narrow and wide baffles and imaging

Totems image best!

I don’t know the answer here, but simply on some personal experience:
The wider-baffle speakers that I’ve become acquainted with and auditioned - I’m thinking the larger Harbeth models, Devore and to some degree Audio Note - all have impressed me by "disappearing" and soundstaging much more than I would have expected given their looks, and given the usual audiophile ideas that narrow profile speakers image well/wide speakers don’t.

That said....

It’s also the case that while those speakers did surprising imaging/soundstaging/disappearing, they also weren’t near head of the class for those qualities. In each case I have found soundstage depth somewhat flattened, and a sense I can hear the speaker contributing to the sound (which as a hunch could be due to the thinner-cabinet-working-with-resonances approach also taken by those speakers).  Many narrow baffle speakers seem to disappear much "more" and with greater depth to the imaging.

narrow and wide baffles and imaging

narrow baffles are crucial to creating that so-desired pin-point imaging.

Yes the narrower the baffle the better, but also a similar thing to image destroying wide baffles is, so many "audiophiles" love to put all their equipment on racks in between their speakers. Just so they can gaze them it in wonderment while listening.

This is one of the biggest image and depth destroyers there is. Stop the "glitz gazing" and put that stuff over to the side/s and have nothing in between your speakers and beside them and behind them as far back as you can as well.

The late Neville Thiel (T/S speaker speaker design laws) told me to do this once many moons ago he called it the 3 x B’s, and I have never looked back and never had anything "between, beside and behind" the speakers. I have an image and depth heard and seen that makes you think you can get up and walk into it

Cheers George

Room acoustics matter a great deal, but I’ve read, and listened and I truly believe this:

Extra-wide baffle speakers are better able to convey a sense of the recording space compared to "normal" and "skinny" speakers in most rooms. My favorite example of this is the Sonus Faber Stradivari.

You can get more insight reading Troels Gravesen’s article on a "poor man’s strad" here:

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/PMS.htm

Besides that, one thing that bedevils a lot of speakers is baffle diffraction. This is not just the baffle width, but the height and the driver placement. For whatever reason, wide baffle speakers seem to cure a lot of it. 

@prof  Hmmm.  In my auditioning of the 40.2's in a big room in which they could well and truly breathe, they both imaged and sound-staged extraordinarily well.  The Classic 100's in another set-up also did very well on both scores, to my mind.

@analogluvr I agree.  I mean, if it were as simple as narrow good, wide bad, why would these modern wide speakers perform as well as they do, even if they are not perhaps the equal of the absolute imaging champs.

@mindlessminion I think I'd have to say the 40.2's, though the Classic 100's were at a different place, in a different room, with totally different equipment.  Both very good indeed.  The Audio Note's had perhaps the greatest purity of sound, the highest truth-to-timbre, more like the live acoustic instruments than perhaps anything else I've ever heard.  But despite their claims to the contrary, I did think their positioning close to the front wall, as is traditional with them, did tend to foreshorten a little the soundstaging, and reduce a little the general airiness.  Of the four mentioned, I liked the Devore least, though they were fine.