Soundstage Is (Much) More Complicated Than You Think

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41

So you are saying that even if the assumption of reflections in a room is creating a soundstage , it’s doing so because of change of phase.
Am i understanding that correctly?

But that would also be measurable in a room with speakers.

Or am I getting that wrong?

I mean , can we agree that there is an illusion of soundstage in headphones , where even you guys ( reviewers) have mostly consensus that the HD600 series as an example has a flat soundstage and has that blob effect. And you mention soundstage in your reviews.

Or we are totally delusional when we put on one headphone and say it has a wide soundstage and put on another and say it has a narrow soundstage?

This is a good convo btw

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42

No I wouldn’t assume reflections create ‘soundstage’. All of these descriptions of such phenomena are psychoacoustic effects, the cause of which could be different from person to person, depending on how they interpret these effects. There is no universal ‘soundstage’ thing, just subjective descriptions of the experiences people have. What redounds to those experiences in different devices need not be the equivalent.

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43

Wait a sec.

Do you have a two channel stereo where you have setup the system in a manner ( and room willing ) that the soundstage changes as you do different setups with the speakers as well with room treatment?

Because in the two channel world this is practiced all the time and of course it’s psychoacoustic but very much assumed that it is created by reflections. Speakers in an anechoic chamber and even a human voice is hard to locate.

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44

I have to brush up on my reading of Tooles book, Sound Reproduction, on psychoacoustics

Btw, not to win a silly argument. To see if I’m missing something.

Cheers and merry Christmas , hope you are having a good holiday season

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45

With speakers, I think of it the way Erin seems to, which is to say it’s an illusory effect created by the stereo image. The playback equipment may or may not enhance this effect. It can be cool, but not the be all end all of the experience.

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46

‘Subjective’ only to the extent that interpretations of forced positional audio such as this are not universal:

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47

“Cup geometry / depth = sound stage” hypothesis doesn’t seem to work with e.g. Hifiman’s Arya/HE1000 headphones which have nothing behind the driver, quite shallow pads, and are still considered as some of the best sound stagers by many.

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48

Ah ok, so it’s something that you personally don’t care for as well? If I understood that correctly?

We speaker enthusiasts really pay attention to our speakers ‘ disappearing’ and while not measureable is quite a real experience.
I’ve confirmed this from multiple people who will sit and listen to my stereo and while the subwoofers aren’t even close to the speakers, the bass will emanate from where the rest of the freq of the instrument is within the soundstage.
Or they will notice that nothing is really coming from the speakers but behind them, to the right and left and in the middle of them. There are many test tones to do this to properly set up speakers. Yea totally psychoacoustic fuckery , but real.
And not something only I could hear. I did one experiment with a friend from my old condo downstairs. I told him tell me where the singers are coming from. I put on a version of Le Nozze ( Mozart marriage of Figaro)
And he would say “ now it’s coming from all the way like 4 feet from the left speaker , now from the right, It’s moving from the left to the middle . And finally he said “ how is that possible ?”

And I’ve done that with multiple people who come and listen.

None of them say oh it’s all coming from either the left or right speaker. Hence the phantom stereo image in the middle of the speakers. Which is sorta the most fundamental experiment that even though we can’t measure that, it’s real as hell.

Anyways. Too bad there isn’t more resources and money in headphones to kinda figure this out. And by figure it out I mean learn to sorta manipulate it. Because there is no real set formula to do that even in speakers.

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49

That’s a good point actually.
But sound does propagate differently in planar technology than dynamic drivers.

Still. Good point.
But there is a soundstage. So something is causing that aural illusion.

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50

I care more about timbre and tone color, ensuring it sounds right to me. The other psychoacoustic stuff is secondary to me. Spaciousness in headphones with stereo recordings is nothing at all like listening to a binaural recording. Same thing with stereo vs immersive audio mixes played back on the right equipment, it’s a categorically different experience. Yet most of the music we listen to is stereo recordings, and trying to create these spatial illusions in headphones requires a meaningful impact to the things that these days I care about more. When dealing with stereo content, I’d rather not make those concessions.

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51

Ok that makes sense.

I wonder if Olive has mentioned anything about spatial qualities in headphones.

Yeah for me imaging and spatial things matter a lot. And why most of my listening is done via speakers.

Like I feel too claustrophobic with headphones that are way too in my head. Which of course is the case with most headphones so I can’t listen to them for hours on end.
Imaging helps in that front. Having some space around the instruments is good.

I can listen to mono and be happy actually.
But in my car which I have tuned with DSP , if I listen to it now with the factory amp, It weirds me out. Of course I could get used to it again with sound just coming randomly from everywhere.
But listening to it with a proper phantom image in the middle of the windshield and images to the left and right is pleasing to my brain.

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52

Yeah and I think it’s reasonable to talk about qualities to the experience we value like this. I mainly worry when folks erroneously conflate cause and effect, thinking “the experience has x about it, therefore there must be x about the product”. And this just holds back the project of being able to better predict this kind of goodness for people beyond subjective or anecdotal indications. It’d be great if we could get to a point where we could say “this will likely sound x to people”, and in many respects we’re getting closer to that.

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Humans have the same perceptual apparatus whether they listen to live, mono, stereo, binaural, or aggressively manipulated spatial content. Traditional stereo recordings and manipulations such as room, padding, reflectivity, and cup shape impact the same exact perceptual apparatus. As such, your viewpoint smuggles in a world of psychoacoustic stuff; traditional recordings are just so routinized that this goes unnoticed.

Psychoacoustic factors may not be measurable with current electrical/physical devices, but they are highly predictable and manipulable. Using traditional methods to achieve a modest effect strongly suggests these are the same effects that vary only by degree.

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54

Yet there is no requirement that your attention goes to the same things. I do believe there are bound to be trends, and as such we can identify them in listening experiments. But those will likely reveal the same things we get from the Harman work when it comes to overall preferences, not strictly indexing for the spaciousness effect. To be clear, I want that sort of experiment done, or more perceptual listening experiments generally. I just don’t have a reason to expect the outcomes to be different as of yet.

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55

Human hearing is not a complex physical process compared to other cognitive stuff, and not too variable on a grand scale. We are trained into perceptual ‘normality’ as we grow and develop. We become able to hear and process/re-process sounds in a highly recognizable form. This ultimately results in being able to speak and understand a shared language and recognize the voices of individual speakers – but we often speak a new language with disfluencies and/or an accent.

Harman and many others got the main points right with audio long, long ago. The problem with measuring audio nuances (as I see it) follows from the potential resolution of the transmission of sound through the air, and thereby hardware device limitations. Air turbulence and the quirks of sound waves moving through air likely gets in the way. By analogy on a larger scale, earthbound telescopes saw mostly clouds and moisture until the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes got past the atmosphere.

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56

I wonder if @Torq has any comment on this - do you Ian? I know that like me and @Nightjar you generally prefer speakers to headphones. But you’ve also been through many variations of headphone soundstage.

Not having had the experience of headphones that try to sound more like speakers (Looking at you, RAAL), I find that I (undoubtedly psychoacoustically) adjust my expectations of soundstage differently when I listen to headphones, but whether it’s the intimate inside-my-head blob of the Sennheiser HD-6xx or the definitely outside the head sound of the Audeze LCDi4 “IEM” even with binaural recording I don’t feel much front-to-back dept like I would with a speaker when I use headphones.

And I think back to early quad sound, both discrete and more particularly using DynaQuad - a little box with one knob that sometimes makes me want to try the Schiit Syn surround sound processor. There is a lot that’s not-psyco and more acoustic in the Hafler matrix. Probably going back to Kindergarden compared to the theory that @Resolve, @Lou_Ford and you are talking.

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57

I definitely prefer speakers by a long shot.
Not even comparable.
Headphones are just another different way to enjoy music. And it is different. So I like a bit of variation .
Headphones may solve for the room a bit for lower freq, but for higher freq they don’t really come close to how smooth speakers can reproduce higher freq where timbre and naturalness occurs within the FR.
Then of course we get into the soundstage psychoacoustic effects which speakers recreate way better and the visceral impact which is second to none.

Thank god the large market demand for headphones is lending to more research in making a better headphone.

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58

Psychoacoustics really are a hell of a thing. As an example, I actually found the SR1a to have a more narrow soundstage than most people did. And I know people who think of the HD650 as wide and spacious sounding, even though for many of us it’s the opposite. To say that we are uniquely primed by the acoustic cause would be false, there are all kinds of other factors that contribute to the experience. And the thing is… we’re not necessarily worse off for it.

A perhaps more uncomfortable example is situations where someone paid a lot of money for a thing, and therefore pays closer attention to it. Despite the fact that it may not perform any better acoustically than something less expensive, the person paying close attention can have a meaningfully better experience, because they are literally hearing more of the details as a function of their attention.

We often talk about controlled listening, level matching, removing price bias, removing brand/visual bias etc… but the average person buying these products doesn’t undergo this, and their experiences are meaningfully shaped by these non-acoustic factors.

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59

Couldn’t agree more. For testing my EQ theory/skills I purposely bought some expensive top of the line headphones and some super cheap used gaming headsets and quite a few headphones in between. Haven’t heard any particular relationship between sound stage and price, that’s for sure.

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60

It wasn’t something I was going to wade into … in general at least; not the least of which is that “this” could be any of many aspects of the whole thread. Maybe I’ll find the motivation to do so another day, so my comments here will be short (for me) and focused.

I do.

Given the choice, I’ll go with competent speakers every time.

I have.

Though it is the least important aspect of headphone performance for me.

It was really only in my downtown Seattle condo that I paid much attention to it at all, as everywhere else I’ve lived I could run speakers 24/7. Which made the SR1a extra special for me at the time.

…

Anyway …

Lateral (left/right) spatialization should, in a properly setup and functioning system, be 99% (or more) about the source material, since the largest factors there are ILD and ITD … and that’s all in the recording.

Just in raw headphone terms, the most apparent depth-wise spatialization has come from a very small number of specific headphones (and appropriate music). The most convincing/apparent of these was the SR1a, with the wings around 45 degrees.

There are others, but the effect falls off rapidly, with the MySphere 3.x being next and maybe half as apparent as the SR1a, and then further declining through AKG K1000, HD800S and Abyss AB-1266 (if the cups are sufficiently canted).

I’ve found software/hardware processors much more convincing overall (maybe SR1a excepted, though it benefits when combined with such processing to retain “first place”).

A couple come to mind …

“Waves NX” with the head tracker is probably the most convincing. It has other uses also, of course.

“Out of Your Head” worked, but I had a tendency to hear things behind me instead of in front sometimes.

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