Well in some acoustic environments you can certainly hear precisely where each instrument and voice is located .I agree that is not what you hear in large concert halls but in smaller performance spaces playing smaller scale music you certainly can.And for many of us creating that sort of sound in our system is what we aspire towards.And perhaps we can even get it better than the real thing.Just like a well filmed,lit and edited film might be better than a live play because it uses techniques to intensify ,focus and enhance the subject.
Pin point imaging isn't for everyone
A subject my posts touch on often is whether pin point imaging is desirable, or natural. While thinking about wide-baffle speakers in another thread I came across this quote, courtesy of Troels Graveson’s DIY speaker site. He quotes famous speaker designer Roy Allison:
You can read Troel’s entire post here:
http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/Acapella_WB.htm
This goes, kind of, with my points before, that you can tweak the frequency response of a speaker, and sometimes cables, to get better imaging, but you are going significantly far from neutral to do so. Older Wilson’s were famous, and had a convenient dip around 2.4 kHz.
I had emphasized dispersion in order to re-create as best as I could the performance-hall ambiance. I don’t want to put up with a sweet spot, and I’d rather have a less dramatically precise imaging with a close simulation of what you hear in a concert hall in terms of envelopment. For that, you need reverberant energy broadcast at very wide angles from the loudspeaker, so the bulk of energy has to do multiple reflections before reaching your ear. I think pin-point imaging has to do with synthetically generated music, not acoustic music - except perhaps for a solo instrument or a solo voice, where you might want fairly sharp localization. For envelopment, you need widespread energy generation.
You can read Troel’s entire post here:
http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/Acapella_WB.htm
This goes, kind of, with my points before, that you can tweak the frequency response of a speaker, and sometimes cables, to get better imaging, but you are going significantly far from neutral to do so. Older Wilson’s were famous, and had a convenient dip around 2.4 kHz.