Why don't more recordings have soundstage outside of speakers

For sure all piece of gear matter, and everything someone could use to control all working dimensions of the system matter...

One even can go to upgrade all electronic parts there is in speakers or amplifiers...For sure, why not?

All this is common place fact...

But for all of us there is limit in the money, time, and abilities we can use in this process...

And for me music come one day and i did not care too much now with an improvement in sound, EVEN if my system value is 500 bucks...Any costly upgrade is useless for me.... My goal was music and S.Q. /price ratio not the best system in audiogon.... Anyway i am not so infinitely far behind most good system...

We must keep in mind that the only thing that must be proportionate in audio is not so much the % of time and money allocated to any piece of gear, but more the S.Q./price ratio in itself.... After that if the system you own is already relatively good and well chosen, acoustic is the greatest investment in time for an optimal S.Q. improvement.... Saying that all matter in audio is a common place fact, an evidence that do not contradict this essential fact in audio about the primacy of acoustic...




What is NO MORE a common place fact is the way acoustic control is hugely impactful and could cost very low amount of money...

This is the reason why i wrote about it and was insisting about that.... If we dont lived through it, it is unimaginable because we are conditioned by the electronical design market publicity..

These things being said, there is NO solution that fills all people needs for sure,including my own solution...For me audio take a dedicated room which is not a solution for most people anyway...

But huge transformation at no cost in audio is not a so common fact, then, i could not stay silent about it....Even if all my solutions cannot be useful to all...Even if some would oppose my view...




I will end this post with my last month discovery...

Before i was controlling the room in a complete rightful way, the nearfield position was the better listening position....No discussion here...

Then i discovered that each step taken to improve the room were impactful on the near field listening position and not only to the regular position, and very surprizingly, the improvement were at the same level for the 2 positions with each improvement....

But passed a certain point, the improvement begins to be more impactful for the regular position....And now the regular position is better, more natural, livelier, than the nearfield position....The integration of the detph imaging and soundstage is more natural and the timbre more natural and lifelike also....The only thing that seems better and on par is the details of sound, but this is an "illusion" caused by more direct wave than reflected one....In reality i miss nothing in regular position and the way the details are integrated in the whole is better , this is the reason why instrument timbre and voices are more real like....
Imagine you listen music like with headphones but with a way more natural sound and more life like than headphones....I will never use any of my 7 headphones ever...




Then my conclusion is when a SMALL room is under control, the regular position is BETTER on ALL counts than the nearfield position... Not only even better than headphones...


This is how you know that you have succeed in room control....

Is it not surprizing? i dont remember that someone has ever speak about this fact here.... Perhaps i am wrong.... Correct me if someone know about this surprizing acoustical fact...

My best to all....

With all the supposed audiophile brain trust on this site, where are all those experts chiming in?

I will give you a hint. What do you think happens when the sound from the right speaker gets to your left ear? How about what happens when the sound from the left speaker gets to your right ear? I will give ya another hint. The time for the sound to get from one side of your head to the other is probably related to the angular width of your speakers.
Some recordings some delayed left channel added the right or vice versa and that can make the width seem wider, but you better be in the sweet spot.
There can be additional information in the volume, but as one of the more astute audiophiles noted, you better have your system tuned to get the most of it. I see the posts on here. Most of y'all aren't even playing baseball let alone in the ballpark.

Ya all worrying about cables and fuses when ya can't even get the basics right. You need some tough audio love.

@mijostyn Oh, man -- I’m all over that mic sh*t. I dream in waterfall graphs, dude. Love that stuff!

@snr Glad you could bring your expertise in for all us lunkheads. Thank you for your wise thoughts.

"The room" is really just another part of the system. For a long time we thought the way to treat the room is like the way we were treating components. So we put huge tube traps and panels everywhere. Now we have a much more sophisticated view of vibration control. Lots of things now we want to suspend on springs so they can move independent of the room. Because we can hear this reduces ringing and greatly improves detail resolution. A good example, I put my crossover back inside the speaker but on Townshend Pods, with a huge instant improvement. A lot of the improvement comes directly from the control (precision damping) of resonant behavior. This same general principle is at work in their Podiums, speaker cables, and interconnects. That explains why after upgrading to a lot of this I noticed a huge reduction in bass bloat or tubbiness that I was until this point sure was a room problem.

Clearly then it was not. Imagine if I had gone to the trouble of "fixing" it the conventional way. I would now be looking at how to get rid of the great big tube traps sucking bass out of my room. Instead I use a mix of a small amount of cleverly placed panels combined with more next-generation treatments, Synergistic HFT. These are I guess room treatments, they definitely improve clarity, imaging, etc, but in a quite different way than conventional panels. Way more effective than old school panels. And I know, because I tried the panels!

So the room is no different than any other component, equally important, and like any other component a huge part of it is vibration control. With the room even more so. Also like all components it benefits from a more sophisticated view of vibration control. 

As others have said there is a sound engineering 'trick' in which you pan an instrument or sound hard to one side and then mix in the same track panned hard to the other side but 180˚ out of phase. At the mixing desk it pops the track right outside of the speakers and leaves lots of space in the centre of the mix... which is very handy in a lot of cases. The effect only really works on a stereo loudspeakers, it doesn't work on headphones and in mono the instrument or sound will be greatly attenuated as the out of phase signal is summed with the original. In most cases an engineer doesn't know how a track will be listened to (with the exception of vinyl) so effects like these are used pretty sparingly.
Many systems are able to render a soundstage wider than the speakers even when there are no 'tricks' like this in play... I enjoy a number of recordings made with a single stereo pair of microphones that have a huge soundstage. In my experience it's usually down to the recording and the loudspeakers. An average room is capable of a wide soundstage as long as there is enough distance between the loudspeaker and the side walls to avoid flutter echos. You can put absorbers at the first reflection points (imagine the wall is a mirror and you're looking at the reflection of your loudspeaker from your listening position) to tame the worst of these.