erik,
2 - Imaging. I challenge everyone to go to a live acoustic event and close their eyes and listen. Compare to home. The truth is most real life venues imaging is not that specific. Listen to a street busker even. Close your eyes and compare. IMHO, "hyper imaging" is not at all realistic and a deliberate artifact of speaker tuning.
I accept the challenge :-)
I hear the "live music doesn’t really image" claim so often and I don’t agree. I’ve always been in the habit, especially when listening to acoustic sources, of closing my eyes when listening.
I’ve tended to prefer closer seats at the symphony and when I close my eyes and find the "imaging" fantastic. I could easily point to whatever instrument is playing, as it occupies a dense easily identified space in the soundfield. (If someone is used to sitting at the back of the hall, this will be less the case, but even from the back when I do this I get pretty good imaging with eyes closed). This is also the case whether I’m listening to smaller jazz ensembles, or even if I come upon people performing on the street. I close my eyes and the sonic images are like the best imaging I’ve ever heard.
That is one of the reason I enjoy a speaker that images precisely. Because when that happens all the sound energy is condensed such that the "force" of the sound seems to be coming from the specific instrument, more like a real source I hear in life, rather than being distributed in some vague, swimmy manner. (Though imaging isn’t my number one concern - timbral beauty being first, dynamics etc being important...if those aren’t there I don’t care at all how a speaker images).
