After many more days, including a whole weekend of listening to the Quickie + Emotiva with the HE-500, I think I have a better understanding of the soundstaging. I don't know what the universal definition of soundstage width vs. depth is, but for this discussion, I'm defining width as the up/down + front/back plane (yz plane), and depth as the axis from ear to ear (x-axis). Refer to the image below and imagine the headphones upright for reference:
I found the Emotiva with HE-500 pairing to have always had great width (yz plane), but it wasn't that great in the depth (x-axis). The instruments never felt it was coming from too far away. With the Quickie, I found the benefit to mainly come from soundstage depth. The width, which already been great, is about the same, but the depth really becomes something else. When I mentioned the doubling of soundstage in one of my earlier posts, I meant it as doubling of the soundstage depth. You really start to hear the subtleties of distance sounds, and with the added transparency, I think that's what really gives this sense of much better depth. As far as percentages, it's really hard to quantify exact percentages when it comes to soundstage for me. To me, since the I found the Emotiva pairing to have a relatively shallow (lacking of depth) soundstage, it's especially hard to put a percentage on this. It's like saying I doubled my money, when all I had was a dollar to begin with. Percentages rely entirely on the base value, and since the base soundstage depth on the Emotiva + HE-500 wasn't great to me, it makes any percentage statements a bad definition to go by. It could truly be quintupling the soundstage depth for all I know. All I can say it helps the depth immensely. It goes from from one of the more two dimensional headphones I've heard to one of the best in depth and three dimensionality. Another thing that probably skews the sense of the weakness in depth with Emotiva alone is the ratio of width to depth. Like I said, I found the width great, and when compared to the depth, it makes it sound more two dimensional. Think of a flat box shape.
Keep in mind this comparison has been between the Quickie with Emotiva vs. the Emotiva alone. If you have a different amp, it's quite possible you don't suffer the shallow soundstaging I find with the Emotiva alone. YMMV.
One other thing to note is if you asked me to give one word to describe the soundstaging of the Quickie + Emotiva, it would be
coherent. What this means is that I find the ratio of width to depth, and the level of separation of instruments to be very well synced, and on a very natural and realistic level. Two weeks ago, my friend brought his HD800 over during the Thanksgiving holiday, and I tried it out extensively, paired with the Bottlehead Crack. I've heard all kinds of things about the soundstage of the HD800, but frankly, I wasn't all too impressed. From memory, I recall it to be spacious indeed, but it lacked the level of coherency what I'm hearing with the Quickie + Emotiva + HE-500. Especially with livelier genres, I found the HD800 to be lifeless at times, and the soundstage to have a sense of artificiality, where it stretched out the separation of instruments more so that what is natural, leaving pockets of empty space in between instruments that did not need to be there. This is akin to placing your 2-channel speakers too far apart in respect with where you're listening from. I think the perfect sense of spacing would be where all instruments have their own space and are not competing for space with one another, but at the same time borders one another leaving no unneeded space in between. Maybe it's the pairing with the Crack, but the HD800 definitely pales in comparison to what I'm hearing from the HE-500 in terms of soundstage coherency in my opinion.
