Is there measurement that correlates with cohesive/pinpoint imaging?

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."

  

I do know that in the same room with the same equipment, my Omega single driver speakers had a much more coherent and precise image than my Klipsch Forte IIIs and a pair of Vienna Acoustics Mozarts that I compared a little.

@djones51   Thanks for the tips about these other speakers

I have the Dutch and Dutch 8c, I never really listened to single drivers at least since the 1970's when I didn't know that's what I had. The D& D are very coherent I guess because they do the crossover in DSP.