Is Sound Stage an artifact of recording?

 @ronboco  i do have some classical and jazz,  acoustic etc. songs on my playlist that I have discovered in the last few years and I enjoy them. I’ve just always been so surprised so many here rely on that type of music to build their system around. I guess that type of music is above my pay grade being a blue collar guy. 

How you make your living need not affect what you might like musically. Most Jazz musicians were not from money nor were most of the folkies. Music is a great big beautiful world.

@8th-note  I get your point entirely. For what comes from the speakers to sound like the source it makes sense to record close to the source. Love that kind of recording. Of course others are about the room. Do you recall Paul Horn's flute recordings made at the Taj Mahal?

My eyes closed. A singer, standing in front of me. Voice hovering in the air. That is one of my great joys. Sometimes, she's only three feet tall.  I still love it.

Interesting that Paul McGowen's post today is on this subject.  Here's his para-phrased opinion of it:

"SoundStage: It's already in the recording!

…A stereo recording carries spatial information as tiny amplitude and timing differences between the left and right channels. That's it. Our brains are extraordinary at decoding those differences into a coherent three-dimensional picture — but only if the playback chain preserves them faithfully. Move a transient by a few microseconds, smear it ever so slightly,  and the picture starts to collapse inward. Center images thicken. Instruments drift forward. The speakers stop disappearing and start politely reminding you they're sitting in the room…Most of us have had the moment where we swap one piece in the chain and suddenly hear the room behind the singer for the first time. That information didn't appear from nowhere. It was always on the disc, in the file, on the master tape. Many of us have spent thousands chasing what the playback chain was maddingly deleting all along…The chain matters from file all the way to ears, every link of it. Strengthen any one link and the whole picture gets a little more believable…Soundstage isn't something a piece of gear gives you. It's something a piece of gear stops taking from you…it’s the absence of every little smear and timing slip that quietly flattens a recording."

Perhaps he was inspired by our thread. As a manufacturer of audio equipment, I would not expect him to point out one of the things that I have garnered from this discussion, namely Imaging is nice and can be helpful in adding to the illusion, but not really essential for a peak audio experience.

See a show at the sphere on Las Vegas and you’ll get massive soundstage