Is soundstage DEPTH a myth?

How could this be a myth ? If listening live you have each aspect of tone,soundstage ,width as well as depth imaging and instrumental textures.

this greatly depends on in a big way the $$ amount invested and system synergy.

having not only been in audio for 40 years but also owned a Audio store in the UK 

this way I have been on both sides of the coin . Sad but true you truly do needto spend well over $20k at minimum to get just a satisfactory audio system ,especially 

when pricing has inflated 25% in the last 2 years. Quality speakers alone command    well Over $15 k for anything in the B class of Audio .  This is why people dedicate a whole year just to upgrade a piec3 of equipment ,myself included.

I went from a $100k+ system to2 much smaller ones .

imo you need to spend at least $10k k in total just for digital to get a truly good reference base system ,to many this too it would ge entry level .it all depends on your budget . Being a Audiophile is a never ending hobby ,technologies especially in digital have gotton substantially better in the last 4 years which is a great thing.

now for under $2k you can get a very respectable sounding R2R dac , $5+k starts the reference grade for example . The T+A 200 dac is my next goal superb Sonic quality and a bargain at $7k.

There is no question that a good system well set up can give a sense of depth. What I'm not sure is whether this is reproducing what' s on the recording(which I doubt) or just a room/speaker interaction(which I suspect it is except for a miniscule number of recordings). But the affect is nice and certainly adds to the illusion of almost live sound.

@samureyex

If you want a good point of reference of soundstage depth to play with, Zepplin’s Celebration Day (studio masters / Qobuz) has a deep soundstage. And Nora Joes “little room” (not too late / 24bit / Qobuz) sounds like she’s wayyyy back in the room. Fink’s album Bloom Innocent (acoustic) has really good depth too.

@mrmb Well said. I frequented a different forum (not ASR) and I kept on getting harassed by harsh words. When I talked about differences of DACs I got bashed on by a few vocal individuals because they think DACS "only do 0s and 1s, either it works or it doesn't". 

Talking about differences of amps, they jumped on me pretty hard too. Their king is anything from Purifi/Hypex. Last week I talked about how system synergy is important and I got absolutely destroyed. I'll never go back there again, it is not a place to voice a different opinion. There's a new generation of people that only rely on graph data + distortion measurements and they are VICIOUS. 

I say all this because I've experienced 1st hand how massively an improvement a component like an amp can be for the overall sound. 

@audioman58 It's crazy how often people in this forum rave about the TA200 (in a good way). 7k is out of my price range for a DAC, and also I've been pulled into the BMC audio dac/amp system.

The answers from you guys are, yes soundstage depth is real. The only question left is would people experience it regularly or with just a few rare pieces of music?