Etys has narrow soundstage becase of their high noise isolation. Sound of right channel doesn't reach left ear, sound of left channel doesn't reach right ear. Sound pocessor can solve this problem by adding modified sound sygnal of left channel to right, and right channel to left...

This is true for all headphones, not just Ety's. Even if you have a large, open-air headphone, you should not be able to hear what's going into your right ear from your left ear.

Unless you've got the sound up loud enough, where it's effectively a speaker attached to your ear (and probably near blowing out your right ear drum), hearing any audible and distinguishable sound from your right ear is hard.

The reason why Ety has a narrow soundstage has to do with the fact that it's a canalphone, the whole point is to insert it as deeply as possible and create a seal as tight as possible. Under which situation, it's really hard to get that "large soundstage" sound... The sound source is inside your ear as the way it is.

What you're talking about is a crossfeed.. which makes any headphone (not just Ety's) more natural sounding, because it emulates how we hear things in real life.

However, even if you had an amp with crossfeed along with the Ety's.. it won't give you a bigger soundstage. It will sound more natural, but it won't change your soundstage dramatically. If it did, then it's manipulating the sound way too much. There's supposed to be "some" stereo separation, crossfeeds has to achieve the balance of natural sound and still have some good stereo separation.

The CD3000 has a nice soundstage, I do not miss my speakers honestly...and there are others with even better than the CD3k

Agree with Sovkiller!
Etys provides very precise sound, their membrane has very small weight and very small Inertia. I can draw conclusions that etys has very big dynamic range.
If they have big dynamic range then they can provide very wide soundstage with processor.
It is carried out in practice.

That's probably not the reason. I'll be touching on soundstage, etc in my ER-4P vs E5 review in a few weeks.


How does crossfeed give a wider soundstage?

Thinking twice on the subject, the crossfeed IMO will narrow it, IIRC they will place you a little far from the stage, and move the music more up front, with the transfering of the signal to the other ear, but it will give you at least a more relaxed listening, and "maybe" once more relaxed, the instruments will take the proper place on stage, maybe is not a wider soundstage but a better and more real soundstage, sometimes to be wide is not to be real, but this is only a supposition, I have never tried it, but for sure it will make a better audition though.

There is no problem of narrow soundstage when playing binaural. Binaural is our reality. These recordings includes full information about sound...

On the bright side, the Etys work very well with all the virtualization stuff as well as binaural recordings. These days I rarely use the Etys without some Dolby headphone or Yamaha Virtualizer on.

A relatively natural soundstage is provided by headphones which involve the outer ear, the more so when they project the sound waves rather from the front (AKG K 1000, Stax Sigma) and the latter's spatial information isn't falsified by reflexions inside the earcups. The Etys don't ivolve the outer ear which is important for the location of the sound sources. On the other hand they benefit from this circumstance with binaural recordings where the outer ear is already part of the microphone and a second pass would mean a corruption of the binaural recording's spatial information. BTW: crossfeed doesn't widen the soundstage, rather the opposite.

hmm... But how can outer ear play any role when listening with phones? Sound, that came from phones located under one angle. Outer ear only adds to sound horn and echo effects.

The outer ear is involved in normal hearing, creating a variety of reflections and echos before sound stimulates the ear drum. I agree that without its involvement, headphones will sound less natural. Few headphones allow much involvment of the outer ear because they sit right on the outer ear surface, close to the auditory canal. However there are many circumaural phones, which leave space between the heapdphone driver and the outer ear and thus get at least some outer ear involvment in the listening process. Some that I have include the old Stax Sigma and the still available Koss E-9 electrostatic and an old Sennheisser 220.

Crossfeed will not increase soundstage, rather it will narrow it since it means adding some left signal to the right channel and vice-versa. You are effectively monauralizing the stereo signal. The channel separation will be reduced and the width or spread of auditory signal will be less. If you totally mix the signals you will end up with complete monaural sound, localized in the middle of your head.

The crossfeed supporters, and I am not one of them (I had such a system years ago and found it to be of no use except for a very few old recordings with much exaggerated stereo separation) seem to like it because it makes phones seem more like speakers. However speaker reproduction is not the ideal or directly comparable to normal listening of sound sources in space. Speakers create "phantom channels" because for example, the left ear hears the left speaker and then the right speaker, delayed by the extra time it takes the sound to reach the left ear. These delayed signals have no correspondance in real-world listening and are artifacts, messing up the sound. Headphone lsitening gives a truer representation of sound because its creates a situation more like your own head being present in a real soundfield. And that. is one of the reasons, most of us here are dedicated headphone supporters.

I also suspect that many users of crossfeed find that the particular cross-feed set-up they use, does some additional processing, changing frequency responses and the like, which work well with whatever phones they are using. Thus they are responding to some other aspect of the "crossfeed" than just the crossfeed.

In Soviet Russia, soundstage narrows you!

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Wel I agree with the first part of the post, maybe about the soundstage narrowing, but about this....hummm......if the recording is binaural yes the headphone listening is more accurate, talking about just the soundstage of course, but if not, there is an strong channel separation which is not normal also, remember that the mixing and edition, take place most ofthe times with near field monitors, not headphones, and maybe the speakers are not the ideal solution, depending on the room size etc...but is a more alike representation of a normal listening than headphones, IMO the best aproximation is a binaural recording listened with headphones, but has to be binaural, the regular stereo ones will leave a hole in the middle....but how many binaural recordings you will find in the streets....

As far as I'm concerned it doesn't. I thought I'd like the concept of crossfeed... I didn't. Do my ears get fatigued? Yep... but I'v come to the conclusion that I love a wide soundfield, hence the purchase of an Earmax Pro and Sony 3000. After putting them together for the first time today all I can say is holy crap!!

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You think that when you're listening to real music you only hear particular sounds in one ear? Speakers are MUCH closer to "real-world" listening than headphones precisely because they provide such real-world cues.