[emlin]

Enjoy!

Thanks!

 

[Whazzzup]

Artifacts are then sorted according to type of material, e.g., stone, ceramic, metal, glass, or bone, and after that into subgroups based on similarities in shape, manner of decoration, or method of manufacture. Soooo …..

 

[emlin]

Artifacts are then sorted according to type of material, e.g., stone, ceramic, metal, glass, or bone, and after that into subgroups based on similarities in shape, manner of decoration, or method of manufacture. Soooo …..

Yup, I always miss the engraved hunting scenes.

 

[tomb]

First, the fun part. Soundstage is used to describe anything and everything around here but it shouldn’t be so.
IMO, soundstage is strictly information you get about the room from the delayed sounds that reach you after bouncing off the walls and everything else. To me it is not about where the instruments are in your mind, that would be imaging.
But even if you stick to that definition that many will disagree with, you will still have the question of which room we’re talking about? Is it the room where the band recorded? Is it the room and speakers the guy mixing the track was in? Or a ”room” made almost from scratch by the sound engineer? Or maybe it is the room you’re in when listening to speakers? Is it whatever feeling you end up with while using headphones? Pick any one option and some people will disagree.

Whatever you’re asking about, the brain constructs what it thinks is the most plausible space based on various amounts of cues and your own body, put together into a pudding of experience. It’s easy for nearly anything audible, visible etc(sensed) or expected(psychological bias) to alter your impression of space and sound source localization. So, of course a transducer(headphone, IEM, speaker) being the least accurate and most inconsistent part of a playback chain, will surely have some impact on your experience in general including soundstage and imaging.

About accuracy, you can probably forget about that when it comes to spatial cues on headphones and IEM. Speakers will also create something fake and fairly unnatural, but almost every album ever made was finalized while using speakers, so it’s the ”fake” that would usualy come closest to the final product.

In conclusion, someone talking about large soundstage doesn't mean anything about actual reproduction accuracy. Larger could seem like it’s better given how silly small the soundstage and imaging feel on headphones. I don’t believe there is more to it. But larger doesn’t means it’s not incredibly wrong in other aspects. Also you can find 10 guys mentioning a larger better soundstage while describing significantly different impressions on various headphones.

I always like to compliment the sound science guys when I can - good post! I'm sorry that you took some abuse later on, but the OP didn't realize he stepped on one of the booby traps on Head-Fi with this one.

Everyone touched on it to some degree, but I like to think of soundstage (and imaging to some degree) more simply. The goal of most audiophiles is to get closer to "real, live" music with our music reproduction equipment. Headphones came about to allow the listener to concentrate on low-power, tiny signals - without distraction - in noisy environments. At the same time, because they usually totally enclose the ears or ear canal, headphones immediately compress the sound environment compared to live music or speakers. In the worst cases, they can make the listener feel as if they're listening in a well and feelings of claustrophobia may even result ... not a very comfortable experience.

This is exacerbated by those familiar with live music environments, be it a rock music stage or a classical music hall. The music often envelops the listener, if not actually engaging the body and its capability to sense music and vibrations. Headphones remove a lot of this in principle. So, the effort to bring it back - while using headphones - has been going on for a long time. As castleofargh recommended, vented, open headphones are the first step in combatting this. After a while, you start pursuing headphones that can create a noticeable soundstage. Instead of in that claustrophobic well, the listener may hear sounds that seem as if they're coming from somewhere outside the headphone cans, in front and even behind.

This enhances the listening experience, making it more psychologically comforting and seemingly closer to reality. Does this have any basis in the real music? I guess that's what this thread has been arguing about. With studio recordings, it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that anything is present other than what the recording engineer intended. With live music recordings? Perhaps the echos enhance the feeling of spaciousness to some degree, depending on whether the headphone has a tilt toward creating that soundstage.

IMHO, it's one reason why the original AKG K701 was once considered one of the three finest headphones in the world (along with the Senn HD600/650 and Beyer DT880). It had tremendous soundstage and was one of the airiest, open headphones in the world. Its response was fairly bad, plagued with super-light bass that AKG has been trying to address ever since (only ruining the headphone, IMHO). Similarly, the HD800 became the king of soundstage when it came out and still has that crown - again, IMHO.

Some of the old hands around here will tell you that in discriminating between TOL headphone performance, soundstage is a bellwether. They will tell you that a headphone having response faults can often be corrected with equalization or other means (if it has sufficient quality). However, there's almost nothing you can do to increase soundstage. The headphone either has it or it doesn't. That's why headphones like the K701 and HD800 succeed, despite complaints here and there about lack of bass, nasty treble peaks, headband center bumps that hurt, etc., etc. While corrections are available for those various glitches, the soundstage is more or less inherent and not available elsewhere with competing headphones.