Fitzcaraldo215
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Hi
I don't have a fixed position on imaging (Puns intended). At concert in large halls. I just hear a big blob of sounds with some left and right and a hall sound.... I don't hear "layered depth" and all the things we audiophiles like so much to talk about... This in concert halls. In small venues however, I have come to experience a vividness and a positioning that my ears, not my eyes do tell me... There is depth and sometimes there can be very exact positioning of players/instruments.
This said.. There is a difference between what we hear and what the speakers produce. It is somewhat true that monopole speakers radiate most of their energy to the front but sometimes with some speakers the sound does seem to come from even further back the plane of speakers. We're not talking about dipole speakers which IME perform this trick routinely. I wouldn't be so bold as to say that there isn't some sense of depth in stereo by which I believe you meant two (2) channels. In some instances regardless of how it was achieved depth can be reliably perceived, IME, in a 2-ch setting.
I don't agree about the "blob" of sound idea live in large halls with large ensembles, like a symphony orchestra. Yes, the individual first violin section or the cellos or basses, etc. can and do sound that way if they are playing well and together in unison. But, the "blob" of first violins or other instrumental sections each have finite, though not starkly defined, width and depth dimensions different from other sections. And, yes, when many sections are playing carefully harmonized music at the same time, there is often a larger "blob", blending elements from multiple instruments and sections. But, the "blob" is not consistently uniform in tonality or in its perceived spatial image. Basses, cellos and violas toward the right give a tonal weight to that side that first and second violins on the left do not have, etc.
Eyes closed live, I do hear front to back and also height layering if they are playing on risers, as my local Philadelphia Orchestra does. Some of that might depend on where one is sitting. For me, it is better in the floor Orchesta seats, as opposed to the First Tier Balcony center boxes where I used to sit in Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center. The sight lines were better in the higher seats, but the sound is better on the floor overall. I prefer sitting between midway and back of the hall, normally about 2/3 back, also. And, it is a lot cheaper than the Box seats were.
Many experienced listeners in my home have noticed the excellent sense of soundstage depth and dimensionality achieved in my Mch system. But, at the risk of people calling me totally crazy nuts, there is also a noticeable sense of image height in many, though not all recordings. The brasses and percussion sound noticeably higher and deeper in the soundstage than do the woodwinds, which in turn sound slightly higher and deeper than the strings, like the effect live.
I have no idea what specific system/room accidents or artifacts have occurred in my setup to cause height perception. But, it is quite noticeable, and I like it. Mathematically, I sort of almost see how phantom imaging in this way is possible from a speaker array in a horizontal plane and how a mike array might capture it. But, do not ask me to explain it. And, our ears are, of course, able to detect height, even though there are only two of them.
It is not frequency dependent. For example, trumpets, trombones, tuba and horns all exhibit this to a similar degree on a fair number of Mch SACDs, such as Philadelphia Ondines, Concertgebouw RCO Lives, Budapest Festival Channel Classics, etc. It is also not ceiling bounce. My ceiling has a very large opening to the floor above and varies from 8' on the left side to about 18' on the right, with the curved ceiling cutout about midway. There is also no sense of a vertically stretched image with soloists. They sound like point sources, often also with a sense of the body of the instrument - basses, cellos or pianos, for example.
My effect is perhaps most likely a result of the use of fairly tall Martin Logan 2-way electrostat dipole hybrids with fairly low xovers to their passive woofer drivers. My horizontal 'stat hybrid center channel is also above, not below, my TV monitor and pointed down at my ears. All front speakers are about 5' into the room. A good friend, who is a recording and equipment reviewer and concert goer, agrees it is there in my system, but not in his own Wilson Duette II-based Mch system to anywhere near the same extent. Ditto for other friends, including one with Revel Studio IIs. They are all a little jealous, I think.
Somewhere I have an old Chesky test CD that had a track of point source noises - maybe keys jangling, as I recall - that was specifically recorded to test this. The noise source was miked successively moving up the left side, across the center, then down the right side. My old ML CLS IIz's did fairly well, though not perfectly in height, at tracking the proper image locations, per the documentation. I have not repeated those tests for decades.
Sorry to take this scientific forum into the la-la land of my audiophile ravings. But, when discussing imaging, we are dealing with a lot of subjectivism, I think. I do not know of much viable empirical research that sheds much light on the topic in any detail.
