What I find however is that the imaging, sound stage is very dependent on the recording.
Right. Mono recordings everything is in a sort of sphere in the middle. Some recordings are flat, others deep. Sometimes vocals are centered, sometimes off to one side or the other. Entirely recording dependent.
Norah Jones? She sounds like she's sitting right in the room. It's amazing.
If you say so. Never could get into her myself.
One I'm particularly interested in learning more about is Brubek's Take Five.
The saxophone images great. Sounds dead center. The piano however is clearly coming from the right hand speaker and the drums are clearly coming from the left. Is this typical?
Been a while but that sounds just about right to me. The cymbals I want to say are left and above the drums just as they should be. Piano I can't remember if this is one where the piano stays put or moves left to right depending which end of the keyboard it is. At all times when one side is playing you should hear the room acoustic "light up" on the other side.
The thing to listen for with imaging is not so much where things are, as that is recording dependent, but how palpably real they are and how clearly each individual sound source is distinct and separate from the rest. This also varies from recording to recording. Of course it does. Everything does.