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

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Regarding tostadosunidos comments on the topic of the ability of a pair of speakers to reproduce depth:

I first heard the effect on the occasion of hearing a true high end system for the first time, a system being delivered and set up by Bill Johnson at his new ARC dealer in Livermore California (Bill was a pilot, and flew his own plane to dealer locations). It was a pair of the Magneplanar Tympani T-1 loudspeakers (which ARC was then distributing) bi-amped with a PC-1 passive x/o and D51 and D75 power amps, source a Thorens TD-125 Mk.2 turntable/ARC prototype arm/Decca Blue pickup into an SP-3 pre-amp.

Bill put a British EMI pressing of Holst’s The Planets on the table, and when the Jupiter movement played, there it was---the front row of the orchestra instruments were on the plane of the Tympanis, the back row (percussion) waaaay back from that plane. I had closed my eyes as the movement began, and at the shock of hearing the extreme depth of field opened them. I found myself looking at the wall behind the speakers, amazed by how much closer the wall was than the back of the orchestra appeared to be. The back of the orchestra appeared to be further away than the wall!

When an orchestra is recorded with a very small mic set-up (I believe EMI engineers employed the Decca 3-mic "tree" technique---3 mics facing the orchestra), the sound from the instruments furthest away from the mics are picked up by the mics later in time than those closest to them. When played back, that time differential is reproduced as the difference in distance. In contrast, a recording of an orchestra made employing close mic’ing contains no such depth information, so should be reproduced without it as well.

One of my first jobs was calibrating the optics at US Army Map Service used for 3D imaging. The Zeiss Stereo optics are analogous to stereo audio inasmuch as the overlay of two different maps photographed from different angles, when viewed through stereo optics, appear in 3D. Ditto for 3D movies. 
Wharf: The poster didn’t comment about the size of his audio system to that of his listening room. He specifically focused on the reproduced soundstage in his listening room.

Had the poster said something about a frequency aberration in the room, like too much booming bass, then I would have concluded it was something about the sound system being out of kilt in the room.

Yet the poster suggested the room was “cutting off” the soundstage of reproduced sound.
@bdp24 - i heard that system a few times with the original big Tympani panels. When I bought my SP 3 and Dual 75a back in the day, the dealer demo’d the units I bought on just such a system. And I got to meet William Zane J in the early days as well when he was making the rounds- he was a pretty intimidating guy judging by how the dealer wanted to make sure he was happy. I wasn’t old enough, or invested enough in the ’business’ of the stuff (I slung gear as a kid and was an enthusiast) to care what he thought, other than that it was cool to meet him since he had already achieved legendary status, thanks in part to Harry Pearson, but man, that stuff sounded so good compared to most of the other gear around then.
One interesting anecdote on records. I’ve long had copies of "Way Out West," a sort of classic jazz warhorse that gets played periodically because, well, Sonny Rollins. I never found a clean early pressing for reasonable money, so relied on remasters. The original Analogue Productions cut, which I think was cut by Doug Sax, sounded pretty good, but it had a giant hole in the middle- very typical of early stereo hard panning. I eventually got a 45 cut that Hoffman and Gray did and it had an image in the middle. I asked Hoffman what was up with that - he said that the resolution of that cut was so much better (whether source tape, mastering chain or technique, I dunno) that I was hearing a center image because of the sound bouncing off the back wall of the room where it was recorded.
I’ve still got an original stereo cut on my ’list’ for that one.....
Back to our regularly scheduled program....

I look forward to someday experiencing this--I'm sure it will take a better system than I have.  At present I have a hard time understanding how something as simple as a microphone can do what something as complex as an ear does.