Soundstaging and Imaging: The Delusion about The Illusion

@kosst_amojan--the terms have an accepted meaning. JGHolt published a glossary many years ago that was long used so that people could speak the same language when describing reproduced sound.
I learned to understand both image and soundstage from using the old Quad ESL beginning in 1973. This was a speaker that excelled in the midrange (with some real world limitations) but remains a reference.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to florid language in audio-speak that became common in reviews, but Holt was known for his no-nonsense approach to subjective reviewing. Here’s a link to his glossary as republished by Stereophile (he started that publication and it was erratically published, no adverts and unlike the slick glossy today).
PS: You'll note that there is a difference between image and soundstage. I can hear that difference in the use of my phono stage, which places instruments in very precise positions in space, top to bottom, front to back and dimensionally, so you can hear the body of the instrument, as well as its position relative to the mic, if it is there on the recording.
Obviously, a multi-tracking pastiche of tracks and overdubs with no natural acoustic space being represented will rob a recording and its reproduction of a natural soundstage, although it can be created as an artifice through slick engineering, something that started to occur in the '70s (if not before) when tracks and lots of outboard processing invited mischief in popular recordings. This also coincided with the rise of the engineer as auteur and the use of the studio as a crutch- no longer was an engineer a 'recordist' but an artist themselves, and the musicians, some of them not as capable of playing through the entire sound and nailing it on a take, could go back and 'fix it' to the point where the recording is a  confabulation- sometimes wonderful sounding, but bearing no resemblance to what might have actually happened in real time in a room. 

Ever notice this correlation:
the more undefined terms that appear in an original post,
the less real content it likely contains.  After reading it
for the fifth time, for me, it is hard to answer,
"What is this person saying?"

So, future responses to the post are doomed to be imprecise,
confusing, and ultimately empty of meaningful ideas.  

Just my opinion, of course.
(Cat chasing its tail.)

Mg opens the door, steps in and hears someone calling produced music "Parlor Tricks" then Mg quietly backs out of this clubhouse to find a place with listeners exploring recordings. LOL

Two legs, two arms, two eyes and two ears...yet one brain having two hemispheres that are cross-wired for interpreting sound. Go figure mono might have been the ideal sonic reproductive medium rejected by those who apparently knew better. And those who were wiser recommended quadraphonic sound, yet we all know where that led...

Right. I remember walking into The Record Collector in Hollywood about thirty years ago (at its old location) and after talking with the owner about a few records, mentioned that his speaker position- one located in one room, another past an arch in another area- wasn’t so good for imaging. Hey said "bah, stereo-- a gimmick."
This was in the days when mono records sold for almost nothing. I should have bought more.
To stereo-- listen to those old jazz records from the dawn of the stereo era- no center image- hard panning left and right with a hole in the middle.
When I have visitors who have never heard higher fidelity stereo, they usually remark on the sound coming out of the middle--the phantom image. Is it a parlor trick? Sure. Does it contribute to a greater sense of realism? Maybe.
I was very much about imaging in the ’70s- when I started listening to the original Quad- a speaker with vast limitations, but mostly suffering from sins of omission. The image was almost everything! It could be spooky in its sense of realism on the right recording, along with that coherency that comes from electrostatic panels (sans the add-on woofers and tweeters, which I would use to make up for some of the shortcomings of the Quad).
For the past dozen years, I’ve been listening to horns- and image they do well, with SET amps, no crossover on the mid-horn and judicious placement.
But, imaging is only one factor in trying to create the illusion of real music. Tone is very important to me, as is timing in the attack and decay of the fundamental and harmonics. All are cues that trick our brains into believing more.
Is it ultimately an illusion? Of course!
Is there something better? Probably. Weren’t there three channel experiments back in the day?
I used to add a delay line and a small set of nothing special speakers -ala the old Hafler method- it worked better on some records than on others- to add a 3d dimension to the proceedings. (I don’t really bother with discrete multichannel sound, though I guess I could on my home theatre system).
Ralph Glagal also developed a fairly elaborate playback method that, I believe, used conventional recordings but was able to present the information in a way that was supposed to better recreate the live music experience. (He lived not far from me in NY and I should have visited when I still lived there).
I doubt we need more formats at this point- getting consensus among CE, the rights owners of content and ultimately, consumer buy-in makes for big scale investments at high risk. (Look at all the failed formats over the years and the huge controversy over more recent approaches, like MQA).

I’m also not interested in re-buying material, much of which is out of print, and in many cases, has never been reissued, at least legitimately.

I’ve come to the conclusion, after spending many years, a lot of time, and a considerable amount of money and effort ---that not everything will sound great- if some of it does, wha-hoo! I’ve focused more on getting the most out of average recordings, not "special" ones- and accept the fact that it is a poor substitute for the real thing.
I will say that after attending Crimson’s show here almost two years ago, I played some of the sides from the Live in Toronto 2016 set the next morning and was very impressed with how well my system and this recording acquitted themselves. I could not, of course, reproduce the size of a 3,000 seat hall, or the power of the bass (their sound team was amazing-- they never overloaded the room, which is common in most amplified music shows).
I have musicians visit occasionally, and we can get a decent approximation of an acoustic guitar over the system. Piano is much more difficult to reproduce convincingly and much has to do with the recordings in my estimation.
Where things start to get challenging is when the the material gets complex (big orchestral passages with lots going on) and starts to sound cluttered-- I don’t think it is simply an issue of dynamics, but may have to do with the ability of the phono cartridge through the electronics through the speakers to unravel all that is going on and present it in a convincing way.
I also don’t listen at terribly loud volumes- I like to try and get the energy, bass and dimension at less walloping SPLs.
Short answer, to me, is imaging is a factor and perhaps not even a necessary one to create the illusion of live music, recognizing that no reproduction is quite the same as the real thing; this is so, for me, even when the reproducing system, recording, room, set up and all the other factors, including mood or frame of mind, are most conducive.

All live recordings should be in mono to reproduce the event as you would actually hear it if you were in attendance I suppose.My brother's system is actually set up like that.A wall of sound that is a blast to listen to:)

Agree. No one is debating the fact that we have two ears.

Funny how folks skip over the main point of my penultimate post: Original performance is not in stereo, but the reproduced performance is in stereo.

☝🏻That’s the enigma. 

It’s often helpful to read the original post, including the cited article, before jumping to conclusions and apparent attacks on my mental health. Lol

Its no delusion. Whenever I drop something small on the floor first thing I do is stop and listen for it to stop rolling around. Then I go and look and it is always right where I knew it would be by sound alone. When someone walks up to me out of sight I know they are coming, how close and how fast, by sound alone.

The XLO setup CD has a great track where Doug Sax walks around a room talking and clapping and when your system is really well set up you can clearly hear his voice and clapping coming from exactly where he says he is, including as he walks around to the sides and even when he goes behind you!

There are a lot of delusions the OP may well be suffering from but hearing the realistic portrayal of a sound stage is probably not one of them.

Stereo reproduction is an enigma by default. Original performance is not in stereo, but the reproduced performance is in stereo. If we have two ears to detect true sound imaging and soundstage, then by default we are deluding ourselves in believing that reproduced sound is a facsimile of the original.

Both Bob Carver and James Bongiorno created products to address this issue. Yet, here we are, still on the path of delusion that reproduced sound can possibly recreate the illusion of the original performance.

Thankfully, I listen to my audio system with a double-barreled shotgun in my lap. All good. 

Odds of survival go way down if you can't tell from which direction the sound of the lion comes. Swap out the lion for a guitar, the ears for a microphone. How does that really change anything? Its as real as real can be.

@rodman99999,+1 for the reference.

Who is Cylinder? 🤔

Here’s an article, on finding out if your system’s at least doing what it’s supposed to, performance wise: https://www.stereophile.com/features/772/index.html And, a link to the LEDR(and other good info links), should you not want to spring for a test CD: https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_ledr.php

 Cylinder, you might want to read Meditations, by Descartes.

Mightily grateful for you taking that first pitch and hitting it out of the park.

💥💥💥👏🏻👏🏻🍿

I will speak for us all and say we truly perceive and may be somewhat deluded from time to time, but not always.