Please Read and express your feelings and opinions....

While soundstage height is not very important to me, my engineer friend is constantly harping on the openess from top to bottom and side to side his system has with similar equipment and wiring. Where his system and mine greatly differs is that he is using a two way monitor speaker with 1st order crossover in a smaller, acoustically damped room. My speakers are 4.5 way, 7 driver large speakers in a large, live sounding room. Totally different. Missing some height in some Ellington and Santana recordings (such as bells and xylophones above my head) doesn’t bother me as it does him. I am more concerned as several posters are above with tone, timbre, timing, clarity and detail. With my SR and TC treatments, the soundstage width is adequate for seating along a 10’ couch (or nearly anywhere in the room) to be very enjoyable and not locked into the center only. So, I’m not missing the height my friend has.

All of the attributes mentioned are very important, but can you suspend disbelieve without accurate soundstage?

fleschler, if you desire more height, place HFTs high up on the wall behind your speakers.

Dave

I tried that (I have an HFT 2.0 at 18" from the floor, a pair of HFTs at 5’ mid-way between speakers, a HFT-X at 5’ between speakers and an HFT at 7’ high between speakers). When I added the Blackbox and Atmosphere XL4 is when I apparently lost height but gained so much more in width and tonal warmth. When I added HFTs on at 7’ above the 5’ HFTs, the balance was thrown off, too much highs relative to mids and bass. I also have mid-wall to the seating area 5’ high HFT 2.0 and 7’ high HFTs, and at the corners behind the speakers (they are literally corners with record shelving at an angle facing the room) I have 5’ high HFT 2.0s, 6’ and 7’ high HFTs.

Also, an anomally from the suggested SR setup is that I cannot put any HFT types on the face of the speakers (top, sides and rear work great). They tend to alter the frequency balance, especially bad is placing either an HFT or HFT-X below the dome tweeter or below the ribbon supertweeter. I also tried at 8 and 4 o’clock positioning. I just leave them off and voices, violins and guitars retain a beautiful balance of body and head. It’s only in Jazz Party opening cut and Abraxis that I lack the placement of the highs above my head which annoys my friend who has it all. He has ZERO room treatment, a congested room with speakers nearly flush against the wall and a 80s 27" tube TV smack in the middle between the speakers. Those little speakers (his own folded bass design) are remarkable, with fabulous soundstage (height and width) and all the other requirements put forth as well as high volume level without distortion. What they lack is body type dynamic punch (his room mitigates against that as well) like my system or a good horn system.

I'm all for science when it applies....the earth is round,rotates and
revolves around the sun,dinosaurs once roamed the earth as evidenced by their fossil remains  etc. et al ......but I listen to music with my ears and do not rely upon test results to determine what I like to listen to. Otherwise I'd get an app that could listen with me,and let
me know whether I liked the music or not.  But then again,I always
thought I had a cool enough voice until I hear it on a home video and cringe at the sound of it,so now what do I do ?  What a world,what a world.

Just one thing. Soundstage height should not be taken all by itself, but as one dimension of the 3 dimensional space of the recording venue. What we should be striving for is a more and more accurate portrayal of that 3 dimensional space, as the system is improved - an “expanding sphere” of the soundstage, as it were. A sphere with dimensions of width, depth and height. Dealing with the 4th dimension is beyond scope. It wasn’t that long ago that audiophiles were exclaiming, “Whoa! The sound is coming from outside the speakers!”