[GhostLoveScore]

I've been reading about different headphones having wider or narrower soundstage. I own AKG K701. Now, in regular songs I am not able to say - this instrument is to the front-left, other instrument is in front of me and so on...
I don't get that kind of "separation". But what I did notice when I first plugged K701 in is this.

I honestly thought I forgot to turn off my speakers, it really seemed that the sound was coming from the front, not from right and left. Is this what soundstage means?

When watching movies, there was a few moments that I had to take off my speakers and check if the certain sound was coming from the headphones or from real world. It felt so real.

While this is interesting, sometimes that annoys me because it always feels that the sound is coming from some distant place.

 

[cossix]

That is essentially what soundstage means. I think there are two main definitions and people tend to use either one frequently. 1) Soundstage is the "wideness" of the sound. It can be described as the distance between the leftmost and rightmost cues. 2) The physical apparent depth of sound or distance from your head the music seems to come from. This is what I typically use to describe soundstage. An intimate soundstage results in sounds being between my ears, or very close to them. A deep soundstage, as you have experienced, would make the music seem to come from a point far away from your head. I experienced this for the first time when I started this hobby and bought the HD598.

Another similar term here is "imaging". You get tons of arguments about soundstage vs imaging when you look at threads for audiophile headphones used for gaming. Imaging is essentially how accurately spaced the instruments are, from left to right. A headphone can have good soundstage (sound seems to come from across the room) but poor imaging (the headphone sounds like the only places sound comes from is L, R, and Center, with nothing filling the gaps). On the other hand, and headphone with good imaging but bad soundstage would sound more intimate and not as natural, but would feel extremely accurate when it comes to determining where each sound comes from. Imaging can also be imagined in this way: In front of you, stands a group of 3 people. They are arranged in a line going from your left to right, and are 10 feet away from you. The two people on the ends of the line are about, lets say, 45 degrees from center. If they all make a race car noise starting from left and going across, trying to make it sound like a car is zooming past you, it will sound jagged because you only have 3 people making the noise. This is poor imaging. Lets say you add 10 more people in between the first 3. Now you have a dense line of people. If they make the noise again from left to right, it will sound much more accurate and will sound like the car is zooming by you. It's almost comparable to frame rate of a computer.

I hope I was able to help!

 

[Malfunkt]

Great question. I think you are going to get a number of different impressions of what soundstage/imaging represent.

Adding to what Cossix has mentioned, an important consideration is some music has been engineered to be played back on a 2-channel speaker system. Take some classic rock or jazz stereo recordings, as an example, have been engineered with the room space in mind. On a room speaker setup, you will experience a natural crossfeed where you your left ear will predominantly hear the left channel, but also receive sound reflections from the right channel and vice versa for your right ear.

Listening to this music on headphones, however, ruins the stereo phase of the music. It makes it appear more panned left and right than what is intended. That said, your brain can adapt to this style of listening.

On the hand, binaural music recording are specifically designed to be heard on headphones. There are a number of techniques to producing this, but essentially you have two angled mics placed in a dummy head that can record discrete channels for each ear. Played back on the right headphones, you will truly be able to experience soundstage/imaging. In fact, spatial positioning will be superior to a 2-channel stereo recording engineered for speakers, and you will be able to hear sound enveloping you including cues from behind you as well as above and below.

Some modern game engines are starting to process spatial sound for headphones as that is such a common setup for gamers. For example Overwatch uses a built in Dolby Atmos engine that does a great job with spatialization.

You can use a device like Sennheiser GSX1000 to process 5.1 and 7.1 content and simulate it for headphones. Even cheaper on Windows you can use Dolby atmos for Headphones which can do the same for regular surround content (and even stereo) but is even best to play back specific Atmos content that has full spatial cues. Even Netflix is starting to carry some Atmos content.

Some headphones that I feel do a great job for spatial audio for binaural audio are the Hd600/650, Hd250/540, hd700,hd800 yeah I know all sennheisers. Those are ones im just familiar with.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

I've been reading about different headphones having wider or narrower soundstage. I own AKG K701. Now, in regular songs I am not able to say - this instrument is to the front-left, other instrument is in front of me and so on...
I don't get that kind of "separation". But what I did notice when I first plugged K701 in is this.

I honestly thought I forgot to turn off my speakers, it really seemed that the sound was coming from the front, not from right and left. Is this what soundstage means?

Soundstage is an inherently speaker term since for the most part you need speakers to replicate soundstage. This is primarily because recordings were meant to be played back by speakers, and the in-room playback is basically to project the location of instruments to the listener laid out in front, achieved through controlled reflections as well as careful filtering of sound across the two channels that will interact with a room via controlled reflections (ie too much reflections and it will screw up the soundstage). It's the same as putting a sound source like a drum in a specific location and hten hitting it, and it will bounce around and what you hear tells you where that sound came from, so in a recording, it's recorded to make it sound like that relative to the two speakers.

With headphones it has traditionally been problematic primarily because each ear will only hear the driver that is sitting on top of it, unlike in a speaker system where both ears hear both speakers' sound interacting with the room. So assuming the room isn't screwing with the sound, you'll get to hear positional cues. Think of that same drum example above and how tapping on it makes a cat or dog swing the ears all around to locate it - that's how speakers work in a room - something you don't get with headphones.

One other issue that exacerbates that problem is how headphones are traditionally designed with the drivers smack over the ear canal. Even in a car with the speakers aimed directly at each other the speakers are to the front of the driver, not flanking him (the asymmetrical interior however is the main problem in a car, but that's for a completely different discussion). The K701 at least deals with this one problem by having angled earpads, effectively positioning the drivers to the front of the head at an angle the same way you have speakers in front with toe-in. This is why you're hearing the sound more from the front than from left and right. A lot of headphones utilize a similar feature - Audeze and HiFiMan also use angled pads on some of their headphones, while the K812, HD800, HD700, CD300, T1, T5P, a bunch of Ultrasones, etc have the drivers mounted towards the front of the earcups with a toe in angle. The Sony Qualia Q10 actually has both - it has an angle mount plus asymmetrical earpads.

Basically, soundstage is inherently a feature for (proper) stereo speakers, and the K701 is among the few headphones that does well enough with it to not sound too much like the stereotypical headphone.

When watching movies, there was a few moments that I had to take off my speakers and check if the certain sound was coming from the headphones or from real world. It felt so real.

While this is interesting, sometimes that annoys me because it always feels that the sound is coming from some distant place.

It mimics speakers, which, unless you're using (relatively) crappy speakers cranked up too loud, will sound like they're coming from farther away. Take the Focal Stella Utopia vs their own Chorus series. The Chorus isn't crappy but compared to the technical advantages of the Utopia (ie a flatter response and better dispersion), by comparison it pushes most of the sound forward, with the bass drum and guitar just lagging behind. The Utopia on the other hand images the vocals closer to the speakers, then has the bass drum well defined but still spatially clearly coming from behind the speakers (take away the toe in angle and that goes away too).

That's what the K701 was designed to do, really, if at least at the cost of an early bass roll off (the K702 addresses that with no imaging penalty). If you don't like that effect you can always get a Grado for the ultimate in your head non-imaging and in your face sound made possible by its upper bass and midrange boost as well as high efficiency that lets them get loud with less power and effort from whatever they're plugged into. Or an HD600.

Speaking of the HD600, I put angled Brainwavz earpads on mine to move the cymbals back and towards the center. Because if you have to scale down a band to the size of your head, a drummer that has the cymbals waaaaaaaaaaaaay off to the flanks where the guitars are is just weird, unless it's a wacky Fantastic Four cartoon episode where Reed Richards shows off his stretchy arms by having the cymbals off to the flanks of the stage. You can get that in speakers too, except in that case it's due to excessive reflections (or excessively loud tweeters).