Years and years ao, I first started getting acquainted with audio equipment through working in a music instrument & audio store.
(Not everyone whoever get to work in an audio store eventually becomes an audiophile.)
However, my mentor at that time introduced me to the concept of soundstage and imaging. Whoa. that was it. I was hooked.
So a few years ago, when I was asked to make a training video DVD - for totally newcomers to the audio industry, I commissioned (funded, script and story board) the creation of this video with CG graphics. I figured what hooked me then will spike their interests too. The female narrator is a local television actress (paid) and the male narrator is myself (unpaid amateur!). Sorry for the slowness in the narration, but we needed to ensure our colleagues in the middle east countries find it totally intelligible.
I usually follow up this video by playing CDs of the unplugged version of the Eagles' "Hotel California" or Rosemary Clooney singing "thanks for the memory". Both these songs contain very vivid imaging spread across the entire width of the soundstage. It works pretty well to help newcomers to understand the concept of making a recorded performance come to life into the living room.
Consider this video my homage to my first audio mentor!
More on the subject of soundstage and imaging.
Most of us have learnt quite early to automatically map out a holographic image in our mind each time we listen to sound reproduction through audio equipment.
During this process of mapping out each voices and instruments in the music that is streaming through our ears, they are laid out in a map-like grid, allocating a certain position in space in front of our view so that each of the voices and instruments are laid out like an ensemble of musicians playing live in front of us, suspended in space like a 3d hologram.
This imagined holographic "soundstage" does have a size. There is perceived width, depth, and height. Within this soundstage, the various voices and instruments occupy a certain space - though sometimes their separation from each other is not well defined and articulated.
And most of us have had experiences that taught us that better made equipment tend to help us perceive a wider, deeper, and taller soundstage and each sonic images within soundstage to be well delineated, focused and stable. And poorer equipment tends to do otherwise, reproducing soundstages that tend to be smaller, narrower, shorter, and flat and very forward.
We have also learned that it is not just equipment quality, but often, the quality of the setting up also matters. For example, we learnt that if interconnects were to be connected in the wrong direction, the resultant soundstage we perceive from the whole system will tend to sound narrower and shorter. The soundstage will also tend to sound as if it is positioned in front of the speakers. If we were to reverse the cable's direction so that we are using it in the way the manufacturer want us to use, the resultant soundstage will blossom to more wider size with real life like height and each musical element will seem to sound more distinct from each other in their own space and position within the soundstage. The same also go with the AC orientation of the powercord and how they are plugged into the power grid.
During the comparison, most of us have been actively mapping out the different soundstaging we perceived in our minds. Any changes, whether is it the height of the main vocals that is being changed is instantly compared to against earlier soundstaging maps we had remembered so that is automatically registered as a "change" in our mind. Some people can recognize changes within 5 secs, as they tend to focus on only one or two elements like the main vocals or maybe a certain percussion passage. Some people prefer to listen a bit longer so that they can perceive more varieties of changes from different voices and instruments. Whatever way works.
We can tell if a listener is applying this method while listening to sound reproduction from audio equipment via the language/vocabulary that they later use to describe their listening experience. They will tend to use "visual" terms to describe their listening experiences.
Case in point:
A listener may describe a particular equipment that is brand new and just taken out of the box as sounding "smallish", "narrow", and "forward", "hazy", or "vague" and "unfocused"
And after an extended run in period, he may describe the resultant sound as "spacious", "cavernous" or "having wall-to-wall soundstaging", and "hall ambience that extend as high as the ceiling" and "solid focussed imaging" or "palpable image that I could touch with my fingers".
Using the visual mapping method, even the most subtlest of sonic changes can be easily detected and remembered. So that even after an interval of hours, days, or even weeks, the listener can still remember what he had perceived and be able to recall it for use in another comparison. That is how we can have long aural memories. Ha!
