Eye-brain effect

Absolutely true. Eye and ear senses do naturally work together. In particular, think how much easier it is to understand spoken word when you can watch the other person's lips. Some deaf people can learn to understand speech from lip movement alone.

When I go to a live perfomance, and often at home, I listen with eyes closed. This permits me to better focus on the music. It also saves money on tickets, because I don't have to sit in the front rows so as to see the facial expressions of the performers, which some other people like to do.

Depends on your defininition of imaging and your expectations. You will never, under any circumstances, hear a SO sound realistic in your living room on any level, dynamics especially, and realness of the soundstage which is never so defined as it is on recordings due to the manner in which the recordings are mic'd. All you will hear is a pleasant and more detailed exposition of the instrumentation used. Actually I like it because it gives me the ability to better understand the role that different instruments play in the orchestration, and it more closely represents what you would hear if you were the conductor on the podium.

I listen with my eyes open (I can walk and chew gum) but I have to admit that some things are distracting visually which can make you believe are detrimental to the sound stage image. I just removed a 3x4x2' cabinet from between my speakers (it was recessed 4' behind the plane of the speakers) and I will swear that I have a more focused center image! But do I? I'm not really at all sure. My best of all worlds scenario is dark(ened) room and eyes wide open. When I close my eyes I relax and nap time comes. :-)

I agree that your eyes do work together in conjunction with the rest of your senses. Just like when they 'see' a carrot they would expect it to 'taste' a certain way. In turn they are absolutely not necessary to enhance or detract from any one of them (but certainly always have the potential to, along with your wee brain of course). For audio the best example I can think of is headphones. Good headphones will create an amazingly realistic soundstage, and illusion of 'presence' which would not be affected, other than possible distraction, by your visual sense. I think learned expectations have a lot to do with how our senses process things. With headphones your eyes really have no part in the equation. I'd take that over Newbee's darkened room and NoDoz any day. Certainly the fewer senses that come into play, the more heightened the remaining senses become. Your grey matter has fewer senses to devote it's RAM to processing.

Marco