Best recordings to demonstrate soundstage?

The Cowboy Junkies album “The Trinity Sessions”. Legend has it that it was recorded live (i.e. no multi-tracking), with one single point-source microphone, and in the Trinity Church in Toronto no less. So you can hear not only a very natural soundstage presentation and openness between each musician and their sounds, but you also hear a lot of the space in the church’s acoustics. It’s not overly echo-ey, but it does provide a wide and open soundstage that is naturally recorded and presented.

This is different than many studio recordings where, even though you may hear a large, open, spacious “soundstage”, there really is no soundstage at all  – meaning that what you’re hearing is either electronically added in the mixing process, or is a construct of how the recording engineer layered each instrument into the final mix. That said, such “fake” soundstage recordings can still very involving and fun to listen to, much like Hooverphonic and Morcheeba, as the original poster of this thread mentioned.

As to what soundermn mentioned, “…when I played the Simon and Garfunkel for my GF, her response was... "now I get it". Now THAT speaks volumes, when a non-audiophile finally hears and feels what got us into this hobby in the first place - a closer emotional connection to the music. I love moments like that. For me, I got the same reaction from my wife when I played Neil Young’s song “You and Me”, from his Harvest Moon album, after I upgraded my speakers to the room-dominating Infinity IRS Delta. That experience alone went a long way to an improved WAF for future system upgrades! :-)