Speaker Imaging - Do you hear a line, or do you hear an arc??

I have a pretty big room....10' ceilings....12,000 cubic feet.  Speakers are Salk Veracity STs...9' apart and 30" out from the rear wall.  No room treatments...lots of glass, ceramic tile, and drywall...with a few area rugs and furniture....normal listening volume around 80db...max peaks of 85db.


As of now, I don't stream...only CDs.  Almost never is the soundstage for a whole CD an arc...but almost every CD has at least one song that has lots of depth and could be described as an arc.

Here are just two "arc" examples from some really old CDs...Al Stewart, "On the Border - Live Version"  and Steppenwolf, "Hoochie Coochie Man".

Or, a little more recent....Josh Turner, "Long Black Train"

Mostly, I would describe the overall sound as sitting at one of the front tables at a medium size club...you can perceive/recognize depth, width and height and occasionally when the song was mixed with a lot of ambience, it almost seems like immersion. 

@ieales- thank you!
@erik_squires - hope you finish it soon, and do reward yourself!

Tom

 With a good recording,I would say more like a bubble. Height,width,and depth. Images expanding beyond physical boundaries. That's the stuff that makes me love this hobby.

You’re close, very close. It’s a hemisphere, half a bubble. If it was a sphere we’d hear things below the boundary of the floor. 😬 The soundstage is also defined by the density, transparency, gestalt/organization of the images, solidity of the images and accuracy of the shape of the images. Just when you think you have a good soundstage along comes a guy like my customer no. 1 who has completely REDEFINED what is possible for a soundstage. Everyone else, sadly perhaps, is at least two paradigms behind the power curve.

Very interesting indeed and in my experience, probably true ...If what you said is right, and I think so Geoffkait, the good news is my journey begins....Like you said already... It is a good news because even if I had already a musical 3-d audio system, new improvement will show with experiments and with time... In the meantime I love music like never before...My best to you...

P.S. And yes it is a hemisphere....