The mind is an amazing thing. It can make the world appear any way it wants it to appear. People hear voices that aren't there, and others look at a blue dress and think it's white. We have the ability to hear secondary spatial clues in music and imagine them to be primary spatial cues. But that only applies to the one listener. A different person might hear something completely different. That's why subjective impressions aren't useful for describing sound. It's better to describe the objective fidelity and let each listener find their own subjective bliss. Oftentimes that bliss has nothing at all to do with sound.
You can't judge truth by the number of people who believe something. Our political scene right now is enough to prove that. Good luck quantifying expectation bias.
You can't judge truth by the number of people who believe something. Our political scene right now is enough to prove that. Good luck quantifying expectation bias.
Political beliefs can be dangerous and harmful to the whole society, while our beliefs about soundstage only affect our own listening experience. Pretty harmless I would say. This is why I tell about my audio related beliefs openly. I know those beliefs are harmless. We are talking about things that are very subjective in nature and objective truths are perhaps impossible: There is no scientific truth about how good strawberry ice-cream tastes and there is no scientific truth about what kind of "headstage" headphones create. Subjective impressions is all we have. My principle is to make it so that the subjective impressions contradict known objective facts as little as possible (placebo control => whatever placebo effect I feel, it better agree with the established science).
I've tried multiple IEM and all of them sounded intimate, however the good ones with properly implemented crossover has very impressive imaging and accuracy even in small stage. If you listen to music loud on such IEM it may trick your mind for speaker like experience, but once you sit in front of well positioned speakers you will understand that soundstage and stereo image is on another level.
Utopia actually tries to emulate stereo image with it's angled drivers, Abyss 1266 has an impressive stage compared against other hp's as it's drivers are placed further away from your ear, but even flagship headphones can compete in these areas against speakers. Some people just like IEM presentation and when imaging is very accurate they either imagine this out of head experience or they listen to music too loud.
The problem with speakers is that you need a room treatment. If you don't care for staging and stereo image headphones and IEM's will give way better bang for $
Headphones are definitely cheaper. A good compromise for people who can’t swing a speaker system.
I think you’re mistaking soundstage for clarity. A well balanced frequency response will not suffer from frequency masking and will sound clearer with more detail. That is true for speaker systems too, it’s just easier to achieve with headphones.
You can compare your subjective experience to someone else's but whether you agree or disagree, it doesn't mean anything to my subjective experience. Like you say, subjective experiences only apply to the one person. If placebo makes you happy, that is fine. Just don't recommend it to other people who probably don't have the same bias.
Secondary depth cues are created in the mix, not the headphones. You can mess them up with poor fidelity reproduction (i.e. response imbalances that create masking) but you can't enhance them without digital signal processing. They are what the engineers made them.
The most direct way to affect soundstage and reduce the accuracy of the placement of sound objects in the mix is to blend the two channels together. That pulls everything towards the middle, depending on how much blending you're doing.
You started talking about secondary depth cues, so maybe you want to define yourself what you mean. I am interested of ALL cues, because my spatial hearing doesn't discriminate cues into primary, secondary, tertiary etc. It takes all the cues and tries to make sense of them. Many things act as cues of depth and the narrow spectral dip around 7-10 kHz caused by pinna is one of them. I was talking about that, because that was talked about here. I wasn't talking about reverb specifically, but of course reverb is one aspect of depth (high level of reverberation compared to direct sound indicates that the sound source must be at a large distance of the listener while very dry sound indicates a near sound source. This is why I typically experience the largest miniature soundstage on headphones when I listen to church music with heavy & long reverberation).
I'd say the reverb of mixes can be drastically altered by the freq tuning itself. If it's done in the wrong way the reverb sounds utterly flat and wrong. Very likely this is the basis of why this theory works.
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