Walk-in soundstage

I’ve only been able to hear a true walk around in the sound stage feel once with single driver speakers from Omega (SAM’s), probably the best sound stage I’ve ever heard. Granted they lacked in other areas. Second best was some Open baffles, but they need a specific room to optimise correctly. The smaller the speaker the better the sound staging IMO. Larger speakers tend to do that large sound stage that’s more of a wall of sound then a true walking in the sound stage type of thing.

To obtain that enveloping sound stage that puts you in the center of the event, right up there on stage with them, is hard to find with large multi driver speakers from my experience.

It's Steve Huff. He must embellish as always.

But you can have a system with pretty controlled dispersion patterns for both horizontal and vertical planes, they're pair matched as speakers within ±0.5dB, you have the room where masking is not an issue because of recurring reflections, echoes and ringing (basically you have a treated room using physics and listening and not just vibes) and the finally but the most important of them all, does the song in question have that psychoacoustic phenomenon baked in? Cos you're not getting a sprawling stage with a narrow mix or a mono mix no matter the amount of subjective blabber one can say

And I've achieved all in my space so I have a very unchanging presentation over a large space but not walk in stage. That's hyperbole unless you're running line arrays in your space akin to a music festival

kofibaffour, FWIW, I heard this phenomenon at a dealers once. Just an amazing experience and with modest equipment in a medium sized room. The music was a vinyl recording by Opus 3 of "Depth of Image’ played thru a CJ PV5/Threshold SA3 preamp/amp on small floorstanding Thiel 4 speakers. Outstanding. I then bought the recording and actually superior equipment as well as Thiel speakers and tried to duplicate the experience in my homes. I never came really close. But I learned a lot about audio equipment and set up in the process. The most important thing I learned was you had to have a recording that has the information embedded. 

Hyperbole, speaker dependent, I think not. 

@steakster +10

Mike

Mr. Huff is a writer, more than a reviewer.  I find every time I see a video of his, he goes on and says almost nothing.  There’s only so many flowery words, but he uses them over and over.