First it is impossible to reach the description of imaging you suggested by sheer luck with usual level components bought by someone who have no idea of what he was doing ...
I know because i listened to all possible systems of people like your friend , and i was one of them at some point most of my life , and there was no imaging as you described , no soundstage around the room with holographical volume for each instruments and listener envelopment and immersiveness in any of the system i heard by sheer luck or by the magical power of the gear with no room control ...
it is impossible to do it with the wrong synergy between components , but impossible to do without a control over vibrations and resonance and a minimal control over the noise floor level of the system and of the house and especially impossible to do in a non dedicated non controlled room ...
With low cost components but very good one you can have an imaging , soundstage and holography relatively near but only relatively near the maximum acoustical satisfaction threshold for sure but you must know what you do to reach this point and learn it...Not by sheer luck because no piece of gear works magically at his optimum level without mechanical, electrical and acoustical control , Sorry ...
It takes very high end components to do it crossing the maximum acoustic threshold satisfaction but many people owning high end system dont know how to do it anyway and their costly system sound not right nor musical nor holographical ...Read people who visit showroom or visit one ...
And EQ tool is not enough to do it , it help because it is a useful tool but thats all ...The only DSP able to do it is the BACCH filters by the way , no other one ...Read Choueiri to understand why he is a physicist and know acoustic ...
But you are right on this point it takes deep bass control to go over the minimal satisfaction threshold level to go the maximum or top level ...
It is why i enjoy fully this imaging , soundstaging and holography at a satisfying level with my headphone which beat everything i listen to by a big margin ...they go near 20 hertz by design and clearly by optimization ...
But my low cost small speakers work well and beat most headphones but they lack deep bass control, then even if i enjoy an imaging very good with a soundstage completely out of the speakers plane , even if i am near the musicians playing, in spite of that the soundfield is not in the same realism level than with my headphone but trust me it is a very good one, but me, in the opposite situation of your past young friends i know how and why i did it and it was not by luck , which is impossible to do , but by experimenting and studying ..
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No one can do this by luck, guess why ? Compute this probability ...
Add all the factors at play, all the acoustic factors and there is more than a dozen factors at least which must works all together toward some necessary balanced way , and they all must be synchronized ... Even the best EQ without any acoustic controls cannot do it ... The only DSP with measures of the inner ears and HTRF that can do it , taking into account the owner physical being measures , his location , and the speakers/room specific acoustic state interrelation characteristics is the BACCH filters ... Any other DSP or EQ cannot control the crosstalk phase loss in any stereo system even with an EQ at any price ...
Forget going there by luck, as your friend did , with modest gear from decades ago even with top one as my Sansui alpha and AKG K340...mythical vintage design... It takes HTRF measures, inner ears measures, very good gear in a controlled room and the BACCH filters ...
But certainly you know better than me if you had heard it from your friend system created by luck and magical unconscious power ... 😊
In all probability one of us, you or me had not experienced what is a good imaging, soundstage and holography, a natural timbre with immersiveness all together ...
Probably i know too much in my head or get all wrong and lack the luck of your past friend ...😁
That comment was not meant to be condescending tl, it is an unfortunate fact of life. Very few systems image near the state of the art or have the level of detail heard in even moderately priced headphones. I lived with such systems for decades. I have heard four systems image at state of the art levels in 60 years. The first one was at age 21, the system of a high school teacher. The funny thing is that he had no idea what he was doing, it was shear luck. That system made my life a lot more expensive searching for that level of performance.
Imaging is not just right to left differentiation and a false sense of 3 dimensions generated by artificial echo. It is the generation of the space the recording was performed in and the sense that instruments are 3 dimensional objects standing in space. Really large spaces breath at very low frequencies and you have to be able to get down to 18 Hz flat to replicate that. Most systems are lucky to get to 40 Hz flat. Loudspeaker specs are very misleading. What a speaker does at one meter is a whole lot different than what it does at 4 meters in a room. Gunnar Olsen’s bass drum should kick you against the rear wall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnEqnvz7Qkc. What a machine, one of the very best drummers alive, Carmine Appice with style.
