[George Graves]

In article ,
(Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Ron C wrote:
I totally agree that one should learn to walk first. However, keep in
mind that
Mr. Eickmeier is totally enamored, infatuated, captivated, enchanted,
fascinated,
and beguiled by the spatial aspect of sound, perhaps to the exclusion of
many
other aspects. When you're that deeply in love it's hard to step back
and see the
full picture.

Unfortunately it's not just Mr. Eickmeier. I think the obsession with
imaging is very common in the high end community and that the marketing
of high end products goes far to feed that obsession.

And it's interesting in part because very small changes in tonality can
wind up causing huge imaging changes; if you can't get tonality right,
you won't ever get good imaging.

Also, there are a lot of individual cues that can fool you into thinking
you're hearing real imaging even with a mono recording, which goes to
confound issues that much more.

This summer I heard a speaker system that employed two huge fibreglass
exponential horns with old Altec compression drivers. The manufacturer
kept raving about how wonderful the imaging was, but it was hard to notice
anything beyond the massive narrowband horn resonances.
--scott

Funny thing about imaging. It has to exist in the recording. Often, in modern recordings, especially commercial pop/rock recordings it's not. It also doesn't exist in multimiked/multi-channel classical recordings or in most commercial jazz recordings. True stereo (the only way to get real image specificity, image height and imaging front-to-back layering) just isn't done that much, commercially