3-Dimensional Soundstage

Interesting thread

My room is unfortunately practically square. I do get some layering which I'm content with. The one time I was able to hear real depth is when I was sitting on the floor listening to my new stand mounts (no stands yet).The soundstage was way beyond the walls and out in the yard. Very cool but bizarre.

Agreed on the points Erik listed - but in additon to those treatments

• I have found that treatments at ceiling hight at the wall behind the listener to be beneficial
• I have used a "vinyl curtain" mounted at ceiling height, dropping down around 18 inches
  • You can buy clear vinyl around 1mm thick from the web for a less noticeable application
• I did try different lengths, but 18" was th optimum
• my room was 12 x 15 and 8ft high, with a window behind the listening position and a double opening in the center of the left hand wall

I noticed improved clarity and details once the drape was employed

I also tried this at a friends apartment and it worked very well

• the ceiling was concrete and 12 ft high, the floors were hardwood and it was open plan - so the reflections were coming form everywhere
• the vinyl drape was employed in a couple of places at the wall/ceiling boundary and it worked extremely well

Regards - Steve

Getting speakers away from boundaries usually works very well at improving the soundstage.  Want to hear a good demo?  Take your speakers and put them in very large space or outside. 

When trying to improve your image, first reflection points are usually the first places to look.  Having speaker close to side walls will screw things up badly 95% of the time.   These first reflection points, (side wall boundaries or hard low ceilings), are usually the places to attack first with acoustic absorption- this reduces the reflections coming from them and enhances the ratio between direct vs reflected.  With the ideal wide dispersion speakers, were off axis sounds close to on axis, the image can get quite good.  If the off axis sounds a lot different from on axis, you are in trouble and will never get a good image. 

Some may not want to fix a highly reflective environment or an unbalanced environment.  In some of these cases, a narrower dispersion speaker works well in reducing these off-axis reflections (especially in mid and high end) and is another way to keep this ratio (direct vs reflected) high.   However, methods to restrict dispersion always result in similar increases in beaming, where direct HF gets so narrow, moving your head an inch completely changes the sound.  This is of course not as it is in real life, so seeking wide dispersion and a high direct vs reflected ratio is desired.  Its difficult to achieve.

Brad

Lone Mountain /ATC

This subject stresses the importance of Engineers & Mixing in the recording process.  The internet is such a great resource.  The Allmusic site will list the engineers on an album and then links that engineer to all the other albums they were part of.  If there is an album that you really enjoy the spatial aspect of you you can see other bands that use the same people and discover quite a lot of music that ways.

Yes imaging is manufactured but talented people can manipulate it in such a way that at times it better than live.