Admittedly, I am literally the only person I know to express this perspective
It’s a different perspective from traditional stereo audiophile interests around the issue of “imaging.” My perception of this is that there is a historical fixation on the ability of stereo playback to recreate a hypothetical “performance space,” different from the one the listener is in. This is a hopeless task, and is uninteresting to me.
A stereo playback system creates a real three dimensional sound field in the listening space. This is the physical space the listener is actually living in, and the one we should be concerned with in regards to playback systems.
For the vast vast majority of commercial recordings this is the closest expression of the studio production environment. There is no other three dimensional space to represent.
(Floyd Toole refers to this obliquely with his concept of the “circle of confusion” which I think is not a very useful way of thinking about the issue. Because it references an impossible reality in which the majority of playback systems will be high quality. This will never happen, and the trend in playback systems is not in this direction. Instead convenience, portability, size, cost, and appearance are the driving trends. Within this though, there are some excellent sounding products.)
In any case, the core foundation of my perspective is correct, and the fact that it is rarely referenced indicates that something is lacking in how we think about audio playback systems.
(Some products are making steps in this direction, like Apple HomePod, which is designed to integrate in an everyday listening space. It uses a bunch of fancy processing and multiple drivers to accomplish this. It lacks the split speakers of true stereo playback, so I find it limited.)
A stereo playback system creates a three dimensional sound field in the listening space. Any imaging information present in the recording is
created on two speakers, placed equidistant from the mixer, excepting multichannel productions. This holds true for all audio recordings that have had
any post processing done.
But the listener is not locked to this center position, instead they move around inside the sound field.
In my experience, properly positioned stereo speakers that are
somewhat perceptible as point sources provide a more stable image. My theory is that this allows the brain to understand that the body is moving, not the sound.
Since any imaging encoded in the source is based on discrete, stereo, point sources, the ability to localize the point sources in playback allows the listener to stay connected to any stereo imaging encoded into the signal by the engineer. Imaging in pop and rock (in the broadest sense) makes heavy use of “hard panning” of certain sounds to define the soundstage. The inability to localize hard panned sounds makes the soundstage breakdown.
In addition, the correct generation of the centered sounds is anchored to the left/right speaker spread. This allows, for example, the vocals to be coming from a point source in the center, as opposed to “floating around”.
This is my highly speculative theory to understand my own subjective experience. It seems to hold more true with some recordings and genres than others. Hip-hop for example is obsessed with sonic experimentation, and traditional concepts of stereo imaging are not as relevant.
In general, for good playback,in this light, speakers can’t be too far apart (this causes a “hole” in phantom center), be spaced in from side walls, not too close to back walls, have good dispersion characteristics, and be facing forward, not toed in. The effect doesn’t work well with highly directional speakers, which have an unstable image in different listening positions.
Most of my experience with “good measuring” speakers is through work, not recreational listening.
I have Genelec 3040 system which does have a nice wide listening zone. But because they are hard to localize in the room, the sound feels like it’s coming from “everywhere” which is close to being like “coming from nowhere”. It is this effect that I find confusing. Vocals are not supposed to come from nowhere. While most people who hear our Genelec system (with a sub) think it sounds awesome, it never sounds “correct” to me in a way that some theoretically lesser systems do.
It is very “forgiving” in a way, because the sound is so even and well controlled, with enough power, it can tolerate deficipencies in recordings.
Work continues.
