Sound-stage, imaging, focus......

I don't feel that these descriptive terms are limited only to audio, and feel that what your are hearing at the actual event is more diffuse, because you are further away, further back into the reverberent field than microphones usually are when most recordings are made. Look, if you're really as curious about this as you think you are, you should buy a portable recorder like a DAT, and a one point condensor microphone. You could then ask if you could make your own recording the next time you go to a performance. That way, you could listen to it later on your system, and see what differences there are. You'll never really know until you do this.

This might be a bit tangential, so apologies in advance. Music can be an emotional or energetic experience at the level of the bare, naked soul. It is actually a sort of gentle transformational experience, not unlike deep meditation. This can happen live or with reproduced music, and with any kind of music you are energetically in tune with. The most basic thing is to get the timbre right, because the emotion of the music is hidden in the nuances of timbral richness and shading. In a sense, music is in the space between the notes. Soundstaging can add to the experience or be superfluous - it's more an individual thing. Your heart speaks the language of truth, in music or in anything else. When you listen, take a little time to listen with your heart, and you will be subtly changed by the experience. I get the impression, Rayd, that you already do this.

Soundstaging is an artifact of the recording process and multi-channel reproduction. At real, unamplified, musical events there's little perception of soundstage. Imaging does occur in real life, but it's typically not as starkly defined as via high-end systems. A system's ability to soundstage is indicative of other things being done right. Wide band frequency response, smooth phase and quick transient are some of the things that must be done right in order to have proper soundstaging. An interesting test for stereo systems is to go mono. Very few high end systems sound real when played mono. It eliminates all the soundstage/imaging considerations. It's a very tough test.

I agree with carl. You didn't percieve localization of instuments because it was diffused. Many music halls are made to amplify the sound. so you get diffusing at the same time since there is a lot of echoing going on. But even then your telling me that if say a flute solo came on that you could not pinpoint the exact location of that instument? Or pinpoint where an opera singers voice is? Very often borders book store has musicians and bands play in there store. I can get as close as 5 feet away from them. Even at 20 feet I can clearly tell where each member, voice, and instuments sound is coming from. I can even tell where each guitar string is. Our whole life relies on what we could call imaging and soundstage. When someone is talking to us we know exacly where they are in the room just from their voice alone. If we here a bird but don't see it we know it's in the tree by localizing it's chirping. When a phone rings we can pinpoint exactly where it is from the sound alone. And not just left or right but we also have depth perception. I could go on and on but back to music. It sounds like your listening to a large ansembles. They are meant to combine a large amount of instuments to sound as one. If 10 cellos are playing at once of course you won't here each individual cello and be able to place where the sound of each one is coming from. They are blending like one instument. Even then you should be able to tell that they are coming either from the left side of the stage or right side or middle and how far away they are from you. The whole reason we have two ears is to persieve sounds in stereo so to speak. That is why we have what science calls stereo hearing. It is so we can place sounds relative to where we are located to tell us where they are coming from in the 3 dimentional world we live in. If a stereo system is going to reproduce sound (not just music)and it's emotion Then it must get the soundstage and imaging right. Also bands and conductors go through a lot of trouble to set up the insruments in just the right spot to give the sound they want and so other instuments can be empasized or so others don't get drowned out. This gives you the full emotion they are trying to convey. Even if the timbre is correct if your stereo isn't showing you how the conducter set up his orcastra then it isn't correctly reproducing the sound or emotion that he intended.

Back in college in an astronomy class, we had this portable mini-planetarium demonstration. It was a half sphere "tent" about 15 feet diameter, kept smoothly inflated with air. All of us students sat around the circular edge, where the dome met the floor. In that tiny domed space, I could hear the girls all around me whispering all sorts of interesting things, and wasn't thinking about astronomy very much, heh heh. The interesting thing was, I couldn't tell what direction their voices were coming from! Were they beside me? Across from me? I didn't know. Sometimes it seemed to come from all around me at once, and sometimes it sounded like she/they were speaking from inside my own head! IT WAS THE WEIRDEST (and most fun) non-audio sonic experience of my life...and I'm sorry all of you good old boys missed it...well, not really.