Pin point imaging isn't for everyone


A subject my posts touch on often is whether pin point imaging is desirable, or natural. While thinking about wide-baffle speakers in another thread I came across this quote, courtesy of Troels Graveson’s DIY speaker site. He quotes famous speaker designer Roy Allison:

I had emphasized dispersion in order to re-create as best as I could the performance-hall ambiance. I don’t want to put up with a sweet spot, and I’d rather have a less dramatically precise imaging with a close simulation of what you hear in a concert hall in terms of envelopment. For that, you need reverberant energy broadcast at very wide angles from the loudspeaker, so the bulk of energy has to do multiple reflections before reaching your ear. I think pin-point imaging has to do with synthetically generated music, not acoustic music - except perhaps for a solo instrument or a solo voice, where you might want fairly sharp localization. For envelopment, you need widespread energy generation.


You can read Troel’s entire post here:

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

This goes, kind of, with my points before, that you can tweak the frequency response of a speaker, and sometimes cables, to get better imaging, but you are going significantly far from neutral to do so. Older Wilson’s were famous, and had a convenient dip around 2.4 kHz.
erik_squires
Great Thread!
In my opinion, it really depends upon the overall impression the speaker makes.

B
GK brings up an interesting point, but it's more complicated than that.  On many good piano recordings you can tell from what vantage point the piano has been recorded, the two most frequent perspectives being from the side (lid open to mikes), and from the front, looking at the pianist.  Notice in this second case in how many recordings treble register appears more to the left of the sound picture and bass to the right.  Is that pinpoint? Accurate? Close?  Too close?
Sweating size of intruments in a recording is a noble effort but practically a waste of time since what you hear is more about how things were recorded than how big the intrument is/was.  

Not that practicality ever stands in the way of a dedicated audiophile.   Carry on.......  
Good topic for a rainy day. Mapman made a simple point. Play low spark of high heeled boys then play any of the Pearl Jam bootlegs. The studio recording sounds so real it’s spooky and the ‘live’ recording sounds anything but. The whole point of stereo is imaging and I think the term pinpoint in this context means accurate or precise, not pin sized or pin like. Chuckle, never can tell how the net interprets. Ive had hi end speakers that image but not sound stage and I think thats where the bass comes in, just a thought.
Especially for some producers.
 I hear it on the bandstand playing acoustic or electric. Keep in mind front of house sound and live recording are usually different.