Sound stage

Voices can come from anywhere not just dead center in a stereo recording. Same as anything else except with voices you might find a lead vocal dead center more often. Its all in how the recording was made and anything goes. Listen for where things are not where you think they SHOULD be. If you can tell in most cases where things are, you are in good shape. The biggest best soundstage will not be contained between the speakers but rather have breadth wall to wall and depth as well. Amount will vary by recording. Mono recordings will tend to be more dead center but if soundstage and recording is good will still have some room filling ambience but with a strong bias towards the center of the stage.

You need to understand a little bit about stereo hearing. You have two ears that allow you to detect the approximate direction and distance a sound is coming from. Stereo recording and playback is an attempt to capture the original performance's direction & distance information. For that to happen, you have to have a *stereo* recording. Very few recordings are done simply with 2 microphones to get true stereo. Most recordings are two-channel—multi-miked and mixed down to left & right channels—they are not stereo, although they may be labeled as such. For two-channel recordings, soundstage and imaging are nonexistent. What you hear is an imagined soundstage created by your mind's ear. This is a product of your experience, the mastering of the recording, and the combination of speaker dispersion pattern with your room's acoustics. It's going to vary from one recording to the next.

See Depth Perception

Its best to think of all recordings as having a soundstage. TWo channel recordings are considered stereo. The soundstage is artificial based on how the recording was miked and mastered but exists nonetheless. Some specialized or rare recordings use a simple two mike recording approach and attempt to reproduce teh soundstage at the live event. These are worth finding and seeking out. The old Mercury Living Presence and newer Dorian and Mapleshade labels are three with many recordings that contain a very natural soundstage due to production techniques.

Unless listening on headphones or on a stereo hifi not set up to address soundstage at all as a result of speaker placement, all recordings have a soundstage in that the "sonic cues" produced live are in the recording and affect teh results in terms of soundstage and imaging. Even with mono recordings, though again these will tend to have everything more dead center and sonic queues captured in the better ones can still provide a sense of 3-d ambience. You have to have a hifi that delivers enough detail to capture all the subtle sonic queues accurately and have things set up properly as well in all cases.

"How do you know when its right?"

To start, get something like the XLO Reference Recordings CD, which has tracks that will walk you through where you should be hearing things. If you hear what the narrator tells you should be hearing, then you're on the right track.