[DJ The Rocket]

I'm trying to better understand soundstage.

I remember discovering the concept of soundstage a few weeks after making the decision to devote an increased amount of time and money to improving my personal audio gear, and I immediatelybecame obsessed with it. Having started with the M50x (not much soundstage to speak of), searching for more and more soundstage informed all of my early purchases. I amassed open cans until reaching the Q701, which I assumed would become my new favorites. And they were, for awhile, before ultimately proving themselves to be a sort of personal FOTM.

So what exactly is soumdstage? How would you define what's happening sonically to create the illusion? Certian amps are said to have better soundstage than others, what characteristics of an amp are responsible for the difference?

I listen to mostly electronica/EDM of various flavors, and probably less than 10% of my music is recorded with several performers together in a studio, playing traditional instruments mic'ed a certain way, then mixed a certain way, etc. So I don't experience the "placement" aspect in the same way I think most do. But to my ears, soundstage depends almost entirely on the producer, and the track's complexity and subtlety. As I experience it, tracks produced with a wide soundstage sound wide regardless of what equipment I'm listening with. Ill pore over my playlist and update this evening with examples of the tracks I'm talking about, that seem to make even my M50s open unbelievably wide.

I'd love to hear your opinions on what soundstage is "made of," and I'd especially like to hear suggestions of recordings that sound incredibly wide TO YOU! So please, help me out here by talking about yourself!

 

[Ancipital]

I'll tell you what often makes my eyes pop out of my head, playing Overwatch in my planar magnetics via my desktop amp and DAC. It heavily hinges on positional audio as part of the gameplay, and uses Dolby Atmos to do realtime binuaral encoding.

After a few minutes, I was able to dial in perception of more or less exactly where significant sounds were located in 3D space- which is very important when you need to be able to dodge and spin to get the drop on your opponent in the blink of an eye. Really impressive stuff- I can't remember the last time that sound design in a game was so far front and centre and so well-implemented.

 

[icebear]

For me a sound stage gives a good reproduction of the natural reverb in the actual performance space.
Obviously this is only the case with live recordings and all musicians playing actually together.
Great examples are most of the Mercury Living Stereo classic recordings or also "Friday Night in San Francisco". If you don't hear the room in this trio guitar recording, then toss your equipment right away

Given your favorite music that is sampled and stitched together, there is no natural live sound stage but only a representation of the balance / panning by the engineer on where to put the image of the sound source into the stereo R/L dimension.

 

[Ancipital]

Great examples are most of the Mercury Living Stereo classic recordings or also "Friday Night in San Francisco". If you don't hear the room in this trio guitar recording, then toss your equipment right away

Is that another "Jazz At The Pawnshop"?

 

[Coolzo]

Soundstage width is something that, secondarily to the headphones themselves, may be affected by the level of stereo crosstalk between each channel of the amplifier. Monoblocks typically excell at this, and in my experience frequently do indeed provide a wider soundstage than their stereo counterparts. It makes sense- more crosstalk, more extraneous signal leaking into each channel, slightly less precise separation of each channel, less width. Dual-mono amplifiers also typically have excellent crosstalk performance. Not very long ago, I owned an audio-gd Phoenix, an amplifier typically recognized to have "amazingly wide soundstage". Incidentally, it is (at least in part) a dual-mono design. I can attest to the generally wide soundstage.

Of course, the headphones matter the most in the end. HD800 for me!

As far as recordings with massive soundstage width and depth- if you're looking at electronic music, for sure look into London Elektricity, Metrik, Concord Dawn, BT, Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, Infected Mushroom, etc

 

[RRod]

I'll tell you what often makes my eyes pop out of my head, playing Overwatch in my planar magnetics via my desktop amp and DAC. It heavily hinges on positional audio as part of the gameplay, and uses Dolby Atmos to do realtime binuaral encoding.

After a few minutes, I was able to dial in perception of more or less exactly where significant sounds were located in 3D space- which is very important when you need to be able to dodge and spin to get the drop on your opponent in the blink of an eye. Really impressive stuff- I can't remember the last time that sound design in a game was so far front and centre and so well-implemented.

Yeah, we get so caught up in stereo music-land that we forget that one end-goal for audio is realistic replication of virtual environments. To me, this is all that terms like "soundstage" are getting at: do the things sound like they're coming from the right place in the correct environment.

 

[castleofargh]

Soundstage width is something that, secondarily to the headphones themselves, may be affected by the level of stereo crosstalk between each channel of the amplifier. Monoblocks typically excell at this, and in my experience frequently do indeed provide a wider soundstage than their stereo counterparts. It makes sense- more crosstalk, more extraneous signal leaking into each channel, slightly less precise separation of each channel, less width. Dual-mono amplifiers also typically have excellent crosstalk performance. Not very long ago, I owned an audio-gd Phoenix, an amplifier typically recognized to have "amazingly wide soundstage". Incidentally, it is (at least in part) a dual-mono design. I can attest to the generally wide soundstage.

Of course, the headphones matter the most in the end. HD800 for me!

As far as recordings with massive soundstage width and depth- if you're looking at electronic music, for sure look into London Elektricity, Metrik, Concord Dawn, BT, Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, Infected Mushroom, etc

I strongly disagree about crosstalk!
you should try to get some crosstalk vst, or to mix a song with different levels of croostalk yourself in a DAw and see how much it matters. the answer for me is that crosstalk really doesn't matter unless it gets above around -40db(where I start detecting it more or less consistently). which is not your average bad. I would only expect that from vinyls, or amps that really suck with low impedance loads and using a 12ohm IEM+maybe particularly bad cable insulation between channels. in short all the things that can be easily avoided and shouldn't reach -40db for average use of audio gears. I get that from my sansa clip and a 16ohm IEM.

to my ears, what dramatically alters the soundstage are ILD and ITD, and with headphones those stuff are determined in the mix(the reason some are against using soundstage to describe headphone imagining).

 

[Ancipital]

Yeah, we get so caught up in stereo music-land that we forget that one end-goal for audio is realistic replication of virtual environments. To me, this is all that terms like "soundstage" are getting at: do the things sound like they're coming from the right place in the correct environment.

Aye, and as ever, sound tends to be a bit neglected by most people, compared to flashy visuals. A colleague of mine has been fiddling with this, which looks fun:


[VIDEO]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3Y2BSHxKHU[/VIDEO]


It's still quite primitive, so baby steps, but exciting stuff.

 

[icebear]

Is that another "Jazz At The Pawnshop"?

No, but it might be the most expensive SACD ever offered on A'zon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00005GA0W/ref=tmm_acd_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=1473468275&sr=1-1
Obviously priced not to sell but to built seller history w/o actual transactions, looks fishy

 
I got this one, significantly cheaper though

:

 
This might very well be the best guitar concert in history.

 

[castleofargh]

anytime I see Paco De Lucia mentioned I can't help thinking about this master troll and almost piss myself laughing:

 
is Paco the player hiding under buckethead's mask? this compelling evidence of a video strongly says ... perhaps!