Is there measurement that correlates with cohesive/pinpoint imaging?

of course

measurements and specs explain everything, what is the matter with you?

in fact, they mean so much, are so meaningful and all encompassing, that i think will soon give up listening to music altogether and just log in and read ASR

i will have the specs and measurements on everything having to do with hifi, won’t even need music anymore

you’ll need to excuse me now, its late and i need to cuddle in bed with my oscilloscope

Above... That was a helpful addition to the thread. Thanks! 

Otherwise, how are these multi-driver speakers solving this problem?  If there's engineering involved there's got to be some math or measurements of some kind.

Do any speakers truly image as coherently as single drivers? If so, there must be a theory. 

I just told you the answer 

Single drivers do not really image coherently. IM distortion from moving at largely different frequencies ruins perceived cohesiveness, not to mention different parts of the speaker behaving different at different frequencies.


Imaging in most recordings is purely conceptual. It is manufactured. Most live recordings have nothing remotely like imaging either with very odd exception and even then. That makes left-right manufactured, and depth to pretty much. Height? It is not there. It just is not in the recording.

Audiophiles will convince themselves of a million reasons why "imaging" is better or worse, right down to fuses. It makes me laugh. Imaging is almost exclusively your room and your speaker and of course the recording. Really awful electronic can impact imaging, but we are talking last bit, and most people are not remotely there.


Want pinpoint imaging .... go into an anechoic chamber or wear heaphones. I know, not the answer you were looking for. Headphones are better, but an anechoic chamber can be a good substitute. Sound a bit like crap though.

So, can you measure imaging? No, but you can measure that impact of the speakers, room and electronics on what reaches the ears and get a relatively good impression of what the likely imaging is like. What I can’t tell you is whether you will like it. It is a trade-off between imaging and ambience in the real world with speakers.

@tomic601 

Time and Phase....read what JA has to say about Vandersteen “imaging champs”....

Thanks for the helpful reply.  I just read JA's review of the Vandersteen Quatro Wood.  His measurements are interesting.   https://www.stereophile.com/content/vandersteen-quatro-wood-ct-loudspeaker-m5-hpa-monoblock-power-amplifier-loudspeaker

"Fig.5 shows the Vandersteen Quatro Wood CT's horizontal radiation pattern, normalized to the tweeter-axis response and plotted up to 45° to the speaker's sides rather than the usual 90°... The contour lines in this graph are impressively even, implying stable stereo imaging."   

"Like its predecessors, Vandersteen's Quatro Wood CT offers a true time-coincident output, due to the stepped-back sub-baffles for the upper-frequency drivers, the first-order crossover slopes, and the fact that all its drive-units are connected in positive acoustic polarity. Fig.9 shows the speaker's step response on the tweeter axis. The initial arrival is an almost textbook right-triangle shape, though the tweeter's output arrives slightly before that of the midrange unit. This confirms that the optimal axis will be 5° below the tweeter axis. Finally, the Quatro Wood CT's cumulative spectral-decay plot (fig.10) is impressively clean."