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

 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....

First...THANKS Eric....for so darn many thought provoking threads that you have started!

I agree with the hemisphere/half bubble description.  No doubt that often the slightest change in speaker positioning will affect the overall sound...sometimes significantly. 


And, the straight line, arc, hemisphere soundstage is maybe most significantly influenced by what the recording engineer did with ambience, echo, reverb and delay....and then how your speakers and room interpret/project what he intended.

For a long time, I was obsessed with the soundstage...but realizing that perfection is probably an illusion in this area, once I had a good stage, I turned my attention to tone...especially piano, drums, horns and voices.