Is soundstage just a distortion?

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

I had an interesting experience in the 80's.
I had a private one on one demonstration from Dave Wilson where he ran through several of his recordings, on vinyl, through the very first Wilson Watts ( no Puppies at that time) but they had some 2pi panels extending the baffle.
Sitting only 3 feet away from each speaker forming a triangle, in a nearfield listening position I could hear the microphone patterns as clear as a bell. The soundstage was massive - deep wide and high, behind the speakers.
The rest of the system was his own gear - Goldmund Studio, Goldmund arm & cartridge, Rowland Coherence pre, Rowland Model 7 power amps all MIT wired.
In my view microphones can capture soundstage, they capture the resonances and artefacts of the recording environment if placed correctly.
To me the soundstage reproduction is very dependent on the quality and placement of microphones. Listening nearfield helps to eliminate ones own room from imposing itself on the reproduction.

The question about soundstage height is a good one.

I am pretty sure this is more attributable to the playback system and room acoustics than how the source is recorded in that I do not think two channel stereo format is suitable for capturing height dimension as opposed to width and depth.

I think that relative vertical location of drivers in the speaker system is a factor. Tweeters tend to be mounted higher and high frequencies are more directional so those frequencies might tend to be perceived as coming from higher location than others, for example. OF course, room acoustics and distance from listening position to speakers would be a factor as well.

In general I am a fan of speaker designs that tend to have drivers closely spaced, that emulate a point source as much as possible especially in smaller or most typical listening rooms. Larger rooms where listening occurs from more of a distance will be more forgiving.