I also agree to the consensus that there is a trade off between envelopment and accuracy.
That tradeoff is one of the ways home audio typically falls short of the real thing: At a good seat in a concert hall you have BOTH envelopment and accuracy. Only they don't call it "accuracy"; they call it "clarity" or "presence" or something like that.
And envelopment is much harder to obtain with narrow directivity.
THREE things must be present to enable envelopment: A clear stream of direct sound; then a relatively reflection-free time interval; then a clear stream of reverberant sound. Narrow directivity speakers well set-up can do the first and second, but may fail to generate enough later-arrival reverberant energy to accomplish the third and enable envelopment.
There is an additional complication in home audio: The envelopment cues we want are the ones already ON THE RECORDING. (Our rooms are too small to generate envelopment remotely approaching that of a good venue). So how are the envelopment cues on the recordings delivered to our ears? By the playback room's reflections!
To the extent that our speakers and room acoustics effectively deliver the venue cues while simultaneously MINIMIZING the playback room's "small room signature", we can hope to enjoy envelopment with a good recording. This falls into the category of "easier said than done" of course.
With narrow-pattern speakers, we need to preserve what precious little later-arriving in-room reflections exist, as those reflections are the carriers of the envelopment cues on the recording.
From my experience wide directivity speaker in highly damped rooms doesn't provide convincing envelopment of the sound.
Brilliant observation!
We get our venue-size and envelopment cues primarily from the reverberation tails which are on the recording. And those reveration tails need to be delivered from all around, which means that they need to be delivered by the playback room's reflections. IF we truncate their delivery by overdamping the room, we kill off all hope of enjoying envelopment. Since a wide-pattern speaker starts out with more energy going into the reflections (including the highly beneficial later ones) than a narrow-pattern speaker, a wide-pattern speaker can "survive" more in-room absorption than a narrow-pattern speaker can.
(Along similar lines, in a setup which inherently enables a relatively weak reverberant field, a wide-pattern speaker will generally be preferable to a narrow-pattern speaker. Therefore in my opinion the fairly large Harman speaker-shuffler room, with the speaker positioned along the centerline and the distant room boundaries apparently having some broadband absorptive characteristics, inherently favors wide-pattern speakers.)
From my experience wide directivity speaker only sound very good in the near field. Like the approach of Linkwitz with the near omnidirectional speakers in the middle of the room. With this you will get less early reflections and more later reflections.
In my opinion "less early reflections and more later reflections" is the key to combining accuracy AND envelopment. In other words, I'm not sure that a tradeoff between the two is inevitable.
