Back to analog ..was it a mistake???

Newbee,

Your description makes sense.

Not sure I agree that solo instruments necessarily occupy the entire soundstage in all cases you identified though.

It is not the case with omnis I have heard, which are OHM and MBL. Have you actually heard these properly set up?

There is a greater sense of room ambience perhaps with properly set up omnis, but soloists are located just fine, in fact the mbls are the best I have ever heard at doing exactly that in that they have the deepest soundstage I have heard yet the best specificity.

OHMs I have heard do it almost as well, however I have never heard a soundstage with OHMs as deep as with mbl. I attribute that mostly to differences in room size during audition and the fact that mbl is true omni and OHM Walsh only pseudo omni ( sound in wall facing directions is attenuated with sound damping material located inside the can to allow closer placement to walls). Old OHM Fs and Es were true omni, but I have never heard those.

I did a long edit of my post but too late sadly and I'm too lazy to do it over again. :-)

But for what it is worth, consider when evaluating user definitions of soundstage, that some folks prefer nearfield (for the sake of discussion) a 6' triangle arrangement, some mid field say a 10 to 12 foot triangle, some far field 15 to 20ft triangle (a HUGE room!) and some want to hear their music as they party and walk about the room. Ask each of them what kind of 'soundfield' they prefer and why. They just might give you the same answer, but consider if the experience they describe with the reality of if the equipment and room set up is possible of delivering it. I raised this issue not so much to raise issues of speaker design so much as to illustrate that one persons perfect soundstage, height/width/depth, may not be optimum for another. That was all. I had a kneejerk response to the use of the work ALWAYS.

Mapman, Seems we both agree and disagree. Where i would take issue with your response to my initial post about soundstaging is the implication that because I can distinguish differences in soundstaging between vinyl and my particular cdp, then there must be something deficient or "wrong" with my speakers. I don't get it. If the speakers were "bad" at soundstaging, then I would not get good results with any front end component.

You could fairly argue that my cdp might be subpar, however. I don't really know nor do I care to find out. It is a highly tweaked Sony SCD777ES with a Superclock IV run by a 12V batt, among many other mods. The change from SuperClock2 to SC4 and batt power was associated with a marked improvement in soundstaging (hence my conjecture that reducing jitter improved soundstaging) but still not quite as magnificent as what I get with vinyl, where the soundstage extends from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. This is using Sound Lab M1 ESLs. But all this is OT. In every other way, CDs and SACDs sound great in my system, as a secondary source that could not replace vinyl.

i own several turntables and over four decades of collected vinyl. i love records, but i would never recommend jumping back in with the sharks if you haven't been in the tank for decades. cd's are fine.

Lewm,

I would not suggest that your speakers specifically are "deficient". All I'm saying that it is not always the case that vinyl always does imaging and sound staging better. In your case, apparently this is true, in mine it is not. Both formats produce similar results that are both competitive with the best I have heard in my case, at least that is my assessment.

I believe based on my observations that when one format sounds categorically better in this regard, something unique is going on in that sources signal path that accounts for it. It may be a combination of multiple factors that add up to less rather than any one thing. The configuration of the speakers in the room could be the culprit. My big OHM 5s cannot work their magic as well without room around them to breath, for example. Same true of many large speaker designs: mbls Maggies and many floorstanders, based on my experience. Sometimes, the system may be capable excelling in this area, but the room is the constraint. In some cases, inferior recordings in this regard might sound better because they do not requrie as much room to breathe properly. Smaller speakers like monitors generally do imaging and soundstage better in smaller or cramped rooms I have found. Bigger is not always better (except in bass levels perhaps but too much of that is not necessarily a good thing either).

Also, having run many speakers on various quality sounding systems over the years, I also know that some speakers do imaging and soundstaging better than others because they do so even with lesser electronics up front and set up in the same room. I've heard this with the OHMs and Triangles in my system representing the best and most other speakers I have tried trailing behind those to various degrees.