How far can you go?

Im on tenderhooks waiting for mine to be built Mike, I bet you are the same

Maybe thats why we all change kit from time to time, we're just seeking that buzz..

NB
Forgot to mention, I have no holes, BUT having the speakers miles apart means I have a listening area of about 3 feet on the sofa. If you move away from that you only really hear one speaker. This will really become a problem if I eat too much and my butt expands beyond 3 feet in width.

 

Not really to be honest Chris - mine are months off yet

Still at least I'm getting the Frickin Awesomes back soon

Joel does have a point BTW. For a lot of music, mono is incredibly involving IMO

 

Dub may be a special case. It's the only musical form I can think of off the top of my head which uses stunt studio effects for a musically coherent effect. But, as you say, the main thing is to get the internal organs vibrating, so cone size is where it's at.

Controversial view: plonk down any pair of speakers in a reasonably sensible position in relation to the listening location and play a good modern stereo recording, and my guess is nearly any setup will do stereo well enough for most purposes. If somebody wants h-u-u-u-g-g-g-g-e soundstages they probably don't find their music collection interesting enough as music, and are looking for a way to make the boringly familiar a bit more exciting. Solution: buy tons of unfamiliar music.

-- Ian

 

How about ambient and trance genres? Although you still could do with massive bass drivers for this too.

 

I said "musically coherent"

I think dance music in general borrows most of its production technique from dub. Different technologies, similar objectives.

-- Ian

 

" Ah, you know Paul, making a great soundstage is like making love to a beautiful woman"

Ah Swiss wise words, wise, wise words.

 

What , it,s all in your mind ?

 

Better with an appealing spread.

 

And a reasonable depth.

 

The track "Heim" by Bugge Wesseltoft not only extends outside of the speakers, but seems to crawl up the side-walls and end-up behind the listening position.

Not only can it be distracting - it scares the f**k out of me at times.

 

Cheers. I've got that album, and Vogue does always sound impressive. It tends to be a track I stick on if friends come round to try and convince them that putting their speakers more than a foot apart and actually in front of them might actually be a good idea. The bit at the start which goes something like "What are you looking... at", and whips left to right, usually get's peoples' attention . Didn't realise it had any fancy recording on it but nice to know.

FWIW soundstaging does matter to me. Possibly this is a result of having had my system in a number of small lounges (currently a bit under 12' x 11'), so being able to close my eyes and have an apparantly much larger acoustic space in front of me is very nice. Having a bit of seperation between sounds also makes more detail apparent, something I value with vocals especially.

 

Wot's a soundstage? The earth is flat.

 

Tom even flatty systems have a stage

 

Stickman,

Thanks for the Wesseltoft intro, never heard of him before, listened on the net and now have that track also winging it's way to me from Amazon, I'm gonna be broke at this rate!