Looking for the next level in imaging...

ATCs are known for their off axis sound. Sealed box.

@mahgister Please answer this simple question. A recording of a trio. Guitar, Bass and Sax. The recording engineer has mixed the final tape to have all three mics/instruments playing an equal signal from left and right channel. This puts the sound of the recording with all three instruments in the center of the stage. Are you claiming there is any stereo equipment or room treatment, or combination of each that will produce a playback in my listening room where the three instruments are spread out across the room, and for good measure, the sax is in the center and five feet in front of the guitar and bass? That is what I called into question with the statement, if it’s not on the recording, it’s not in your listening room. Cheers

The notion that everything remains at the mercy of the mastering tech and his recording’s limitations/inadequacies is a bit time warped and assumes that everything remains the same as it was 50 years ago

Some very smart guys at Dolby, DTS, Yamaha, Sony, etc got together and advanced technologies in object based/spatial audio to address just this. You would need a minimum of 6 speakers ( 2 fronts, 2 surrounds, 2 heights) to do justice to their spatial upmixing codecs. The speaker count would go up from there depending on how nitpicky one gets. If you have a native spatial mix, that’s great. But, they will try to salvage even crappy stereo mixes.

In other words, these codecs can decompose the recording and "spread it out" in a 3-D dome (aligned with your multi speaker perimeter) and create all kinds of depth wise layering, spatial nuance/cues and detail, that’s simply impossible in stereo.

If you are an ardent believer in 2 speakers only, BACCH can do a relatively dumbed down version of the above mentioned and offer something relatively convincing.

Some new FPGA dacs (hrtfs, whatever proprietary code’s in there) used in purist stereo will try to create an even more dumbed down version of the above mentioned

You could try to help things out with speaker design (concentrics are an example), positioning, etc. For example, if you have speakers flat against a wall and sit flat up against a wall (no 6 to 8 ft of space behind you), everything goes to sht from there, etc.

+1 to mijostyn post ...

The third dimension is not instruments at different distances away from you, any system can do that and much of it is artificially created by the mixing engineer with echo. The 3rd dimension is the sense that and instrument or voice is a 3 dimensional object in space. If that space is full of reflections, echo and amplitude smear you will not be able to delineate the 3rd dimension at all. This is the state of most systems including some incredibly expensive ones.

I understand his point here but we must had the right balance between all surface (reflecting-diffusive and absorbing) then we can have too much room treatment if one of the three factor is unbalanced with the others for a specific room geometry size and content ..

A good live recording with a horn section is a great example. A top notch system will allow you to identify each instrument in space. Most systems show you the horn section, but you can not separate the instruments easily, the same applies to vocal sections. The spatial cues are usually there, but acoustic errors can easily overcome them because they are at a much lower volume. IMHO there is no such thing as too much acoustic treatment. An anechoic chamber is better than a poorly treated room.

I used my own mechanical equalizer with 100 distributed resonators located at specific places and this is more than passive acoustic treatment. We can create not only good imaging and holography ( the third dimension which is the sonic volume of each instrument ) but the end goal more than imaging done right is the listener envelopment (LV) Source width auditory (ASW) ratio.

But no, an anechoic room is a dead space , unnatural, it is better a bad room we will improve ... ☺😊

@mijostyn 

+100 on over treating being better than under treating. Especially in smaller rooms where control is even more important. 

Some of the best imaging I've heard from a box speaker was a pair of floor-standing Nesteroviches.  I couldn't believe that such a klunky, traditional-looking speaker could disappear so completely.  They were very well set up in a room, oh, 25' deep x 15' wide, with lowish ceilings, not much room treatment to speak of.  Horowitz and Ben Webster fully occupied the space behind the speakers.  Very impressive.  Also they are beautifully balanced, tonally speaking.  Nesterovich himself is long gone, unfortunately, but you can occasionally find them used.

I demoed the BAACH system.  The tech guy dials in to your Mac and sets it up.  They're very nice and offer a ton of support, but I heard almost NOTHING--seriously, almost no effect at all.  We talked about my ProAcs and the room, both of which are not terribly bad, IMO.  Finally he asked about my hearing, if one ear is different from the other.  Most certainly.  My left ear is very frequency-limited, and the tech said that will negate the desired effect!  I kept the demo for a few days to play for an audiophile friend who has superb hearing, and he could hear the effect very well.  But neither he nor I liked the "processed" sound.  Bear in mind that this was a rough test in a modest system.  It costs nothing (except a temporary charge on your credit card) to try it.  Clealry not for me, though.