Is soundstage just a distortion?

It seems you've answered your own question. Room geometry and speaker placement are clearly responsible for the effects we hear. A sphere is the ideal cabinet so any diffraction caused by a 'box' is an artifact. If you fastened your speakers to a wall as if it were the floor, what do you think you'd hear?

Hi Csontos,

Thanks for the comment!

So, you are saying that soundstage height is not imbedded in the original recording, but only an artifact of room geometry and speaker placement?

The interesting thing is that, if these are indeed artifacts, they are pretty consistent across different systems. For example, say in a recording of a singer singing and in the same time playing a guitar, in all the well set-up systems I have heard, I could hear the guitar at a position lower than the singer’s mouth / chest, just like in real life! The same can be experience in live recordings like Belafonte at the Carnegie Hall, in which I could clearly hear some of the audience chanting in the higher balcony position!

This effect is also quite consistent across different type of speakers, i.e. conventional speakers with tweeter on top and bass at bottom, panel and ribbon speakers with their units physically extended from top to bottom, electrostatic speakers with a relatively full range diaphragm etc.!

You're kidding yourself if you think you're hearing frequencies coming from areas or the plane they're not being produced except for diffraction and room reflections which are by no means precisely directed. The best you can hope for is a coincidence. Drivers are typically placed on the plane where their specific frequency band coincides with roughly where you would expect to hear those specific frequencies for a natural production of sound. Sound engineers may be manipulators but not magicians (in the real sense anyway). Speaker design itself I think plays a much bigger role in the height of the sound stage than does the recording. I think that's true for the other components too. Does it not follow that there should be a relatively consistent outcome?

Hi Onhwy61 - your comments on my post are absolutely correct. I would add to them, however, that I once asked a good engineer why he doesn't go ahead and do a more "purist," as you call it, style of recording, with just a couple of mikes out in the hall, and his response was that although he completely agreed with me on every point as to why that would indeed be preferable, he said he would certainly be fired if he did so. It comes down to the sort of thinking that if we have newer technology and newer capabilities, that this must be better, and you better use it. Now I am no Luddite, but neither do I believe that new technology is always better. The digital recording technology is so much cheaper and so much easier to use and manipulate the sound you are recording - that's why it has stuck, despite the fact that the vast majority of listeners who actually bother to make a direct comparison (and granted, this is quite a bother nowadays) prefer the analog.

Regarding the question about soundstage height, while I can't say this with 100% certainty, experiences I've had listening to a test record containing half-octave warble tones have led me to believe that our hearing mechanisms perceive certain parts of the treble spectrum, especially in the 7 to 10 kHz area iirc, as originating from a point in space that is considerably higher than the actual source.

If so, musical notes having significant spectral content in that region would tend to be "pulled" higher, along a vertical axis, than notes that don't. That may explain, for example, why a female singer's voice may be perceived as emanating from a point in space that is above the level of the guitar she may be playing.

I haven't done enough experimentation to totally rule out the possibility that ceiling reflections at those particular frequencies were the cause of what I perceived with the warble tones, but I'm doubtful that the leaf/quasi-ribbon tweeters in the speakers I was using at the time had sufficient vertical dispersion to cause ceiling reflections to be responsible.

So in the absence of specific evidence, I would not make the assumption that our hearing mechanisms perceive all frequencies as emanating from the height of their actual source.

Regards,
-- Al