Which Recordings Have Widest Soundstage

there is only one...music collectors have purchased and enjoyed tens of thousands of recordings looking for it...come to think of it,i forgot what it was years ago.

Recordings using the "Q" sound such as "Amused to Death" by Roger Waters is one example.

The earlier days of stereo, for example Beatles Sgt Pepper and Sly and The Familly Stone. Thousands of examples exist. Duran Duran's sound engineers did lots of tricks...listen to "Tiger" on "Seven and the Ragged Tiger"...not great music but the engineers must have had great liberty and fun in the studio. Another good one is Jean Michel Jarre "Oxygene"...

Today engineers are generally much less aggressive at panning the sound (done too aggresively and it becomes distracting). Sadly compression and added distortion seem to be the most popular tools in the studio today.

To get the sound less anchored to the speaker reverb is used and the opposite channel may be either shifted slightly in phase or even fed in reverse polarity (done properly this can make the sound jump out at you).

I mentioned this one in a previous response to a similar thread a few months ago, and I actually got a reply in agreement with me. The West disc from Bill Frisell's "East West" has the widest soundstage with the most front to rear depth of any discs I own. It was recorded live at Yoshi's in Oakland, and has some Frisellian versions of Heard it Through the Grapevine, Shenandoah, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall, and some driving electric bluesy cuts.

Sometimes it seems as though Frisell is sitting on my sofa extreme right, though when I turn my head to place where the sound is localized, it mostly vanishes from that location. On other cuts, after the 2-3 minute guitar solo intro as only Frisell can do, it sounds as though the drum kit comes in from somewhere out in my backyard. At the start of the first song, Frisell has some triplets of guitar pings and squawks. It seem as though the first comes from some unidentifiable location in the foreground followed by a second from the right speaker and a third from the left. Throughout the disc, it seems as though there are always some guitar licks slicing diagonally just a few feet in front of me in my chair. Quite remarkable, and no, none of my other CDs ever sound quite like this one.

Interestingly, I did have a chance to hear this CD on a system worth about three times as much as mine, and the effect was just not there. I believe it is due to the room parameters and acoustics. My reasonably good sized room (I could use about 2 ft in width) is a symetric rectangle with a 12 ft ceiling and speakers placed along the shorter 14' wall well out from the from the front wall, with a pair of bass traps and some absorption and diffusion behind the speakers (Maggie 3.6's), while my friend's system was off to the side of a much larger room with typical ceiling height and at the time he had no room treatments. There was a wall to the left, and the right side was open for maybe 20 feet. I have not heard his setup since he added some treatment. I agree with many who profess that room size parameters and acoustics play a large role in soundstaging, but a well recorded disc is essential also.

Duke Ellington's 'Blues in Orbit'is very wide. Good record too.

THe best one in my posession,which is so by a wide margin,is Dick Hyman,From the Age of Swing,on Reference Recordings,and is also HDCD.It is the best overall quality of any CD I have heard,I believe.