Food for thought or perhaps some really don’t know-nothing Lol. Regardless there’s always room for entertaining humour, bravo you slid some of that in there.
Component contributions to “sound stage”
What components in your stereo system do you think make the largest contribution to your perception of sound stage in your system? Which element or component contributes the least to this part of the stereo listening experience?
Rankings are fine. Justifications or explanations are even better.
kn
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First it is so evident that if spatial information is not encoded rightfully from the recording engineer NOTHING will ressuscitate this information lost for ever... Then the recording is not a factor which we can control. I did not even mention it.in the right system /room no album present the exact same soundstage. This difference correspond to each recording. We speak about a system/room able to create more so or less so an interesting soundstage for sure already encoded in the vinyl or dac.
Now saying that only reveal you know nothing about the relation between physical acoustic and psycho-acoustic... And the importance of sound direction for evolutive survival of man as a prey ...And hunter... And sound direction perception ( and the impediment of stereo crosstalk )is the COLLECTIVE perception which our brain create the soundstage impression because of the specific acoustic parameters between 2 speakers and room. Do you call colors illusion? It is not even wrong, it will be an ideological abuse of words. The soundstage is a real perceived phenomenon which can vary for each of us even with the same system/room... But it is there... |
OK, here we go. I asked this question in part because of recent discussions on ASR and Head Fi Science Forum about measuring soundstage and if different DACs could contribute to a listener’s perception of soundstage in their system. It ended (for me) in a protracted lecture in how modern DACs, or any other piece of modern audio electronics that measure well could not possibly contribute to perceived soundstage, and if the listener perceives it, it is entirely down to ‘expectation bias’. Speakers, placement and room, yes, electronics (and especially digital electronics), a hard no. I started this post because I am curious about what others on this forum think about this issue and I wanted to be open to any responses without coloring the discussion, at least initially. My experience is that yes, room, speakers (or headphones), and placement in the room including listening position are primary. Of course if there is not a good representation of soundstage embedded in the original recording, then reproducing what isn’t there in the first place isn’t really what I am after here. My second system is at my workstation and nearfield where tiny differences in my head or speaker position make a big difference in how I perceive soundstage. My main system is a combined AV/music system where the speakers are on the wall, so and soundstaging there is limited to lateral and height with elements of depth being sacrificed. I am OK with that if I am getting good lateral presentation with accurate timing and tone from my gear and my speakers. I have been tinkering with my main system (same receiver and speakers) for over a decade to get the two channel (non-dsp) sound I want, and here is what I have noticed: -speaker cables matter in my system. I went from entry level multistrand wires to solid cord cables with higher quality materials and design elements and this made a noticeable difference in both tone and soundstage presicsion -replacing the stock metal jumpers bars on my small budget speakers in my second system with OCC silver plated copper jumpers with teflon dialectric had a big impact on higher frequencies and soundstage - these were from China, not the kind that cost more than the speakers themselves. -changing phono cartridges matters -phono preamp matters -wait for it… digital front ends/DACs matter, and matter a lot in my system to my ears. If you include the DACs in my disc players and receiver, I’ve used at least eight different digital front ends my main listening room and four in my second system at work. Just some examples of the differences I heard in different digital front ends include running PCM raw data from a disc player to my Arcam AVR and using the internal DACs provided a wide soundstage but no center fill, even when adjusting the the toe in on my speakers. The sound of this arrangement was also a little hard and sterile, but the bass through my sub was very clean and tight via the digital level in. On the other hand, the soundstage using Arcam irDAC and bypassing the digital processing in the Arcam AVR was concentrated in the center, much more musical, but the bass was a bit more wooly. When I swapped the irDAC for a Chord QuteHD, the soundstage opened up considerably, to the width and height of by analog front end, but with more precise placement of vioces and instruments. These differences were not as striking as those provided by swapping speakers, but were not subtle. Of course mentioning such effects on the science forums resulted in scorn and an impassioned defense of the castle. YMMV. kn |
@knownothing A few months before I became a dealer two years back, I was on a search to upgrade my own DAC. I owned a modified PS Audio DirectStream MKI (in which the transformer and LPS mods I performed improved and increased the soundstage) to an exploration of over a dozen other DACs. In each instance, using the same cabling and remainder of system components, each DAC presented the stage a bit differently. Some DACs presented a more forward stage and excelled in depicting width, while others presented further behind the speakers with decent depth and less width. Some DACs excelled at neither, and few excelled in every dimension. While the DAC chip and conversion process itself should not be responsible for altering the presentation of the soundstage, the rest of the design and engineering of the DAC, including how it manages a low noise floor to the design of its analog stage, can contribute to how the stage is presented. Even the T+A DAC 200, which is one of the most popular units I sell, has a “Wide” setting on its front face. When disabled, I believe it caps frequency response at 20KHz or 50KHz (I am too lazy to look in the manual right now), whereas when enabled, it allows up to 200KHz of information through. While that focuses on the frequency response, and despite the threshold of 50KHz-200KHz to be well beyond the capabilities of human hearing, most (including myself) can actually hear the soundstage widen. In my experience, noise, whether it be power line noise, EMI, jitter and others are all culprits for poor staging. Any noise alters specific frequency and timing, which will affect reflections in room and different intersections of frequencies, phasing, etc. Our pursuit of happiness in our audio systems are largely around a search for realistic presentation and harmonics of music, countered by the elimination of noise and reflection in most ways possible. I say “most” because some noise with regards to harmonics are preferred, and soundstage width sometimes cannot be truly replicated without the right types of reflections which help to more accurately paint an accurate picture of the space. Even studios and live recordings are often captured with noise and reflection as part of the equation.
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