Soundstage - Too much?

I think the problem lies in my inability to explain it. There are so many varibles to acoustics. I think when you are moving in the speaker you moving it closer to its sweet spot. You wouldnt put the speakers side by side and you wouldnt put them against the wall. The best spot will be wherever that paticular speaker and the room work best with each other. Like when you focus a camera manualy. To much either way makes it out of focus.

When you move the speaker you are also changing its reflection points all over the room. The ceiling, back wall, front wall, and floor. There are also secondary reflection points which are also changed. The other reflection points are the reason you dont want your speaker the same distance from the side wall that it is from the back wall. Or that when you tow in your speakers you dont want the back facing the corner. They all have a drastic effect on each other

Also the end of the sound stage isnt the furthest point you hear an instrument imaged. Its the size of the room that your system sounds like its playing in. The neaunces that makes your system sound like it is in a bigger room are the also the benefits of good imaging.

I cant stress how great that book is. It breaks down frequency, sound waves, and will even give you basic mathmatical equations to plot resonate modes for your room. It even gets into what would happen if you put your system in a feild. All your observations are obvios traits of a great ear. That combined with the knowledge of that book would give you a great set up. A properly set up system is by far the largest upgrade you could ever make.

hi perfectimage,

i agree w/what y say above, especially: "All your observations are obvios traits of a great ear...." ;~)

seriously, i tink your 1st paragraph sums it up pretty well, & also sums up why i 1st disagreed w/ya - i am fortunate enuff to have a large listening-room, where the 25'-long wall is the *short* wall. this allows placement for optimal *precise-image* placement, knowing that the soundstage width is only limited by quality of the software, speakers, & electronics - i will *never* be placing the speakers close enuff to the side-walls to adwersely affect soundstage width. your statement about moving speakers to get that optimum position - far enuff away from each other, yet not too close to the side walls, is typical of smaller listening spaces, & what i used to do before i moved to a house w/a large room a few years ago. i feel best results in a smaller room wood be to start with trying to optimize the distance between the speakers vs-listening distance, and then heavily treat the side-walls at the 1st-reflection-point.

i believe that the room is by *far* the single-most important piece of equipment in an audio system.

regards, doug

As to Ben's question, how can you get a sonic image outside the speakers, I guess I'm more surprised by soundstage height and depth. There, you also get sounds that are not right on the line segment between the speakers, but your system doesn't even get to use left-right ear differences to perform that magic. If you play your music through Monaural, you'll still hear height and depth, although in comparison with also having the side-to-side information available, it seems kind of dull. If you have an instrumental voice only through, say, the left channel, the instrument will seem like it's positioned at the left speaker. But, paradoxically, if you also have that instrument coming through the right channel, faintly and with the right quality and time relationship to give the proper spatial cues, you can push the instrument's position out past the left speaker. At least, that seems to me to be the way it works. It's easy to see how these subtle spatial cues can get trashed accidentally or deliberately in the recording process and also lost in the playback process. Obviously, I agree with Sedond on this one. Sure, room reflections do all kinds of things to the sound and soundstage, but I think it's accurate reproduction of spatial cues that produces a good soundstage. If surface reflections generated soundstage, why haven't I ever heard instruments or voices coming from the floor?

soundstage *depth* is a whole 'nother issue - but basically similar tings are happening: ya wanna optimize the speaker placement w/the wall behind 'em, usually it's a compromise w/floor-standers & monitors on stands: further from the back-wall gives better image-depth (& worse saf), closer placement increases bass-response at the expense of image-depth (& saf improves!). ya also wanna sit far-away from the rear wall. of course, small rooms are aided w/strategic sound absorbtion & diffusionn when you or the speakers get closer to the walls than ya'd like. if ya got the space for it, subs can help in speaker placement for optimum sound, imho, cuz ewe can place the monitors for optimum-depth while placing the subs for optimum low-end response. i believe this can improve the *monitors*, even if they're full-range floorstanders - i had my thiel 3.5's set-up this way, before i got my present small merets, & they never sounded better - that 10" woofer was better higher up the frequency range when it dint have to go down to 20hz, and the marchand x-over is more transparent than the thiels' equalizer, that i was able to ditch. it's amazing how big speakers like thiels can disappear when out in the middle of a room! :>)

for optimum image height, go for a carpeted floor between ewe & the speakers, nothing else between yew & the speakers, & as high a ceiling as possible, or sound treatment on the ceiling between ewe & the speakers. kinda extreme... :>)

These debates have me rethinking and rereading.

"Reflection from flat surfaces"

"Like the light/mirror analogy, the reflected wavefronts act as though they originated from a sound image. This image source is located the same distance behind the wall as the real source is in front of the wall. This is the simple case - a single reflecting surface. In a rectagular room, there are six surfaces and the source has an image in all six sending energy back to the receiver. In addition to this, images of the images exist, and so on, resuting in more complex situation. However in computing the total sound intensity at a given receiving point, the contributions of all of these images must be taken into consideration."

Taken from the Master Handbook of Ccoustics. by Alton Everst Pg 193

I hope this is clearer then my explanation