That Audiophile Soundstage

If you've got your speakers, room and listening position set up, the speakers should disappear. The music should be coming from the space between the speakers, which should seem to be sitting on their stands, or shelves, doing nothing.

You should also be able to close your eyes and point to where the instruments are located. Bass there. Voice there. Guitar there. If it's a piano solo, the bass notes should be on one side and the high notes on the other.

So goes the audiophile line.

Go to a live performance by a string quartet and you won't get this separated soundstage. The players will be sitting fairly close together, from the left: violin, viola (or second violin), cello, and bass on the right. They need to be able to see and hear each other, not have to wave across a wide stage. The result is a near-mono experience: the sound is experienced as one thing, it does not need to be assembled from this on the left and that on the right.

A lot of recorded string quartets sound like that: each instrument can be picked out easily, but try the pointing game, and they are all around the centre of the stage.

An orchestra is a nearly-stereo experience live and on recording: low notes - horns, basses, cellos - to the right (facing the orchestra), high notes (violins, bells) to the left, woodwind, trumpets and flutes in the middle above the violas. Orchestral recordings veer to the left a lot. Listening live, you do find your eyes moving to the source of a sound, especially if it is a brief solo passage.

Those speakers at a club or a live gig are mono. That way everyone hears the same thing. If it was stereo, only a handful of people would hear it all, and most would be getting one side or the other. At Sadlers Wells flamenco performances, it used to take me a few minutes to train my ears and eyes to allocate the sound to the instruments.

And the whole point of medieval choirs is that you cannot tell one singer from the next, let alone where they are standing. The sound should seem to come from heaven itself, in one blended voice that can sing different notes at once. People who sing that music tell me they cannot pick out the individual lines either.

In the 1960's stereo was sometimes done by putting some instruments on one side and the others on the other side. Maybe the drums and voice appeared in the middle. Early stereo recordings mostly come from the speakers, not the space between. It's not a good sound, to my ears.

The way audiophiles talk about their soundstage, you'd think that every mix took the trouble to place the instruments apart, distinct and to use the full width of the stereo. But a lot of records do not do that. Miles Davis' 1980 albums have all the sound grouped towards the middle of the stage. I wondered why for a while, then realised that Miles wanted it to sound good to anyone in the room no matter where they were. He wanted to make music people would party to, not sit on their own in the sweet spot, venerating. Jazz has always been party / club music.

Famously, mono is supposed to feel like it is coming from the middle of your head over headphones. Sit in the sweet spot of a stereo, and the music seems to come from a band about six inches wide. It's like there's a third speaker in the middle. Stand further back and that mono-band gets wider. The instruments are distinguishable, not smeared, but not stereo-separated. It sounds like you're hearing the music through the door of the club.

The audiophile soundstage is an artefact of two-channel audio and a particular way of mixing the sound to space it out. That's why it does not work outside of a sweet spot, and why, when a piece is mixed for the sweet spot, as often as not, we wind up listening to it on headphones, where we don't have to worry about our exact placing in the room.