What exactly is "imaging" ?

[Jim Audiomisc]

Yes, outdoors on an open plane ground. No, indoors anywhere but an anechoic chamber.

Having loads of indirect sound from speakers in the listening room may 'lose the speakers' but also gives lousy stereo even the 'hanging on a washing line' meaning of the term. So it loses a lot more than the 'speakers' compared to what units like the ESLs can do in the right circumstances.

 

[awkwardbydesign]

this ‘giant stereo piano the size of a stage’ thing at times, and on some big multi-driver speakers the thing invariably slopes (right hand high, left low) and sounds like the stage isn’t level. One often fears the piano will roll off.

What you need is this; https://nilsfrahm.bandcamp.com/album/solo
I really IS a giant piano! But it only works if you have deep and good quality bass reproduction.

 

[Joe Hutch]

What's really needed is a system that will mute Keith Jarrett's and Glenn Gould's muttering and mumbling. Shut up and play yer piano!

 

[tuga]

Yes, outdoors on an open plane ground. No, indoors anywhere but an anechoic chamber.

Having loads of indirect sound from speakers in the listening room may 'lose the speakers' but also gives lousy stereo even the 'hanging on a washing line' meaning of the term. So it loses a lot more than the 'speakers' compared to what units like the ESLs can do in the right circumstances.

I agree with that. But research indicates we're the minority when it comes to preferring more or less "listening room sound/interference".

Unless we include those who prefer headphones to speakers...

 

[Colin L]

What's really needed is a system that will mute Keith Jarrett's and Glenn Gould's muttering and mumbling. Shut up and play yer piano!

KJ's squealing drives me nuts TBH. GG's singing along on the Goldberg's (to me) add to music and I really enjoy them. The higher your systems resolution the more sense they make.

 

[Colin L]

Yes, outdoors on an open plane ground. No, indoors anywhere but an anechoic chamber.

Having loads of indirect sound from speakers in the listening room may 'lose the speakers' but also gives lousy stereo even the 'hanging on a washing line' meaning of the term. So it loses a lot more than the 'speakers' compared to what units like the ESLs can do in the right circumstances.

As a counter, my MBL 101 omni's image better than my previous B&W 800D2's.
Personally I'm not overly impressed by laser-cut pin-sharp imaging. Too often it requires "head in a clamp" listening, the effect goes away with only slight changes in head position.

 

[tuga]

There's a study by Taeho Kim on the "Perception of vertically separated sound sources in the median plane".
This is the conclusion:

This study examined the ability of human listeners to segregate two concurrently presented sound sources in the median plane.
It was shown in the results that a pair of vertically separated sound sources can be moderately segregated when the separation between the sources is sufficiently wide.
The segregation ability in the monaural hearing condition showed no significant difference from the binaural hearing condition.
The rate-of-change for the segregation was relatively weak with respect to the degree of separation, although it increased in the binaural hearing condition. In addition, it was not difficult for the listeners to discriminate a pair of sound sources from each of the corresponding two single sources.

 

[AndyU]

research seems to indicate that most people prefer less direct / more reflected sound

Not me! And not most people working in studios.

 

[tuga]

As a counter, my MBL 101 omni's image better than my previous B&W 800D2's.
Personally I'm not overly impressed by laser-cut pin-sharp imaging. Too often it requires "head in a clamp" listening, the effect goes away with only slight changes in head position.

Frequency response flatness as well as tweeter to midrange center distance and speaker response matching all affect image stability and focus.
The ratio between direct and reflected sound does too.

 

[tuga]

Not me! And not most people working in studios.

Can you say for sure that people who work at studios have narrow directivity speakers at home and treat the early reflection zones in their sitting rooms?
Anyway, research is research, you can't argue with that.

 

[Cereal Killer]

I’d imagine most that work in a studio, work with what’s installed and how the studio is setup. That’s what makes a good studio worthwhile using. You can quite easily tell when a recording is created in a substandard environment.

 

[davidsrsb]

The segregation ability in the monaural hearing condition showed no significant difference from the binaural hearing condition.

Not surprising, our two ears are designed to identify bearing, not height. I guess that we are using ground bounce to estimate elevation, as our hearing is not suited to direct vertical direction finding. We must be pretty good at processing echoes of only a few ms delay to do this with any accuracy at all.

 

[cooky1257]

There's a study by Taeho Kim on the "Perception of vertically separated sound sources in the median plane".
This is the conclusion:

This study examined the ability of human listeners to segregate two concurrently presented sound sources in the median plane.
It was shown in the results that a pair of vertically separated sound sources can be moderately segregated when the separation between the sources is sufficiently wide.
The segregation ability in the monaural hearing condition showed no significant difference from the binaural hearing condition.
The rate-of-change for the segregation was relatively weak with respect to the degree of separation, although it increased in the binaural hearing condition. In addition, it was not difficult for the listeners to discriminate a pair of sound sources from each of the corresponding two single sources.

AIUI The 'monaural listening condition' is referring to using just one ear, the binaural condition, both so, its easier to discern height using two ears rather than one.

 

[Dowser]

Certainly, the 63 and its' many derivatives, being acoustic analogues of phased array radars (though designed for a spherical as opposed to planar waveform) would be ideally situated to produced the best imaging.

I always enjoyed this aspect of the speaker when I owned it. My were modified by Electrostatic Solutions (which included the sparse weave sock) and were on stands - facilitating the mirror alignment as Jim recommends.

off topic a bit, sorry - mine are now 45cm off the ground, so spikes adjusted so they are vertical. The Metal grilles and dustcovers are in my basement, and they’re wearing a see through very thin nylon sock.

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

KJ's squealing drives me nuts TBH. GG's singing along on the Goldberg's (to me) add to music and I really enjoy them. The higher your systems resolution the more sense they make.

Funnily enough, I'm the other way round. I have GG's 'Well-Tempered Klavier' set and rarely listen to it because of the grunting and mumbling. But Jarrett, I'm quite comfortable with, 'because jazz'. It just becomes part of the set, indeed part of the piece. And in a live jazz set, the audience is pretty uninhibited about in-performance applause and shouting-out, so non-musical 'noises off' are part of the experience.

 

[Colin L]

Funnily enough, I'm the other way round. I have GG's 'Well-Tempered Klavier' set and rarely listen to it because of the grunting and mumbling. But Jarrett, I'm quite comfortable with, 'because jazz'. It just becomes part of the set, indeed part of the piece. And in a live jazz set, the audience is pretty uninhibited about in-performance applause and shouting-out, so non-musical 'noises off' are part of the experience.

SPT, I should state that I love KJ's work and have 50+ albums of his. It's just that we starts squealing very loudly I generally skip to the next track. Off-hand I can think of maybe half a dozen tracks that get the skip response.

 

[earlofsodbury]

‘giant stereo piano the size of a stage’

This tiresome habit also creeps into a lot of modern person+guitar recordings: disembodied voice haunting mid-stage versus guitar the size of a removal van...

I suppose a lot of this stuff is being mastered with the expectation of it only being heard via third-rate iphone earbuds, hence all manner of ugly gimmicks to get it sounding impressive. Less forgivable with classical/orchestral repertoire.

 

[Tony L]

I suppose a lot of this stuff is being mastered with the expectation of it only being heard via third-rate iphone earbuds, hence all manner of ugly gimmicks to get it sounding impressive. Less forgivable with classical/orchestral repertoire.

There is also artistic license with entirely studio-created music like rock/pop, things like Dark Side Of The Moon through to anything by Aphex Twin, Radiohead etc just don’t exist in the real world and are assembled in the studio overdub by overdub. To my mind it is unforgivable with say a live Keith Jarrett recording, I really don’t want a wide stereo piano and rock-style kick & snare centre, hi-hat right, ride left, toms panned across the stage there as frankly it sounds bloody daft.

It makes me chuckle when any one says something like ‘listen to the focus on her voice’ with something like a Norah Jones album. Any decent system should be able to sort out anything up to four or five distinct vocal layers overdubbed and slightly panned to give the sound she wanted. I have no issue with it in this sort of again studio-created music, but jazz and classical should in most cases be a recording of an actual event. I guess things blur there too, e.g. Miles and others fusion output (which I love), Stockhausen, John Cage etc.

Close-mic’d rock drum kits and wide stereo pianos do definitely trigger me in non-rock forms. I far prefer the ‘60s Blue Note etc approach of chucking a couple of mics in front of the kit and plonking it at one side of the soundstage in a coherent acoustic space. Just sounds way better to my ears. So much more real and believable.

 

[adamdea]

AIUI The 'monaural listening condition' is referring to using just one ear, the binaural condition, both so, its easier to discern height using two ears rather than one.

Yes- fascinating as it is, I don't think it has anything much to do with stereo.

 

[AndyU]

I guess that we are using ground bounce to estimate elevation, as our hearing is not suited to direct vertical direction finding.

This paper suggests the pinnae are involved in the perception of height, and references papers about their involvement in front/back perception. I did experiments many years ago at uni modifying pinnae. Handy things.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6596065/