3D lifelike sound and impeccable measurements - mutually exclusive???


The more I investigate gear the more it seems that it’s easy to get organic involving sound with flesh and body and a 3D immersive soundstage with the right matching of components but it also seems like it necessitates choosing some components that don’t measure well/add colorations/even order harmonics etc My question is are there components (specifically amps/preamps and integrateds) are out there that combine great measurements and in your mind also have that organic immersive sound that really helps many of us get more emotionally involved in the music or are these qualities mutually exclusive? 
clarinetmonster2

Showing 1 response by tk21

It seems to me that a good soundstage is largely determined by loudspeakers, speaker positioning, and room acoustics. Less so by electronics (unless we're talking about digital signal processing, maybe.) I'm not aware of any metrics that directly indicate soundstage size or holographic image quality. 

So IMO the short answer to the OP's question is "no", 3D lifelike sound and impeccable measurements are not mutually exclusive. But that is mainly because the measurements that are usually available seem to have little or no bearing on soundstage/imaging.  Does a higher SNR ratio and "blacker background" have some positive impact on the soundstage/imaging?  Probably.  I don't know how it would make things worse, everything else being equal (which rarely is the case).