3-Dimensional Soundstage

Getting speakers away from boundaries usually works very well at improving the soundstage.  Want to hear a good demo?  Take your speakers and put them in very large space or outside. 

When trying to improve your image, first reflection points are usually the first places to look.  Having speaker close to side walls will screw things up badly 95% of the time.   These first reflection points, (side wall boundaries or hard low ceilings), are usually the places to attack first with acoustic absorption- this reduces the reflections coming from them and enhances the ratio between direct vs reflected.  With the ideal wide dispersion speakers, were off axis sounds close to on axis, the image can get quite good.  If the off axis sounds a lot different from on axis, you are in trouble and will never get a good image. 

Some may not want to fix a highly reflective environment or an unbalanced environment.  In some of these cases, a narrower dispersion speaker works well in reducing these off-axis reflections (especially in mid and high end) and is another way to keep this ratio (direct vs reflected) high.   However, methods to restrict dispersion always result in similar increases in beaming, where direct HF gets so narrow, moving your head an inch completely changes the sound.  This is of course not as it is in real life, so seeking wide dispersion and a high direct vs reflected ratio is desired.  Its difficult to achieve.

Brad

Lone Mountain /ATC

Danager has it- I read here where people think the artist is the one who "builds" the sound, it's the engineer who builds it to the artists liking.  Like many of the Diana Krall records are Al Schmidt, and they all have a very familiar sound as its Al at Capitol Studio A over and over.  In most cases, artists hire the engineer they think is better at recording than they could ever hope to be.  And once that relationship is formed, it often becomes lifelong.  Engineering is art form- very much on par with mastering an instrument or being a great songwriter. 

Brad

Having sold David Cheske a microphone or two, a major difference between his recordings and many other "traditional studio" recordings is that David usually chooses large spaces with large sources that [together] sound very good. In other words, if you were there and could hear the the real event, then the recording immediately after, you would say the recording did an excellent job of representing the real event. That’s Davids thing. A choir in a great hall, an orchestra in a famous venue, etc. He’s absolutely great at that kind of recording work and was a niche he sort of owned for a long time I think.

This large venue/large source recording is NOT the type of recording done in studios.  It is quite rare in the business, especially rock and roll. The size of a recording studio’s "live room" is often surprising small, unless it’s designed specially for orchestra (then it’s called a "scoring stage").  Live performance venues set up for live recording had a tremendous amount of work invested to set up for that.  The cabling alone is daunting; mic placement takes hours and hours of experimentation and is certainly not a set up and forget type of thing. Commercial recording studios are already set up, wired and ready to walk in and record as soon as you set up your guitar and amp. It’s fair to say a normal recording done in a normal studio live room would be multitracked out of necessity (one track at a time). Some studios would maybe have enough space for a small 5 pc chamber orchestra to play together- no more. The Pet Sounds room at East West is small- no way could an entire band set up in there and play at once. That’s what makes the recording so brilliant- Brian figured out the production to make it sound HUGE.

So the sound stage question is very much up to the engineer, the producer and the artist. It might vary with the record and the people so it could be one way on one record (Ive seen Bill Schnee record jazz ensembles all at once in the live room) and a completely different way on another record from the same artist or engineering team. And yes @rodman99999 is right- if "its" there, it was put there on purpose and your system has to do the heavy lifting of reproducing it. Not easy!

Brad

@cerrot a preamp cannot "generate"  a 3D soundstage or improve upon what is there.  It can hide things though.  My guess is your previous preamp and cables took away the 3D soundstange of the recording and your new preamp and cables don't.  

Brad

@cerrot That's a great story Cerrot.  Its awesome when you can "discover" better sound in your own system.  Working on the pro side, a lot of studio mix engineers and mastering engineers LIVE for that!

Brad   

The problems created by small rooms are many:

1) small room nearby first reflection points will cancel direct on axis information by arriving late, therefore creating large dips in response you cannot fix with EQ or any kind of DSP.

2) In a small room, a speaker with poor off axis reponse will make imaging almost impossible as the frequency response of the reflection and the frequency response of the direct sound are different, causing dips/cancellations in in multiple places when direct and reflected sound are added together at your ear. The sum of the sound is what the the mic/measurement system looks at. So the room correction DSP corrects the direct sound coming out of the source (which was likely not that wrong to start with) based on what the refelctions are doing. The problem is the direct sound was fine, it was the refelcted sound that was messed up. SO via room correction, you are fixing/repairing/EQing only the direct sound NOT the reflected sound which is the real problem. The reflected sound is still just as different from direct sound as before due to physical room problems (like glass or highly reflective walls or poor speaker off axis). The reflected sound only gets better by boosting or altering the direct sound so the sum comes out better. And this new sum only works for one tiny location- 1 foot that way the reflected sound is different and the "solution" or fix (room correction) would be different. This is why we say you cannot fix room problems with electrical soliutions because the room problem never goes away.

2) small rooms cannot support bass. The lowest note a room can support depends on its dimension: a 32Hz note requires a 35 foot room dimension to exist, a 50 hz note requires a 22 foot long room dimension, a 85Hz note requires a 13 foot dimension! Complaining about bass in a 10x12 room is like arguing that wavelengths dont exist. Expecting much below 100Hz in a 10x10 room will just frustrate you. If you are stuck with a 10x10 room, you are better off letting the dream of great bass go and focusing on great midrange and top end. Headphones can be a workaround. Multiple (4, one on each wall) small subs turned low can also help.

3) highly reflective surfaces such as glass or hard painted walls or ceilings are destructive to mid and top end by reflecting sound in a particular bandwidth. Using absorption to stop the reflection all togther is one countermove; diffusion can change the angle of reflection and randomize it by creating actually more reflections (so none dominate), as major reflections often get stuck between parallel surfaces and keep ringing for a long time. Clap your hands in a room and you’ll likely hear this slap echo and the frequency it emphasizes.

Brad