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In Reply to: I'm not certain we really ave agreementdef… posted by David Aiken on October 14, 2005 at 14:46:51:
I can't disagree but from my experience it has been far far easier to find speakers that image and soundstage well (in that I have yet to hear speakers (ones that are considered to be "good") do this incredibaly badly or even less than good - than it is to find speakers that don't have remotely credible dynamics timbre and tonal accuracy etc.I would say less than 5% of all the speakers(that are deemed in the press and on forums) I have heard in my life provide good dynamics, timbral accuracy, tonal credibility (not sounding etchy or having the tweeter give itself aways, sounding AS ONE not hearing the drivers independant of each other etc.
And conversely probably 95% of all those speakers Image and soundstage well - at least within a flea's(can't spell nat??:-) eyelash of each other and most all do it more than credibly if you spend some time positioning the speakers that suit them.
I suppose the difference is that I just EXPECT that a speaker will image and soundstage well because I rarely if ever come across speakers that are hideous in this regard. Though I have heard some speakers seem to artificially create a center image where the singer is actually or should be off center.
I suppose if you have come across speakers that do it very badly then it would be important but my experience has not found a whole lot that do it badly - if I did then i may put a premium on having it done more right.
Follow Ups:
You may be right on most speakers imaging better than they do tonal fidelity and some other things, but then I tend not to hear particulary good imaging in speakers in showrooms. At least here in Australia, good speaker setup in showrooms seems to be rare. I don't think I've ever heard a showroom setup do a brilliant job on soundstage or on imaging - they tend to do better than most people do in their homes but then what most people do in their homes seems to fail to deliver any sort of soundstage or imaging at all.What I have always done seems to have been to select on the other things that are important to me and then rely on good setup and a bit of patient work at home to get them imaging well, and always considerably better than I ever heard the speakers do in a showroom.
Agreed -- speaker positioning is the key and you will get most speaker soundstaging and imaging well pretty much no matter what speaker you purchase so long as it is considered a half ways decent loudspeaker. Sure maybe the Cerwin Vega D9 you are not going to get to pinpoint image but then again who knows until someone bothers to try.This is why it puzzles me that press goes on endlessly about these two issues which is really one issue when your room is going to be different anyway and so will your positioning (and this always will shift the speaker's sound in this regard). I have heard the AN E about 5 feet apart firing directly straight ahead they have a wonky sound when it comes to imaging - you have to sit in a vice to not have everythiong shift with your seating position. At home in the proper corner placement 12 or so feet apart with the required toe in and boom everything is presented in their locations and you can sit pretty much anywhere in the room and get it.
Since most people are auditioning at showrooms with the "hopes" the dealer has both a good room and bothered to position them carefully then chances are when people say speaker X has poor imaging I always think BS - because if you spent the time with the speaker to set it up chances are staggerringly high that they will present the stage you're wanting.
Interestingly and to those disbelievers as there are many - amplifiers do in fact havce a say in this as well. With the Paradigm Studio 100V2 I bought a Sugden A48b amplifier based on the audition. I compared it directly against a MF A300. The latter amp created a bigger stage right to left and more AIR while the Sugden was a little softer smaller and even veiled (describes as a valve-like presentation - it also sounded deeper in bass with more weight and smoother in the midrange. But the point is that soundstage (and the speakers were not moved) different substantially.
This also occurred with a listening shootout at another audiophiles house nearby - He had AN K/Spe and Gershman Acoustics X1-Sub1 running and we switched out several amps. His Big Oddysey mono blocks versus a Sim Audio Celeste was startling in this regard with the Oddysey sounding big and wide the Celeste small and heavey (not to my liking at all) and the MF power amp was punded by the Sonic Impact $20.00 Class T digital amp (at least driving the K's).
I have heard many speakers that claim great imaging in press and I have heard them at showrooms which "seem" to have been set-up well and I listen and am often unimpressed. The speaker manual will say 3-4 feet from a back wall and away from side walls and X distance apart and the dealer has done all that. I listen and hear well yes the voice is in the middle but I hear sound from the speaker's tweeter (ie I hear the tweeter) or the space from the singer in the center to the actual left and right speaker forms a gap where there is nothing and then sound from the speaker again - this from major Stereophile beloved slim line speakers with mmetal tweeters.
One reason I tend to not talk about imaging is because most of the so called good ones to me tend not to do it very well and why I try and listen in at least two different dealers or two different rooms. I figure that most likely this will be able to be fixed at home largely or the magazines are deliberately touting lousy imaging speakers as being great so that the buyer in 2 years will look to upgrade and of course by some more Stereophile magazines to get more bad advice -- but nah a magazine would not deliberately do that to get people to buy more magazines now would they?
And also how come this thread started out with the subject "Yet again the buzzword to help poor speakers ..." and now we've got the comment "…or the magazines are deliberately touting lousy imaging speakers as being great so that the buyer in 2 years will look to upgrade and of course by some more Stereophile magazines to get more bad advice -- but nah a magazine would not deliberately do that to get people to buy more magazines now would they?"It's a big jump from imaging being the buzzword to help poor speakers to magazines pushing speakers that image badly.
And I, for one, don't think that Stereophile, or any magazine for that matter, goes out of it's way to give bad advice, and I definitely don't think it behaves unscrupulously to get people to buy more copies.
Pick a component, any component, and not everyone agrees on how good or bad it is. Put it in a pile of different systems and you will expect to hear different things. Let a pile of different people listen and expect to hear them say they heard different things, even when they're listening to exactly the same system in the same room. Maybe not big differences in every case but definitely differences.
Is there any reason to believe that any of Stereophile's reviewers, or any particular one of most reviewers, fails to accurately report their opinion of what they heard and thought when they review a component? What makes them liars out to deceive and give bad advice, or at the very least incompetent and unskilled listeners, when they report something that you don't agree with? Why is it more likely that it has to be something other than an honest difference in opinion and listening experience rather than just that? Why are the reviewers always wrong and their critics always right?
And even if the reviewer is wrong on occasion, why should that be automatically put down to something other than an honest mistake when we all make honest mistakes? Why should reviewers be any less fallible than the rest of us?
As far as the accuracy of Stereophile's reviews go, the only products I own that they've reviewed are my speakers - a favourable but wishy washy Sam Tellig review which I think didn't do them credit but I often have differences with Sam's views, and my Arcam FMJ CD33 CDP which was reviewed by both JA - the main review - and Art Dudley who compared it to a Naim that he preferred. I find myself in close agreement with JA and, for what it's worth, the dealer I bought it from believes that about 50% of people prefer the Arcam to the Naim and the other 50% prefer the Naim to the Arcam. Why should I assume that Art Dudley did anything other than honestly report what he heard and felt simply because he and I have different opinions and prefer different products?
Frankly, there's often a discrepancy in the opinion of different Stereophile reviewers on the same product and the magazine makes no effort to hide that fact. In fact they often go out of their way to make it quite obvious. There's no reason I can see to jump to nasty suspicions just because your opinions don't agree with theirs on some products or because they choose to review gear that you don't like and don't review a lot of the stuff that you do like.
Frankly I got into this thread because I disagreed with the view expressed in your original subject matter and the logic in the article you quoted. There seemed to be a bit of reasonable discussion in the middle and all of a sudden we're back to irrational diatribes against reviewers and Stereophile in particular, and a 180 degree turnaround about what reviewers are doing when they talk about imaging in reviews. Hardly a productive exchange so I'll bail out.
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