3-Dimensional Soundstage


I have appreciated a quite nice separation of instruments in my system's soundstage.  I have read many times about people experiencing depth in their music and have never appreciated this.  I was talking to an audiophile friend this week about it and he brought up the fact that recorded music is a mix of tracks and how could there be any natural depth in this?  If there was a live recording then yes, it is understandable, but from all studio music that is engineered and mixed, where would we get depth?  Are the engineers incorporating delays to create depth?

dhite71

Showing 2 responses by deep_333

I have appreciated a quite nice separation of instruments in my system’s soundstage. I have read many times about people experiencing depth in their music and have never appreciated this.

Category 1: Least expensive

If you are happy/satisfied with a flat 2D sound that becomes a face smacking wall of sound when you crank up the volume, that’s all there is to it. That’s the old school "hifi" that many dudes have been happy with for decades. Don’t worry about depth or 3D if you fall in that category.

 

Category 2: Very expensive

No matter the recording, some level of partial 3D and pertinent depthwise spatial nuance is created primarily in the digital domain with FPGA dacs, processors like BACCH, etc (still inside the domain of channel based stereo)... There are also elements of speaker design, analog circuits design and setup - speaker positioning/listener positioning/room, etc that play into its conduciveness.

 

Category 3: Can be as expensive, more expensive or less expensive than category 2

True immersive 3D envelopment/immersion/detail/full on spatial nuances/etc, which is more representative of live unplugged events in great acoustic spaces can be accomplished with object based audio, i.e. more than 2 speakers and pertinent object based audio processors.

 

Note: "All knowing seers" in the 3 above mentioned categories will claim that they achieved audio nirvana in said category (to each his own/who cares).

It is perfectly fine you enjoy the unnatural sound (immersive 3-d, magical sounds, etc).

@mihorn   I think you may have got the "unnatural" mixed up... Go to a great acoustic hall, book the golden seat (in advance) and watch a wind ensemble or a string quartet, i.e. no  punk rocker screaming into PA crap equipment inside a bar.

When you compare the former event to stereo vs multichannel object based audio, you will note that it sounds a whole freaking lot like object based audio and nothing like stereo. For the first 5 minutes of my relatively recent attendance at such an event, i was constantly looking behind me because it sounded like there were diffuse effects all around and active from back surrounds and back heights. How the sound materializes from the instruments and are perceived by the ears thereafter (like flowers blooming and closing perhaps inside a 3D dome of space), it sounds nothing like channel based stereo. So, perhaps, stereo is very unnatural! But, i suppose we never had a choice until around 2014.