OP: Small speakers. The smallest.
I listened yesterday to a BBC Radio piece on Joni Mitchell.
At my desk where there is a cheap Dell with standard sound card and two tiny plastic speakers. The speakers are 3.5 feet apart and not toed in at all or angled up. My head is a foot above their plane and 3.5 feet from the line joining them.
The programme celebrated the 50th anniversary of 'Blue' so most of the music was from there. I don't know what the BBC's source was but presumably CD or streaming. The radio signal is digital.
The thing was that on this crudest of replay systems the soundstage stretched way outside the speakers. I closed my eyes and pin-pointed the limits and found on the left side the image stretched fully one foot beyond the speaker. I can also say the sound quality overall was very good.
I am very familiar with 'Blue' and have four different LP issues. In scale, my big system with Martin Logan CLX Anniversaries doesn't stretch nearly that wide.
Go figure.
I listened yesterday to a BBC Radio piece on Joni Mitchell.
At my desk where there is a cheap Dell with standard sound card and two tiny plastic speakers. The speakers are 3.5 feet apart and not toed in at all or angled up. My head is a foot above their plane and 3.5 feet from the line joining them.
The programme celebrated the 50th anniversary of 'Blue' so most of the music was from there. I don't know what the BBC's source was but presumably CD or streaming. The radio signal is digital.
The thing was that on this crudest of replay systems the soundstage stretched way outside the speakers. I closed my eyes and pin-pointed the limits and found on the left side the image stretched fully one foot beyond the speaker. I can also say the sound quality overall was very good.
I am very familiar with 'Blue' and have four different LP issues. In scale, my big system with Martin Logan CLX Anniversaries doesn't stretch nearly that wide.
Go figure.