Staging / Imaging with headphones: A question from a headphone barbarian

Only to a degree. The fact is that room acoustics differ greatly from headphone acoustics: there are various factors involved in this, but mostly it is due to the room acoustics and delay, and the fact that your hears will hear some of both channels of audio. Since music is generally recorded for speakers, some use what is called a "crossfeed" to emulate true room acoustics - with varying degrees of success. A headphone can in fact have tremendous soundstage, but their sound will remain different from speakers.

That said, go listen to some binaural recordings. You may be intrigued.

The Virtual Barbershop is a classic example of a binaural recording. 

A list of other Legally Download-able Binaural recordings can be found here.  Enjoy!

Yes, crossfeed can usually help this problem.

Headphones just image like headphones.  They must be enjoyed or respected for their other merits.  

This was lifted from the 6moons review of the LCD-2s

"You are right. As far as tonal accuracy, precision of the signal et al are concerned, there's nothing that beats a transducer not colored by the room. As you said, technically and from a pure sound perspective, headphones are unbeatable. I do often use them to run checks and see if speakers I'm designing are missing anything. However, to get the feel of space, depth and dimension plus low bass one almost feels rather than hears to feel simply immersed in the sound field as one would at a live event (admittedly nowhere close but still) - that naturally is impossible for headphones. One can still enjoy the music of course. I did a lot of headphone listening when I was stationed in San Juan on a job and had no system. But given the choice and for sheer pleasure, I would always opt for a less 'accurate' speaker system that surrounded me with music than a more 'correct' headphone system that played music only inside my cranium."

Quote:

Originally Posted by tojohndillonesq 

Thanks so much for the info and the Virtual Barber Shop!  Very illuminating!  Is there software that will let you RIP a CD into Binaural format?

Binaural sound comes from a recording process that uses 2 microphones that are either put in a dummy head, or sometimes in a person's own ears.  Because of that, regular stereo CDs won't be binaural unless they were recorded using a binaural recording method.  Additionally, binaural recordings are reasonably rare since they don't sound very good on speaker systems. 

There are other systems that can create a 3D sound similar to that of a binaural recording.  One that is considered quite good is the Smyth Research "Realiser". 

Here is a link to member Edwood's thread introducing the SVS Realiser. 

Edwood's thread has a lot of info and reviews from various Head-Fi members, but if you want to learn more about this system you can visit their website here.