Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Soundstage aka Holy Crap !

OK, that was interesting. No more testing different configurations yet, but played another few CDs while working. On Sheep from Pink Floyd's "Animals" I realized what was different with the sound...

Sheep opens with electric piano and sheep noises, followed almost immediately by bass guitar. The bass is sharply located in the center, while the electric piano has always sounded "out of phase" and smeared across the soundstage with most of the sound seeming to come from a bit outside the speakers.

With the new setup the electric piano was sharply located "over there", off to the right somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees, almost twice as far from the center in terms of angle as the right channel speaker.

There was still some piano sound coming from near to (and just outside of) the left channel speaker but I can't rule out the possibility of the asymmetric room turning what should have been another sharply located piano sound on the left into a mostly one-sided result.

This effect only appears on albums which have had obvious audio effect processing - on all of the other tracks the instruments are placed between the speakers, and if anything the soundstage seems to extend beyond the speakers a bit less than I remember before (although it's possible that the "slightly outside" tracks are now the ones where I am hearing that "way the heck outside" effect.

Interesting stuff.