Soundstaging and imaging are audiophile fictions.

you go jeffrey! tell it like it is....

Last time I attended an orchestra I could clearly hear that the french horns were left of center, and the trombones were right, that the violins were to the left and the cellos were to the right. So naturally I like to hear my hifi do the same.

With amplified rock the point is more valid, but I think with rock music studio and live sounds are almost two different art forms, and that the stereo field is more important in the studio work.

Hey, but if stereo imaging is not important to you then that's your choice, but I don't agree at all that you don't hear a broad and defined soundstage in live music.

I think that imaging and soundstage are sensory illusions but,in this case,I like being fooled!
johnny7

Reread the original post. My first reading of it must have been pretty cursory. Sorry! Strangely enough the original poster would want to go back to mono and I am suggestion that what is needed is multi-channel. Sound staging and imaging are real illusions. I believe that just about every decent system does the trick. You would have to have a pretty poor system, pretty poorly set up and in a pretty poor room these days to lack a proper measure of these qualities. Where I beg to differ is at the point where audiophiles start making extremely finite distinctions between the prowess of one stereo system over another to (a) provide a soundstage that is wider than the room in which the system sits, (b) provide a layering of instruments that is believed to be very deep when, in fact, it is still only in front of the listener (audiophiles love it when the speakers are far from the walls at the front and sides and that the sound appears to come from a point behind the speakers and fully detached from them) and is heard as though one is peering through a window (the worst systems seem to have us peer through a basement window, whereas the better ones give us a ground floor picture window), (c) provide localization of specific instruments or voices in a large ensemble that, to my ears at least, is not present in a concert hall listening to a large enough ensemble when sitting at a normal distance (the latter point does not mean that instruments and voices cannot be localized in the sound field, merely that so much exaggeration exists among audiophiles when describing certain systems ability to do so that they appear to have reached a point beyond the live listening experience, hence my hyper-reality comment). Many audiophiles approach the whole issue of recreating a three dimensional sound field in which instruments and voices can still be heard with a degree of differentiation in a strictly two channel way, concentrating on preamps, amps, cabling and speakers to transcend the limitations of those two channels. Unless one believes in magic, all of those components will not do it. That is where proper multi-channel systems should come in to add the missing dimension.

Wow, Pbb. Until your last sentence, I was sure you were going to say that multi channelling is just another trick. Good post; I shall have to study it a bit, though.