ACTUAL MUSICAL SOUND VS. MEASUREMENTS

...If you know what to measure and have the means to measure it.

How does one measure imaging?

Mapman is exactly right..., music would be all out of tune without measurements.

Take a string instrument as an example. On a string instrument, one octave is half the string length, and each subsequent octave is half that length.  Same goes for an organ pipe. 

Every note in the octave has an exacting length to produce that note in tune.

Get the measurements wrong, and everything is out of tune.

But who's to say what "sounds good/bad"?

One can always use the argument that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but we know it goes beyond that and there are standards (e.g., symmetry).

@mikhailark

I’m not taking about a sound field distribution across a room, which I would call "soundstage," but more the ability to "precisely locate" specific instruments in a 3-dimensional space, which I would call "imaging."

If this can in fact be shown with some calculations and a waterfall plot, I’ve never seen one and I’m asking you to show us all some representative examples, because I think that if it could be done, it would be done.

In fact, I've never seen "soundstage" calculations/graphs presented, so maybe you could steer us to some of those too.  Comparisons would be most interesting.

I care, and I’m betting a whole lot of other people do too!  And don't think that any company that could show that theirs excels above more expensive others wouldn't do it just for bragging rights.

Stereophile Magazine reviewers continually talk of soundstage and imaging or lack thereof. If it could be measured, there would be mention of it.

So then, show us some/one example.

https://youtu.be/lwFaSzavd9c

And if you could reasonably measure such a thing, how do you determine what is better?  It's not like S/N ratio where you shoot for a lower number.