Is Sound Stage an artifact of recording?

I have attended hundreds of symphony performances as well as small acoustical jazz performances... and earlier in life rock and other electronic venue. 

The biggest immediate variable is the venue and where you sit. By choosing seats you are deciding the amount of direct versus indirect sound you are receiving, so what you hear is going to be highly dependent on your location assuming you are in a purpose built venue. A chapel, churchs were not built for musical fidelity, they were built for awe. So they have big domes with highly reflective surfaces designed to echo and impart a sense of size and etherial splendor. So music played in such venues sounds cool... but not very real... as in realistic imaging and sound staging. 

In venues purpose built... well acoustics as a science is something often not optimized... so some venues are not great. But many can be great. The seats known as "audiophile seats" are 7th row center... they vary a bit between venue. In the symphony hall I attended for decades the best seats were 8th row left center. Just the right distance to hear the orchestra primarily through direct sound but with enough distance to have the sound blend during crescendos, rendering the orchestra a single instrument. In this setting there is a sound stage and imaging is present but not pinpoint. I have spent many hours with my eyes closed immersed in the music. 

How it was recorded is paramount after the venue. The best recordings are primarily through two microphones. The symphony hall I attended the microphones were placed about 10’ about 5th row center about 12’ apart. I could hear the difference of not having all the rows in front of me absorbing sound on those I attended and listened to the recording. The specificity of the imaging matches that in the seat I experience. 

Many recording engineers place microphones everywhere and put plexiglass sounic barriers to get more specific recording of specific sections... like horns, or just cello.... or highlight the concertmaster. 

Then it goes into mastering... and the engineer mixes the recording. So you can get virtually anything you can think of from it. 

One recording I recommend... not symphonic is Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul. Joe wanted to do a great recording. He and his producer went all over New York and then found the perfect venue. "The hall’s reverberant acoustics were captured by a matched stereo pair of expensive Neumann M50 microphones." He also close miced all the instruments. The results are one of the best recorded albums I have heard. It captures the power of the venue with its reinforced reflected sound and very realistic specicifity. Fantastic and powerful album. 

Thanks for this original post. This is a subject that I have thought much about over the years. In fact, I wrote a letter to the editor of Stereophile more than 20 years ago about this same topic. My point was that after going to over a hundred live music events of nearly every genre I had never heard live music that sounded as good as my stereo. They published my letter and titled it "Better than Live?"

Yes, I prefer the sound quality of my system over live music. It is clearer, the imaging is better, the instruments are more distinguishable, and I have control over the volume. I do enjoy the experience of live music but the criteria for a great concert are very different than listening to my stereo.

From the mid 90's to the mid 2000's I had a recording studio in my house and I recorded local bands in the Portland, OR area. From female singer/songwriter to doom metal, I went to all my client's shows. The live events were enjoyable, even thrilling, but trust me, I never had the objective of recreating their live sound. I've also been to numerous jazz shows and a modest number of classical concerts. It sort of became a joke to me. No matter how much I enjoyed the concert it made me appreciate how wonderfully my system played a well executed recording.

We are kidding ourselves if we think that the goal of our systems is to recreate the live experience. How do I know that? Because if that's what we wanted to do, all live recordings would consist of a stereo pair of microphones placed at the optimum listening spot in the audience. We have hundreds of examples of this (bootlegs, Grateful Dead tapes) and you can hear that these recordings are lousy compared to a professionally produced recording using several microphones plus feeds from the mixing board. How many classical recordings do you have that are a simple stereo pair? I will bet that the best sounding classical recordings in your collection were done with multiple microphones and likely even used microsecond delays on each channel to align the signal and give a cleaner hall sound. The engineer manipulates and processes the sound to the extent that it sounds very different that what you actually heard at the concert.

One of the previous posts talked about a Ray Bryant piano concert. The piano had 4 microphones!!! Does anybody really think that it takes 4 micophones to replicate what an audience member should hear from a large acoustic piano? Again, the goal of reproducing the fidelity of natural acoustic music in an open space is an audiophile fallacy.

So, if we are not really interested in making a recording of what you actually hear in the audience, what are we trying to accomplish? Producers and recording engineers are trying to make something that sounds like what you think you heard. It's a heavily photoshopped version of the blurry, diffuse, mediocre sounding event you actually would hear if you were there.

Part of why I feel this way is that imaging is very important to me. My system is very good in this regard and I can pinpoint the location of voices and instruments precisely in the soundstage, depth included. When I recorded I learned the tricks to accomplish this illusion and I appreciate the craft of the recording engineers to achieve this. All I can say is thank goodness they didn't just try to recreate the sound of live music.

I've argued this many times.  The reality of live orchestral music does NOT yield the hyper accurate positioning that audiophiles crave.   It is NOT actually "realistic."  I am reminded of Japanese director Kurosawa who added smoke to a live volcano.  His point was that while filming you could literally feel the heat of the volcano, but theater goers would not so the smoke would compensate for the lack of somatic sensation.   

I think it's fine to look for a system that makes up for the lack of visual information, but don't blame the live orchestra for not imaging well enough! :) 

@erik_squires  So glad you tuned into this discussion, I was thinking of you as I listened to the Occasional Sound podcast  I referenced above when William Low, founder of Audioquest mind you, stated that Furman made the only power conditioner worth anything for the home listener. Now with that I risk derailing my own discussion.

So to get us back @8th-note  

We are kidding ourselves if we think that the goal of our systems is to recreate the live experience

My thought is that this is possible but it is inextricably tied up with what we are listening to. Solo guitar (acoustic)and  singer, absolutely possible to get close to live with a fairly modest system.  The liberating thing about this is that genres like Rock, Pop, electronic that never existed in a "live" space freedom to be listened to on any system with equal validity because the listener and their choice of playback device are participating in the creative act. They are "freeing" the music from it’s electronic encapsulation. 

So there are instances where some of us want to be fooled into thinking we are listening to a live performance. It can be done with limitations, but there are many others, if not most, where we can free ourselves of the audiophile bs that we are missing something. No, we are creating something along with all the other who contributed to that particular recording.

@elliottbnewcombjr Another pet peeve is when they record/present a Piano full keyboard left to right, like the biggest piano in the world. Ridiculous.

I am with you bro' but I guess it is a representation of what it sounds like to the pianist, eh?