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RE: Want to try this.

The soundstage is up where it belongs and at the proper distance, except that you hear much more of it -- the extra 120 degrees of spread that's on the recording, but that you lose when listening with stereo speakers at 60 degrees.

I tried the Stereophile cow bell depth track, and it behaved as it was supposed to, the bell moving front and back and left and right as John Atkinson walks around the church. It never came back to the plane of the speakers, it moved IIRC between the front wall and way behind the wall. I didn't notice any of the between the wall and the speakers imaging I got with the same setup using RACE.

In my room instrument placement was a bit askew, and some of that had to do with where the speakers were aimed on the front wall because I could change the spread and instrument positions some by moving the speakers. It seemed that lateral position was a compromise between the lateral position in the recording and the angle of the front wall reflection, which in my setup was within 10 ms of the initial side wall reflections, 10 ms being the point at which image shift no longer occurs in experiments.

Some of that may also have had to do with the asymmetrical clutter in the room, which is being used to store things from the living room while it's being renovated. I'm not sure.

The best I can compare the effect to is the sense of being in the hall, but behind a pillar. So it's not perfect -- at least in the very rough setup I tried -- but at the same time it beats any conventional stereo I've ever heard for you-are-there realism. Another interesting flaw is that hard panned stereo (as in early Beatles recordings) moved to the side reflections. It seems that some blending or reverb is necessary for the effect to work.

Another interesting effect -- at the needle drop, my brain would seem for a split second to place the image in my own plane, and then it would seem to move forward where it belonged, as my brain came up with a best fit solution to the paradoxical signals (sound from the sides headphone style, followed by a delayed reflection from the front). This certainly doesn't work like the law of the first wavefront! But it kinda makes sense in retrospect, since it's pretty well established that the brain uses room reflections to help out with front/back localization (in an anechoic chamber or when listening to highly directional speakers like the early Quads or the KLH-9's, sounds can sometimes seem to come from behind your head).

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