Width of Stage

This is gonna trigger some people but you posted this in tech talk so let's talk tech. The auditory cues that allow us to localize sounds and create the sound stage in our minds are fundamentally timing in nature. There's frequency involved and a few other things, its actually quite fascinating when you did down into it. But the fundamental nature of the thing is timing. This is why speaker symmetry is so important, for example, and side wall reflections.  

Okay so you play your record, stylus traces the groove. Which by the way the smallest squiggles on the groove wall are so incredibly small they're on the order of some large organic molecules. So incredible detail. No idea how many times you'd have to sample to trace an organic molecule but got a pretty good hunch its more than thousands per second, and probably up there in the millions. Orders of magnitude at any rate above any current or even proposed rates of digital.  

Now as Ledermann and others rightly point out the stylus does not so much trace out the groove as bounce around sampling it. These guys call this jitter which for some reason infuriates (beyond merely being triggered) certain people. Whatever word you want to use for it bounces and samples. Its imperfect. Nobody saying its perfect. The stylus does not trace out organic molecules.  

Instead the whole thing- stylus, cantilever, motor, body, and arm and table too for that matter- starts vibrating. Really good to listen to Ledermann as he points out the phono cartridge is a generator that puts out a signal that is continuous as long as its moving. Does not know which is which, groove or harmonic resonance. The signal it produces is a combination of them all.  

Just like everything else in nature. Every twig, voice, trumpet and snare, every cymbal, and every room, they all resonate and generate vibrations and sounds- continuously. All the time.  

Consequently our nervous systems have evolved to live in this continuously vibrating continuous signal environment. We don't have time to think if that sound the tiger made came from 3 feet or 30 years to the left. It has to happen fast. It has to be automatic.  

Playing a record accurately reproduces this environment. With all its many flaws nevertheless the one thing it is not doing is chopping the vibrations up into lots of pieces of samples and putting them back together again.  

All this long-winded explanation to get to Michael Fremer's succinct, "There's more there there."
 

@millercarbon  I don't disagree at all.  

Hearing symbols..wow!

Playing my album, I can only hear the crash and shimmer of the cymbals on my system. Got me a  '59 mono-beautiful!

Must be missing something on my copy. 

Sorry, couldn't resist. Too much quarantine time. 

@millercarbon I don't disagree at all.  

Good to know. Thanks.

btw it should go without saying this site has the worst spell check anywhere ever. It turned "dig" into "did" and "yards" into "years". Oh well.

One question for sabrejet about the stage being wider with LP. This same thing has come up a few times recently. In my experience this is a combination of greater image focus and greater sense of the original acoustic space.

Take something like the cymbals. Any system any format they are somewhere off to the left. The better it gets the more palpable and precise this becomes until they physically embody an exact location in 3D space and you can practically see the light shimmering off them right along with the sound. Its been so long and the system has improved so much its hard to remember but it sure seems to me like they never really moved very much if at all but instead the sense of dimensionality became so much stronger they seem so much more real and that is what creates the feeling of bigger.  

This sense is of course much greater with LP because of its much better balance between leading edge transients and harmonic development of the fundamental tone, a crucial set of details thrown all out of balance when the signal is chopped up and reconstituted digitally. 

The other thing that happens is the sense of the natural acoustic signature of the recording venue comes through more clearly and so greatly improves the sense of space that it makes the whole stage feel wider and bigger. LP has to me an even bigger advantage here as the subtle balance is even more critical here with the digital sense of space seeming whispy and skeletal by comparison. 

So that is what I'm curious to know, is that your experience too?

If you can hear them on your LP and SACD, but not CD, unless your CDP has some issue, the odds are it is just not mixed the same. They are mixed differently, more often than not, especially a 25yr old CD, not to mention the record likely has some compression of the highest volume peaks that brings out the rest.

Is there any point in pointing out that the following statement shows a lack of understanding of the timing of multi-channel digitized audio (or any digitized system) for that matter?  All that matters is the analog bandwidth, jitter, channel to channel timing jitter, and signal to noise ratio assuming the sampling rate is sufficient to capture the analog and allow reasonable analog filters. Sampling rate has literally no effect on timing beyond supporting the analog bandwidth. Absolutely none. It is a common misconception that it does, but it does not. No room for a full course on Nyquist here, but feel free to research.

Okay so you play your record, stylus traces the groove. Which by the way the smallest squiggles on the groove wall are so incredibly small they’re on the order of some large organic molecules. So incredible detail. No idea how many times you’d have to sample to trace an organic molecule but got a pretty good hunch its more than thousands per second, and probably up there in the millions. Orders of magnitude at any rate above any current or even proposed rates of digital.