A deeper more holographic soundstage.

If you want to get an accurate reconstruction of the depth built into the recording which is a mix of:

• Volume
• Reverb and pre-delay
• Modified frequency response

You need smooth frequency response and to control reflections. How much is that affected by electronics or the myriad of other things suggested? Almost none. It can be affected by having your turntable set up properly including matching on the phone-pre, but most of the other things discussed are not what is going to help with depth.

make sure you disengage your eyes from the equation

No No, the whole point is to hear and see the image and depth perception of all the music. Nothing better than being able to point out with your eyes a loan cymbal or triangle being struck up the higher and at back of everything else.
http://www.ikonet.com/en/visualdictionary/images/us/symphony-orchestra-77350.jpg
No, seeing is just as important as hearing if not more! As you can think you can reach out and touch some artist they are so "there" in front of you sometimes.

And until you have heard and seen this kind of imaging and depth, you have no idea of what your missing.

And this is how I achieved it, nothing between the speakers as far back as I could. https://ibb.co/SrF9K5d

Cheers George

I always enjoy it when I'm listening to a symphony, and most of the orchestra appears to be sitting beyond the outside wall of the room.

Any relatively good audio system will do....

Then dont spend money....

Second: All my gear is between my speakers which is bad and my speakers are not even ideally located, because one of my speakers is in a corner at few inches of the wall....

And guess what, my imaging is 3-D and the soundstage fill the room and the sound dont comes from my speakers in regular listening position or in nearfield and the timbre perception is right and natural......


Why?

In audio, good design electronics exist already for the last 60 years at least...

Then the electronic design of most relatively good audio system is probably not the culprit for your problem , because probably your electronic component are already good...And variance in quality of design count for sure, but the most important factors are 3 in numbers:

A-How much noise pollute the electrical grid of the audio room coming from the house grid...high noise floor destruct the timbre and imaging...

B-How much vibrations and also resonance affect my speakers, and even the rest of the gear? Same negative effect, these uncontrolled vibrations and untamed resonance will decrease S.Q.

C-And the very fundamental fact to add to these very 2 important one: is my room acoustic good? This factor, so much important were the others, this one is crux of the matter...

Almost no small room sound good without material passive acoustical treatment, ( you must look for a balance between absorbent surface, reflective surfaces and diffusor volumes) and no small room sound good  without passive acoustical controls : Helmhotz resonators, and varied resonators in size from the 3 cm copper bell to a 5 inches copper bowl for example....

It can takes also what i called a Shumann generators grid...It is one of my active acoustical control with my last discovery, a kind of ionizer for the air...

I use other devices also, some other acoustical controls but i cannot all explain here...Go to my thread...

This is why i had depth, imaging, soundstage in almost all my many thousand recordings with some variation relative to the quality of the recording process...Contrary to the saying of some the illusion of depth is a damn real thing, like the illusion of a rainbow....But there is no pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and no real violin in my room but by god! it look like there is one....
This "illusion" contrary to the saying of some is not ONLY in the recording but MAINLY come from the acoustical setting of your room, because it is the room that make your speakers able to speak clearly or not... Not only the microphone location in the recording studio....

Sum total of all my embeddings: around 100 peanuts butter jar in Us dollars...All is cheap available material, homemade if not very low cost... I dont buy costly products...It is NOT necessary at all...This is the result of my 2 years listenings experiments...

Dont upgrade anything, think and embed everything rightly...Thinking is more fun than buying....


Happy new year...

note:
2 years ago with the same gear i own now i had the same problem perhaps worse because of the bad location of my speakers and bad location of my gear...But it was impossible for me to change that...
I worked in the 3 dimensions i speak about and 2 years after my 500 hundred dollars audio system can give lesson to much more costly one....Then have faith in your working ears and think....

+1 for all twoleftears comments

While I appreciate having nothing between the speakers, placing one kit along a side wall means a lot more money needs to be spent on cables, be they speaker or interconnects.


My rack is vertical, but plan to go low horizontal soon

hth