The Disappearing Act

In my case, it is speaker placement (aka room acoustics). And only so. Whether it is a low budget (active) pair of loudspeaker or a more expensive one: Only when I considered all aspects of the influence of a room, I could make the ’disapearing act’ become reality. The recording itself does not seem to have a (big) influence. Up to now, it ’happens’ with every tune since I did the speaker placement correctly.

After meticulous work with loudspeaker placement and the room(s). Funny thing, I did not have to spend (or invest) 1 cent into room correction.

Unfortunately, it took me too long to understand the importance of the room. Because I did not pay enough attention to this fact. Tutorials by Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields helped me to get it right.

Disappearing Act refers to the speakers. It is the listener's inability to localize the speakers when music is being played. Usually humans should be able to figure out exact location of the sound source for frequencies above 120 Hz or so. Certain speakers have to ability to recreate the sound stage without drawing attention to itself. That is what you refer to as "Disappearing Act," or your inability to localize the speakers.

I was recently visiting my son and he has a 3D gaming headset and games.  After much adjustment (old eyes) it was completely enthralling.  OMG a whole new world.  The downside is when you take the headset off your whole world collapses into the room you're standing in. Almost disappointing!

My rig does the same thing and given the size of all the equipment and speakers it is rather remarkable.  As a side note the electronics are in between the speakers so that sort of puts that "old saw" to rest.

To answer your question it happens all the time with well recorded material @baylinor .  

Particularly delightful on live jazz recordings.  Even DSTM does a great job of disappearing, sort of surprising due to the tons of electronic sounds going on.

Regards,

barts

OP this is a very good thread.Disappearing is hard to achieve on every recording.But I totally agree with you regarding the reason why disappearing act happens. 

Bigkiidz with all due respect to your knowledge on this hobby? My whole body will remind me the music is not entertaining when synergy is not good of my system. My thought is it will be hard to achieve disappearing act without synergy. I might be wrong.