Another soundstage question

tomic601:

Impossible to say! I made so many changes to my system during the year before I got them sorted out that no comparison to the Snells can be made. I went from a hodge-podge of racking to a new Steve Blinn Super-wide rack that I modified with Herbie's Titanium gliders, Star Sound spikes and Herbies dots to replace the rubbery mini-balls provided by the maker. Then, I was in the right place at the right time when Tweek Geek broke off their distribution deal with Paul Kaplan's Waveform Fidelity and practically gave away his existing inventory of GSIII cables. I also got my phono stage a new set of NOS tubes to replace the factory gold lions, discovered Star Sound platforms, Symposium rollerblocks, upgraded my SACD/CD player from a stock OPPO 95 to a highly modified Sony SACD-1 that finally made digital sound good to me after 30 years of effort. Also, I remodeled the listening room to place the system on a better wall and finally sold the house and started over in an old farmhouse in a smaller but less boxy room.

Now it has been a fine year for system mods as I dialed in the new room. I decided to start here in the smaller digs by reverting back to the Snells and so have not yet tried the Genesis speakers here yet. I have slightly modified the B’s by replacing the front woofers, repairing the surrounds on the midranges, replacing the driver screws with stainless steel (best $2.00 tweak I ever heard), Cardas Patented Binding posts and some aftermarket fuses. I also ditched the spikes in favor of Daedalus Audio’s new Speaker Dids. Every day I think about swapping out the Snells for the far newer and more expensive Genesis just to learn the answer to your question myself. No hurry, though.
Getting back on topic, I did follow Gary Koh’s white paper to set up the Snells here, but it only took a couple of weeks to declare victory and start to just listen to music.

Soundstage is recording specific, so it's a good idea to spend at least half of your listening time adjusting the speakers to the recording…I recommend jury rigging remote garage door openers to the speakers so you can move them around without leaving the chair, and attach the chair itself to rollers that lock into place once you get it right…note you may have to switch it all up for each track so there goes another bit of valuable listening time…but utterly worth it...

I've seen several people post in several different forums about stage height. And inevitably, the crowd goes bonkers about placement, placement, placement. Um.... no. It has NEVER been my experience that the height or angle of the tweeter effects the height of a soundstage. Ceiling treatments do a little bit, and if they do make a big difference you've just got a poorly designed speaker. And there's plenty of speakers that pay little to no mind to depth, width, and height in favor of this tonal purity some people are obsessed with. It's very easy to achieve height with a recording. I mic that's low will make something seem tall just like a mic that's far away will make something seem distant. It's largely a failure of the speaker to reveal spacial information and some to do with the room. Some speakers just don't do it well, period. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - soundstage height is just another dimension of the spherical 3 dimensional soundstage. The dimensions of that soundstage in a particular system is a function of how much INFORMATION that system can extract from the recording. Which of course means everything matters, from absolute speaker placement, but not toe in or tilt of speakers, correct direction of cabling and fuses, vibration isolation, room acoustics, RFI/EMI and all the other issues that contribute to sound quality, including those unmentionable things that many folks don’t wish to acknowledge, the things that aren’t directed associated with the speakers, the electronics, cables, the house power, vibration or RFI/EMI. You know, things that go BUMP in the night. 😧 In any case the better the resolution you can acheive the larger the ever expanding sphere of the soundstage will be, including height.

When you control the mail you control... IN-FOR-MA-TION. - Newman

"...spend at least half of your listening time adjusting the speakers to the recording..."

wolf, while this might be the ultimate solution, it is really not a practical approach for most people. I had an interesting thing happen last week that changed my view of the soundstage. I ran into someone locally (on A'gon) who was selling a pair of Fostex folded-horn speakers that he had bought as a kit (Madisound BK-16 kit, $500) and assembled it using a Fostex 6.5" full-range driver (FF165K). He was basically giving them away. I spent the weekend and made them look real nice using ebony stain, etc. Lot of work but he had already done all the heavy lifting of assembling it and did a great job at it. Anyway, I made a crude stand, slightly angled front to back, to put them off the ground and set them up right next to my 2Ci so I could switch between the two. One thing that immediately blew me away was the incredible image specificity and the amount of detail coming out of these two drivers. I truly heard things I had not heard before. And depending on the content, especially live recordings, the soundstage was wide, deep and full of activity. The 2Ci has the width and depth but the imaging from these little drivers just places the instruments so well within the stage that I'm now convinced the key to achieving a "good" soundstage is image specificity just like a live event where you can "see" the instruments and that visual cue is what helps in creating the soundstage. In comparison the Vandys sound very matured, warm and relaxed, and of course with more bass. These have decent tight bass but need a smaller room which I'll address when I move them a another room upstairs and put them closer to the corners. The other "downside" is they are way too engaging for casual listening and tend to demand your attention at all times. Some may say they're fatiguing but for now I'm just thrilled with my first exposure to the single-driver speaker world and must say I'm impressed by the shear amount of detail they deliver.
I just realized I hi-jacked my own thread but this was such a cool experience and a revelation for me in the context of how the shape/size of a sounstage can be affected by how well the speakers deliver the imaging. I now "need" a nice low powered integrated tube amp to go with these puppies. It never ends....