the Audio Story never told "the soundstage"

So why are we here?

Audiophiles can come up with all kinds of reasons to be in this hobby but why are we really here?

I'm here because of the picture I get to sit in the middle of everytime I turn on my system. I totally enjoy having music playing in the background as I do stuff but it's "being here" that really turns me on. There's something that a soundstage does to me that nothing else does. I'm transported into a world that kicks my virtual reality sensors to full.

Ever since I was a kid music pulled me into a world of imagery that to me was as real as any another event I did. In a way maybe even deeper cause the rest of the world seemed to shut off when the music was on. I don't even think I gave it a second thought when my chance to play music or go on tour came along. While the other kids were pumping gas at their uncles service station I was on the bus seeing the world and hooking up mic wires. If I wasn't on stage I was behind that mixer or in the studio or writing songs or doing anything that had the word music attached to it.

Being in the middle of sound is the coolest because it's like painting on a canvas that is 3D instead of a flat surface. Don't get me wrong, I love art and having it jump off the canvas but being inside of a canvas is to me the next step. I can remember being 11 and laying on the floor inbetween the speakers which were usually in each corner. Think about it, this was only a very short time after stereo was even made. I would lay there and pick out the instruments and followed them around the room. Didn't you (shows how weird I am I guess)

Later I was the same way as I played my drums or sang or what ever little part I could do. Walking from the stage to the room and back to the board was a world that I was absolutely single minded about and locked into. No wonder I became an acoustian, but it went deeper than that. I was making (no kidding) audio cables at 12 or so and playing with the different ways I could make the sound. To me I never thought about that this was what I was going to do but more this was who I was. When I first went into the studio that was it. To me it was like the coolest stereo. One that I now could make the instruments move around instead of just listening to where they were.

Can you remember where you were in your early 20's? I was running halls doing recordings and listening in my own stereo store. Is that nuts or what? I could not do hardly anything else but music. Every little sound or every little way that a sound would change was something that stopped me in my tracks. My favorite catch phrase had to be "did you hear that?" . For some reason I picked up on every thing and was so fasinated by how it made that sound and what that sound was and how that sound changed from moment to moment. Sound is like this living thing that is full of change and movement. It is anything but fixed and I think now this is the reason that fixed sound is something that bugs me. I don't want to hear things through the eyes of a system, stuck in this tiny stage. To me each recording is an adventure that has it's own little private world. A world that I can be a part of and if I get lucky might even unlock the riches to it's treassures.

This brings me to this thread. The soundstage.

The soundstage to me shouldn't be dictated by the system but the system is there to set the soundstage free. I admit like many the equipment for me was a big deal and I have enjoyed it for what it is and that everthing has a flavor, but my ultimate game and game plan is to go where the music wants me to, and not so much where I want to take the music. I'm so sold on the idea that the music has so much more to offer than we in are lives will never find everything, but I don't want to be the cause of it's limits.

I once recorded a series for a speaker called "lifes limitless reach". It was all about how we limit things to the place where we put them in a box instead of letting them be as alive and big as they can be and are in reality. That's my major beef with High End Audio. They claim to be the absolute sound but are only showing the tiniest part of sound. This drives me nuts! How have we created this industry based on only a tiny picture of the sound and then have the nerve to call it the absolute picture of perfect? Excuse my french but that's just silly and very small thinking. Making an industry that is based on a very small part of something is very odd to me esspecially when I know how big sound really is, don't you?

Do you really think that a recording is this tiny toy model? This little matchbox car of sound?

I use to think that the "audiophile" sound was on it's way to real, but when I saw the industry turn toward some big mistakes I started to wonder what "they" were really after. They even got so weird as to start saying a bigger soundstage was distortion. Distortion in my dictionary says anything other than the truth. A distorted view is the one that puts sound in a little cute box then we as a group of men look at this tiny box trying to out ego each other. That to me is an alltogether different hobby from listening to music. Music to me is taking me inside of a studio or concert. I shouldn't have to be thinking about this little box but more try to figure out to get this thing to unlock and spill all over my listening room taking my room and me away into music fantasy land. Music fantasy land is huge and moves through your room like an ocean of info. When in tune you can hear each little part of the sound and every motion the studio engineer does, and believe me they are doing tricks way beyond what you are hearing if your listening to the audiophile box. things drift in and out of sight and flow around the space in big movements and splashes, but we have been afraid of these splashes as a group of uptight hobbyist. We're taught that things are fixed, yeah right, well I don't know what mag you have been reading but it's not the recording effects one. Guys, these soundstages are full of so much info that if you did a real before and after from an audiophile box to the real thing you would probably jump out of your seat looking for the ghost.

When you go to a live little live music place hold on to your hat cause if the engineer and musicians know anything their going to blow your mind with the movement of sound. Their not just there to blow music your way but a good place is after an energy and stage that takes you away into their world. I can name you tons of little places that cook and paint a soundstage when making live music. I also know a ton of bands who know how to deliver a live soundstage, visit Nashville lately? Or how about Austin or NYC, or London. man there's way more out there than a wall of flat push. Music is about depth and depth perception.

The audiophile world has shoved you toward a box that doesn't exist in real life and doesn't exist on the recording either. We need to and will break out of our regularly scheduled programming but we first need to get out from underneigh the egos thumb that put us there. If you have a company or reviewer that is keeping you and your system in the little box of playback and you feel comfortable there cool. I'm totally down with that just don't call this absolute cause you couldn't be further from the truth. Give the recording process more respect than that. You've heard me say a thousand times how there is no shrink box in the audio chain and if your stage is smaller than real it has blockage.

Diversity in the soundstage

Do you have a one size fits all soundstage?
You might not have thought about it much but recordings have a wide range of soundstage sizes. As audiophiles many times we try to make a sound we like then hope the system will always play that sound. The problem is, recordings don't work this way. Each recording studio and sometimes each recording session has a different size and space dimension to it. It's in a way, a none talked about part of the recording story that few really have an understanding of, or maybe they haven't found a way to talk about it.

For me the most eye opening part is working on recordings. I know how a recording in a huge building is different than a recording done it a small studio space. These two types of recordings in no way should have the same size when in playback mode. Why would they? Yet the hobby of playback has limited it's stage to a box so that the audiophile has a point of reference    maybe. But I think the room and equipment have not yet reached it's maximum compatibility mode. The other factor is we get in a hurry and don't let the system reach that level of "settled". Settled is when a system reaches a point where the harmonics in the music are being produced. It's a place where the recorded signal is making it's way through it's pathway without a lot of interfearance from the mechanics of the physical parts (materials). The materials that are hosting the signal add and delete part of the recorded content as it makes it's way through. Being aware of this, I usually find system setups more pleasing to the ear than more complicated ones. I think this is because I have heard levels of purity in the soundstage that were almost overwelmingly real and huge. The system disappears and this unending space replaces any system involvement. When this happens it's far from a box type of stage but one that seems to go on into space unlimited. Parts and pieces of the music go far outside of the room and there is almost as much sound behind as in front. Most of all it's like real life and there is a presence. Shockingly, I have heard this on systems that are not even remotely High End. Every time I do it makes me stop and think about the hobby. Does the audiophile side this hobby desire to stay in the box? Or, would this hobby change or evolve into a different one if they heard this. Regardless of this possible debate I have to side with the size of real life over staying in that small box.

One of the most fun parts to a system that is able to break outside is listening to the different sizes of the soundstage. When I go to review systems one of the first things that I listen for is if the system is stuck in a one size stage or if I can put on two pieces of music and get two different sizes to the presentations. most times sadly I find that the system is not even close to revealing a stage at all and is still stuck in some dilemma that is blockage related. But when I do listen to a system that has broken free it's almost breath taking and I'm stund by the openess and lack of boundries. Also these setups don't seem to have frequency clustering going on. The frequencies are very balanced top to bottom without a peak and play without effort.

Tonight I was listening to three pieces of music and all three had a distinctly different size to them. Not only size but tonality. The tonality was playing a part of the size of the instruments and you could feel an over all space perseption to the recordings that were quite different as well. It felt like entering a different room with each CD is a way I would put it. I listened closely to the size and shape of the snare drum playing within the space and they were all three very different. One was lost in the stage, one was snappy and upshifted and one was as deep and full as a tom tom. I could have stopped there and said it's a recording issue, but I knew I'd be lying to myself bescause I have heard the recording with the lost snare sound different. My dilemma kicked in cause I knew if I made a change I was back to being at least slightly unsettled again, but it's me and I had to. I took a guess at the tune that needed made and got lucky   . The drum that was lost came out front and center and the tone dropped. That was enough for me cause I didn't want to go into a three day adventure of settling all over again. What this once again showed me though is that our stages can be tuned, and we have a lot more control over the recording when we get a system to a managable place.

Here's where again I need to point something out and maybe you want to come along with me on this journey and maybe not, but it's the part of "my" hobby that I have come to respect and love. If my system would have been more complicated I would have gotten lost easily and maybe would have had to play around a long time on just that one recording to get to a place I wanted. But, this is not the case because my system in this setting is extremely simple and making changes is very easy and very dramatic. A recording that was compressed just came to life as much as the most dynamic one I played before it. What's more the soundstage also came to life and grew past the walls. I went from inside the room to about 3' outside the room with this one little change on a Tuning Block and a door position. It sounds like a whole new recording and I would chalenge anyone to guess what components I was using because the components disappeared as the stage filled out.

the question screams to be asked

Are we in this to listen to equipment or the diversity of the music   

I really think that still a large part of the audiophile population are into listening to components over uncovering these treasures that we pick up at our music stores. For me it's the opposite guys. I love uncovering the music and could care less what the box says or how much something is worth on the dealers shelf, or it's High End Audio percieved status (that BTW changes more than diapers on a newborn). This is a part of this hobby that grows less interesting to me everytime I release a magical music moment. I have to stay loyal to why I am into this and it's about the music. Everytime I have tried to protect a faceplate I have found myself miles away from the goal of soundstage reality and end up in a stuck tonal fix sound that is only good till I snap out of my comma and see how much of the musical performance I just gave up by thinking of this tiny tonal piece while sacaficing this huge beautifully rich story. The fun for me is seeing this soundstage POP   . It's like going from a closet to a whole house. When the recording soundstage opens up there are tons of doors to walk through and the game begins if you know your system and have studied each part and piece of the room system combo. I can tell you now if you are an equipment changing junkie you have no idea what I'm talking about because you have never come close to soundstage reality. You are stepping (it's ok it's your hobby) from fixed to fixed instead of finding the mechanical side to the signal path. And in doing so are not learning how to use the materials as a musical tool. The sensitivity of the signal and the waves don't do it for you, and I would guess that you may be more of a meassurement guy thinking this can reproduce music. Unfortunately this may reproduce sound, but it will never reproduce music and that richness of the meaningful soundstage.

Again for myself, I have to hear Christine McVie's connection to her instrument and the hall around her echoing. I don't want or need to hear how she sounds on brand X. What I need is the size of the hall and her fingers touching the keyboard with her own emotions attached to them. Her every thought as she feels her way through her marriage to both her voice and fingers. I can tell you right now, if you haven't heard her with the sound echoing off the walls of the studio or hall and it go outside the speakers position, you haven't heard Christine McVie.

Soundstage freedom allows you to not only get size but the tonality within that size.

Tonality and soundstage

I have often heard people talk about tonality being one part of the hobby and space (soundstage) being another. When hear this the word that flashes infront of my minds eye is "blockage".

We might have a desired tonallity and a desired soundstage but if you don't let the stage open up you are maybe hearing your desire but not what is there, or should I say only part of what is there on the recording. If you want to hear the recording, like it or not, you need to let it play at the size it was recorded in. There is no absolute sound as we will probably never get a system room combo that gives everything exactly. If so we would be listening to that one song the rest of out lives and never move on to another, because of what it would take to get that sound. We need to be able to settle for close enough, but what is close enough?

Close enough in my book is when I can here the presence of the recording info make the signature of the electronics disappear. It's when I can no longer tell what kind of speakers I'm listening to or how the room sounds, or even how big the room is. If I closed my eyes I would be taken to space and the pace and drive of the music would take me into a world that had no limitations, rules or boundries. I would be surprise at where the music showed up and would have to open my eyes once in a while to see if I was sitting or standing. If I was actually even listening to a system at all, and mostly opening my eyes to see these speakers in the middle of this stage that never lands on them and seems like the boxes are there soundless,  fixtures in the room both nothing to do with the music.

So many times I see people with the wrong speakers in their room. It's a battle for them to make the speaker disappear and they have to play with many shapes to the soundstage trying to make their sound work. Banana shapes and right in the speaker or the tonal shift, or the stage dropping to meet the height of the physical speaker. or, when the sound comes up to the speaker some of it stops and sits in the speaker and some of it moves around the speaker like an object in the music. All of these are potentual signs of having the wrong speakers in the room.

A speaker should totally disappear. Maybe I should say totally and tonally disappear. I'm not saying it will become tonally invisable without it's signature, but it will seem like the speaker is not even in the room. You should not be sitting there with a banana shape to your stage, or a stage that is stuck between the physical placement of the speakers, or the sound starting at or just infront of the speakers and going back from there.

ok, had to go listen

The music should have absolutely no connection with the speakers at all. When I went in just now if my eyes were shut there is no way on the planet I would have ever been able to point at the speakers. With my eyes open (my favorite way to listen) the soundstage was thick is if I could take out a knife and cut an air cube out in any part of the room infront or in back of me and come out with a block of music. I was not separated from the music at all, in fact even at a lower volume I could feel my body vibrating to the music. To put it poetically I felt like I was dancing with the music. The pace and movement was not seperate from any part of the the room or even outside of the room as the stage went through the walls. maybe I even felt like I was in a music bubble with the main part of the sound being infront with the players but with the stage of energy rolling right past my seat to the rear. At no point did I get the feeling of a shape to the stage, but more as I have said before the feeling of floating in a pool of music. I'm not talking about a music blob either cause I have heard this and it's undefined, no this is very defined and I can almost shake hands with the performers.

This is a connection between tone and space. If the tone is off I can tell you that the stage would go back to a specific shape and size instead of just being. A flat screen does not appear making start and stop points. There is no flat screen and I get the feeling of both the front and the back of all the instruments and the singers. It's not 2D, but like sitting in a 3D theatre. things have a front to back empression as the impact of playing happens as if the potency is round and grows and deflates with the intensity of the playing. Again it is not like the instruments are 2D at all but almost overly real and plump. Like music bubbles inside of a big bubble. L can feel and see the skins of these many music bubbles as the edge of the instruments are well defined and tight but I can also feel the pressure of the air inside of these bubbles and know they could decrease or explode at any time. At the same time all of these bubbles have their own thing going on I can feel and see how they are intermingling with each other and seem to be a part of the same pace and movement. It's powerful and relaxed at the same time with a great sense of fullness in the inbetween.

You've heard me say there is no inbetween the instruments black holes, well this very true. If you have a hole in the stage I guarantee you are not listening to a 3D stage or a real one. You should not have any space that is not there in the recording. It's impossible for stereo and it's impossible for a recording to give you a blank spot in the space. There is no effects component that sucks out the sound. Think about it. You have two speakers in the room and they are on either sides of your ears. This means that when signal is being played through them they are vibrating. The only way to turn this off is to cut the speaker off completely, but if it is playing the waves are being formed and traveling through the room. If you have a hole, you have blockage. Part of the signal is missing. A microphone works this same way in reverse. It does not pick up holes. you can have an effect stay in one place but even that when played back is going through both speakers and being amplified by the room. It would be very rare for you to every hear empty space if live instruments are involved in the recording unless you were listening strickly all pan right or left. If you have a pan that is anywhere in between you should not have any holes. There is just too much info in most recordings for this.

Could I have the wrong speakers for my room?

If you took your guitar strings and attached them to the bridge and played them without the guitar body and air you wouldn't hear a whole bunch. If you attached them to something that sounded bad and play in a room that sounded bad it wouldn't be much better. You would hear more but it would still sound very....out of tune. You then give the strings a good full range body and play it in a bad room, better but still not there. A good body and a room that works with that string body room combo and now you have something.

Why would we think that playing a stereo would be any different  

I see people every day get out their audio crowbars and try to make their systems work.

When I take a break and go listen a while I often sit there and laugh. Who would have thought I would have had to own 5 stereo stores and be designing for the industries best to finially come full circle and see that the answer was all about fullrange sympathetic and systematic vibrations. I hope that doesn't sound too complicated cause this whole hobby has been made so over done that some will sit there their whole life and never admit that they have failed at reaching music happiness. Now take it some are on a journey that has nothing to do with sound and others trying to take their taste and bending the music to it, only sounding good to them and only part of the time and only certain music. But the general play back world is really so simple that it eludes us ego driven journeymen.

The signal, simple, it's electronic and vibration.

Amplifying, simple, it comes in three stages that tie together (amplifier, transducer, room)

That's it, end of story! But we have made it so much more than that. Our minds can't quite get this thing figured out. We keep looking at these toys and saying they must know what their doing. Every time we turn around there's someone in a garrage somewhere that reinvents the hobby and we all follow it till we get to that wall of performance peak, then we are back to, what went wrong, why didn't I get there.   

When we peel the audio onion it comes down to something very simple. If things vibrate together in harmony we get balance to our amplification. "Vibration" being the key word here. if you don't understand this you should seriously (I'm not joking here) do a quick study in sympathetic vibrations. : a vibration produced in one body by vibrations of exactly the same period in a neighboring body.

Each step, every inch of the audio chain the signal is introduced to vibration that is either sympathetically intune to the step before or after or out of tune with. If it is intune the sound can be amplified correctly and intact, if out of tune it deviates from the orginal signal or source. The more it deviates the further from the original sound it gets and the more out of harmonic ocillation it becomes, and the trick to a pure signal of any sort is to keep the moving signal within a tuned oscillatory range. In other words you want the capacitor to vibrate like the chassis, and the chassis like the driver, and the driver like the cabinet, and the cabinet like the walls and the walls like your ears. The pieces of your audio system are either going to get along or they are going to fight with each other. If they get along you will get the maximum increase in signal and you will play the music info more realistic and representative. The further you get from intune the lower the content of music you will get and the soundstage goes out of shape and the size decreases and the music sounds lifeless along with other nasty sounds. If your music is sounding like it's coming out of your speakers for example this is telling you that your speakers are having a hard time getting along with something before them or after them in the chain vibration wise.

It's bad audio science to over dampen the audio chain and I have discovered this to be the biggest problem in the audio industry. The second major problem I see is the use of too many electrical sources. The more you add the more you take away. It's really hard to make a bunch of transformers get along because they are all pulling on one power source for their individualy different needs. This throws the system into a weird electrical balance as each part is now not getting the same input of current. This makes the response timing of different parts of the system slightly off and will drain the over all signal gain. The third very important and perhaps touchest part is the vibratory codes in the system getting along. Two of the toughest are the relationship of the speaker to room and the equipments pathway to ground.

The loudspeaker is really a great name for this device because it's the loudest, most vibratory part of the system other than the room. It's job is not only to turn the signal into soundwaves but also to be the interpreter between the amp and the room. This can be a perfect match or a nightmare. The problem is the industry has never figured out a way to tell the listener to beware "this product may be out of tune with your room". To understand this we have to look at what the speaker is doing and then what the room is redoing. You see the speaker is the first of two loudspeaker transducers. The room itself is actually the biggest soundwave producer of the audio chain. It's not an automatic match made in heaven and many times the audiophile has a pair of speakers that is just not meant to work with the room or with the up stream part of the system and the room. One problem that the industry has done is over build or dampen the cabinet of speakers making them only able to project an on axis immediate pattern. This makes it tough for the waves to align and work with the walls wave incoming and out going acoustical patterns. Speaker engineers wrongly guessed the involvement of the rooms contribution to the sound wave and pressure builds and have attempted to make the speaker somehow independant of the room. This has failed and continues to plague the industry.

After dealing with this horror for a few years I started making my own speakers or using speakers that were more peace makers with the room than foes. The first difference I noticed was the room doesn't want to reflect sound, it wants to build up sound like a pool of water. If you took two big hoses and put them where the speakers are normally in a room and turn the water on you would see actually very little water reflect as compared to the amount that runs toward the edges using the surface to get there. The industry has painted an inaccurate picture of the energy in a room to look like beams bouncing around instead of waves and pressure zones. What's weird is it's easy to demonstrate pressure zones and almost impossible to do so with beams (reflections) till you get up into super high frequencies. Reflections do have their place in rooms over 85 feet in length but how many listening rooms are that big?

With my findings in room pressure (sound pressure) zone build up I realized that it's wrong to build a speaker made to fire waves like a rocket and far more musical to make speakers that created sound more like the body of an instrument. The drivers provide the vibration but it's the cabinet that gives the tone and flavor. This is revolutionary and still over the heads of the many designers but will change in time as their learning curve grows. This brings me to another design, the panel speaker. You would think that the panel speaker would be the answer but because of the size of the panel and again the way they form the wave these units too can become extremely beamy, and beamy is what we are trying to get a way from. If you match the tension though on the top of the panel to the bottom some of this goes away. Wave crosstalk on a panel speaker causes part of the beamy sound too. The other problem is these speakers absolutely depend on the room for their sound and if the room is hard they will sound like wise or fight, if the room is too soft the opposite happens. You really should have an easy to drive speaker that produces sound as, yes a point, but also a body. I have found that in the average listening room you really don't want a driver area too big or too small. This completely depends on the construction of the drivers but for my taste a paper driver or wood (light weight) in between 5 and 12" is the perfect delivery transducer. Subwoofers are best from 10 to 18". For myself I even like the sound of a bigger paper driver with tweeter but few are made currently to go high enough in their range before getting weird and dull. there are also some plastic drivers that are fine but must be built with a very flexible spider system without much stress.