What are your favorite songs or albums for illustrating a deep soundstage?

Thank you for the excellent suggestions so far. I’m excited to try some of the new tracks late this evening.

@bdp24 I am having a hard time finding that particular album on digital, but I am seeing a compilation that has many of the Planets track with Sir Boult and New Philharmonia. Hopefully that is the same performance. 

@tylermunns I love Mazzy Star and Beck, both good tracks. Will look into Elton.

@tomcarr Also great suggestions. I should also revisit Roger Waters Amused to Death. I never really got to know Supertramp, so this will be my first foray. 

@hilde45 I love Sara K and have that on CD. Will have to give it a shot. Classical examples are also very welcomed. 

More than anything, I am looking for tracks that holographically image well past the front wall between the speakers. I have no issues with my speakers disappearing and having a tall and wide soundstage, about 180-degrees wide or more. But I also envy setups where it feels like there is a really layered presentation in the center as if you can hear performers 20-30ft in front of you. I know a lot of this has to do with positioning and the speakers’ distance from the wall. One thing I’ve noticed is that many systems that have a deep soundstage do not have a wide, enveloping one that goes 180-degrees around the listener. Instead, those deep stages are limited to about 110-120-degrees. There are rare instances, but that’s my experience. I want to attain the best depth while retaining the size of the width and height I am getting. 

I just wanted to thank everyone so far for providing stellar selections. I’ve finally gotten my system to a place where I have a full 180-degree soundstage AND the depth of the center image can go much deeper than it did before. It was always a toss-up previously but your references helped me out a bit.

As a thank you, I’m building a Qobuz playlist of my favorite soundstage demonstration tracks and will share on this thread as I complete it. 

Feel free to keep the suggestions flowing, and thanks again!

Thanks all for the continued wonderful submissions. I look forward to putting them in the queue tomorrow. It’s been a heavy week for me and haven’t had much time for personal listening time. 

@audphile1 I started this thread because I have always been happy with my soundstage until I recently met a local audiophile whose system was even more holographic. It really impressed me, and it has become my mission to optimize the position my listening chair and speakers. I first had to figure out ways to bring my listening chair further back (which was previously difficult with room constraints) so I fabricated a solution to be able to do so. This allowed me to increase my listening distance from 9ft to 10ft while also enabling me to move my speakers out into the room more, giving them a good 5ft of space. My ceiling is also slanted up to 18’ high behind me, and as a result it is harder to charge the room because of the added volume, and the more I pull speakers from the wall, the more quickly bass response drops. The tracks on this thread helped me better optimize the setup. 

I still have a bit more tweaking, but it’s close now. this is how the speakers in the space: 

Prior to that, I had the T+A Solitaire S 530 speakers set up in the way they are pictured in the thread I created when I evaluated them:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/t-a-solitaire-s-530-magnetostatic-speakers

In my preliminary evaluation, I had them very much closer together and pushed a bit further back because of my listening distance. They need a bit more distance from the listener’s ear than most speakers do. By giving them both a bit more room to breathe and also increasing my distance from them, I was able to preserve the exceptional soundstage width and height I already had and was able to get the center image depth even further than what I was previously able. In the process I achieved a level of transparency I haven’t heard in this room, but it’s still not 100% where I want it to be. 

@danager What you suggest is true for Magnepans, which I confirmed when I had them on the floor last year, but I believe these speakers may have different results to the design of the line array midrange drivers inherently having a very narrow dispersion pattern. T+A has recommended not to have the tweeters on the inside. My assumption is that there may be too strong of a treble response and the mids may not properly hit the ears due to the narrow dispersion. I would anticipate the crossover points would also be different, but I haven’t compared. Perhaps when I have some time I will experiment and see!