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What creates soundstaging?

gassor

gassor

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A wide soundstage with clearly delineated, solid sounding instruments is something I like very much. Yes, I know that it is pure artifice, but I wonder which part of an audio system is responsible for creating it - source, amp or speakers or some combination of the three?-
 
First and foremost, the recording.

Secondly, the speakers.

Thirdly, in my own personal experience, I think the preamp and source are two key areas that can flatten a soundstage, or retain the '3D' representation of it.
 
Yomanze said:
First and foremost, the recording.

Secondly, the speakers.

Thirdly, in my own personal experience, I think the preamp and source are two key areas that can flatten a soundstage, or retain the '3D' representation of it.
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Placement of speakers and furnishings in the room play a critical part too, as does your seating position. I had great soundstaging with an Arcam A5+, Ariston A810 (basically a Cambridge Audio A1 that is bought whilst my Arcam A8r was in for warranty repair) and a pair of Mordaunt Short VS100s... the speakers were really crap, shrill and just all round tonally wrong, but in my bedroom where I had free reign to play with placement, it did image brilliantly. With the 8r back in there and a pair of ELAs, it was much, much better tonally but only just on par for imaging.
 
I think I agree with Yomanze.
When the information is not there in the recording/mastering, you'll end up with a flat soundstage, no matter what.

When I upgraded my streamer this spring, the soundstage on several recordings was increased trmendously, on others, nothing had changed.

I also heard that a slightly better streamer with a pair of Klangedangs, which are very small speakers. Soundstage wasn't great. We added a small sub, and the soundstage improved significantly, beyond belief actually. So adding bass performance was very important, but I have no idea if the same would have happened if the speakers themselves would have been worse.
Oh, and this may or may not be relevant: room modes in both my room and the additional had been taken care of.

Mileages may vary
 
Tin said:
I think I agree with Yomanze.
When the information is not there in the recording/mastering, you'll end up with a flat soundstage, no matter what.

When I upgraded my streamer this spring, the soundstage on several recordings was increased trmendously, on others, nothing had changed.

I also heard that a slightly better streamer with a pair of Klangedangs, which are very small speakers. Soundstage wasn't great. We added a small sub, and the soundstage improved significantly, beyond belief actually. So adding bass performance was very important, but I have no idea if the same would have happened if the speakers themselves would have been worse.
Oh, and this may or may not be relevant: room modes in both my room and the additional had been taken care of.

Mileages may vary
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Getting the room and placement of things within it is pretty critical.
 
Tin said:
My system has been SPACEd out to the max, so I consider myself very lucky. :D
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I don’t have the facility to do that, I’d need a DSM... I may well get a DSM and Exaktbox at some point though, replacing my power amps and speakers later. It sounds pretty good as it stands though.
 
At least the olive Naim amplifiers purposefully remove sound-staging, though I’m not familiar with the other Naim vintages. Hearing the (possibly unrealistic) acoustic of the room in which a recording was made will cause the instruments to sound dislocated from your own room. It will also remove the direct connection between you and those instruments. You either get sound-staging or you get to understand the music you hear.

My speakers will do ridiculous 3d sound-staging with an amp that enhances it, so there’s no need for more than two of them to get surround sound. Fortunately however, when driven by olive Naim, they allow me to understand what I’m listening to.

Of course, everyone is welcome to their own opinion. So there’s no need to get enraged by my observation.
 
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Try creating a believable soundstage in a car - that’s hard work. It all very possible and the key is having an identical sound reaching your left and right ears at exactly the same volume, eq and time.

In a car you use an eq and RTA to set levels, you use an RTA to also match eq left and right and you use your ears to adjust the timing (phase)

At home without the EQ you use placement of ‘things’ to make the output from left and right as close as possible.. (The actual location of the speakers, (with regards walls and reflections) - The best setup I’ve come across for this re home use are ‘The Master Set’ instructions. Easily found online. Then if you still have a different eq left and right then you can use reflections and absorbsion materials differently on either side to get them more similar...

In a car I can tune it ‘blind’ quite well (even if I do say so myself!) with an RTA by getting levels right, then eq both sides to get them as similar as possible (not flat either, must use the Fletcher Munson curves!) then set l/r levels again. Then lastly listen to tones to set the time alignment correctly whilst sat in the drivers seat and it will soundstage bloody well and the speakers will dissappear. This has been done a few times for newbies with a decent in car processor but no knowledge how to set it up. Takes about an hour without listening to any music, just white noise, I ask them to get in and play their favourite cd and they get out thinking that I’m the devil or magic or similar. :)

BUT a decent soundstage will only ever occur if the recording is half decent. It’s funny when you have it set up really properly as it shows which producers and engineers are awesome at their craft and which ones are simply lazy and just set everything to equal.
 
gassor said:
A wide soundstage with clearly delineated, solid sounding instruments is something I like very much. Yes, I know that it is pure artifice, but I wonder which part of an audio system is responsible for creating it - source, amp or speakers or some combination of the three?-
Click to expand...

It is there, the system and system/room interface can only retain or destroy it. Many folk fail at the first hurdle and don’t have a proper equilateral triangle between speakers and listening seat (or something very, very close), which is a huge, huge factor IME. Beyond that it can be lost with poor resolution anywhere, phase error (multiple drivers, arrays etc), too live/dead a room etc etc. Every component or setup decision can screw it up!
 
I use Olive Naim amps and get very good sounstaging (though the pre is now non standard and that made a big difference). Perhaps oddly, I have found that the way that high frequencies are handled makes a significant difference to how well focussed the perception of soundstage is.
 
YNWOAN said:
Perhaps oddly, I have found that the way that high frequencies are handled makes a significant difference to how well focussed the perception of soundstage is.
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is that odd given how directional high frequencies are?
 
Like pretty much everything else, the whole system, which includes the source material and the room, contributes.
Tolerances between speaker drive units (meaning differences in frequency response, efficiency and phase) can be quite high which spoils the effect to some extent.
I was very surprised how much the phase correction in Exakt improved the imaging.
 
I guess as no-one has come up with a way to measure soundstaging finding agreement on how to improve it will be tricky. The best I have come across came from a system which included the Bang & Olufsen’s BeoLab 90 speakers which are almost into new Porsche 911 territory in terms of price. AC/DC were playing on the carpet in front of me I swear!
 
gassor said:
I guess as no-one has come up with a way to measure soundstaging finding agreement on how to improve it will be tricky. The best I have come across came from a system which included the Bang & Olufsen’s BeoLab 90 speakers which are almost into new Porsche 911 territory. AC/DC were playing on the carpet at my feet in front of me I swear!
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How superb! And they were there so perfectly because of electronic eq and adjustment. Same as the automotive system tuning I described above.
 
That makes sense to me Doc. Good equipment will expose the soundstaging signatures that were put in place by top class sound engineers in the recording.
 
I have never heard sound-staging in acoustic concerts I’ve been to. Have I therefore missed out on something? What action should I take do you think?
 
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