narrow and wide baffles and imaging

The Devore O/93's do a strange thing in my room-with the right cabling and placement they throw out a wide wall of sound way beyond and above the confines of the boxes-when the recording has it. But what they don't do is provide pin-point placement anywhere within the wall of sound. I don't expect a single person who reads this thread to be familiar with Shakey Graves or his latest release "Can't Wake Up" but I can't think of a single recording that better reflects this weird dichotomy. It is not at all unusual for me to look around in my listening room thinking that someone must be calling me from behind because a sound I am not familiar with comes from "out of nowhere" as I get accustomed to this new recording, but if I play, for example, the excellently recorded Madeleine Peyroux "Careless Love", I don't "see" her singing in front of me the way my old B&W 805 standmounts would have defined her. If I play the old chestnut "The ARC Choir" from Mapleshade through my digital rig, the choir is wide and high but the individual singers are not defined with the specificity that I know is there in the recording. I am happy with them, but they have their trade-offs. 

Imo loudspeaker design is a juggling of compromises, and anyone who says differently is in marketing.

I possess a fraction of your technical knowledge, a tiny fraction, but this is my viewpoint too. But just to expand upon that, the people that have a hard time accepting this reality are the ones who equate exotic driver materials, driver shapes, enclosure materials, enclosure shapes, crossover configurations, crossover components, et al to "the best". I read S'Phile these days for only one reason; I love the tension between the tech weenies (JA, MF, KR) and the luddites (AD, HR, SG, KM). This thread is about baffle size but barring a dipole, large baffle speakers tend to have resonant cabinets. One approach is to try to eliminate all resonance and another is to play to the resonance. Again, it boils down to an effort to change the real world vs. an accommodation of the real world, or swimming upstream vs. downstream. One can validly argue that those that fight the current (pun) by swimming upstream are the ones who innovate and create new concepts. I accept that. But with loudspeakers, where has that gotten us? 98% of the "cutting edge" loudspeaker designs boil down to marketing BS. And now I am really getting OT, but the same applies to cabling, amplification, and all else other than digital technology.