Soundstaging and Imaging: The Delusion about The Illusion


Soundstaging in a recording—be it a live performance or studio event—and it’s reproduction in the home has been the topic of many a discussion both in the forums and in the audio press. Yet, is a recording’s soundstage and imaging of individual participants, whether musicians or vocalists, things that one can truly perceive or are they merely illusions that we all are imagining as some sort of delusion?

https://www.stereophile.com/content/clowns-left-me-jokers-right

celander
Mg opens the door, steps in and hears someone calling produced music "Parlor Tricks" then Mg quietly backs out of this clubhouse to find a place with listeners exploring recordings. LOL
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Ever notice this correlation:
the more undefined terms that appear in an original post,
the less real content it likely contains.  After reading it
for the fifth time, for me, it is hard to answer,
"What is this person saying?"

So, future responses to the post are doomed to be imprecise,
confusing, and ultimately empty of meaningful ideas.  

Just my opinion, of course.
(Cat chasing its tail.)
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@kosst_amojan--the terms have an accepted meaning. JGHolt published a glossary many years ago that was long used so that people could speak the same language when describing reproduced sound.
I learned to understand both image and soundstage from using the old Quad ESL beginning in 1973. This was a speaker that excelled in the midrange (with some real world limitations) but remains a reference.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to florid language in audio-speak that became common in reviews, but Holt was known for his no-nonsense approach to subjective reviewing. Here’s a link to his glossary as republished by Stereophile (he started that publication and it was erratically published, no adverts and unlike the slick glossy today).
PS: You'll note that there is a difference between image and soundstage. I can hear that difference in the use of my phono stage, which places instruments in very precise positions in space, top to bottom, front to back and dimensionally, so you can hear the body of the instrument, as well as its position relative to the mic, if it is there on the recording.
Obviously, a multi-tracking pastiche of tracks and overdubs with no natural acoustic space being represented will rob a recording and its reproduction of a natural soundstage, although it can be created as an artifice through slick engineering, something that started to occur in the '70s (if not before) when tracks and lots of outboard processing invited mischief in popular recordings. This also coincided with the rise of the engineer as auteur and the use of the studio as a crutch- no longer was an engineer a 'recordist' but an artist themselves, and the musicians, some of them not as capable of playing through the entire sound and nailing it on a take, could go back and 'fix it' to the point where the recording is a  confabulation- sometimes wonderful sounding, but bearing no resemblance to what might have actually happened in real time in a room.