Craig, I remember everything you say. That's how important your words are to me. smile

It's very interesting how I can listen to vinyl jazz on iheartRadio and enjoy it so much. It's for sure not as clear as CD or Spotify but nonetheless, the soundstage is there. The best way I can describe it is I hear the images on the 3D soundstage but those images are lower resolution. This is analogous I suppose to seeing fuzzy figures in the distance and then using binoculars to see the details. What this tells me is that spatial cues are preserved even in a low resolution rendition.

In some ways, it is easier to relax to a lower resolution presentation. I've often thought about a "time-machine" mode in the DSP. Choose your timeline: tubes, vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, CD, stereo, mono.

Last night I listened to Light My Fire in mono (below). Although the vast majority of the presentation was in the center, I was surprised how it spatially extended into and across the soundstage. In some ways, it was more satisfying to listen to than the stereo version.

Although I find no fault with the actives, I suspect more can be done to offer enhanced virtualization. Surely by incorporating additional drivers, a higher degree of control is given to the designer to linearize the amplitude response curves. The challenge there of course is driver integration. And I still think more research is needed to understand if 1 Hz resolution is adequate for frequency response sweeps. One of the things that should be researched is image and soundstage collapse as the SPL is increased. What I mean by that is as the volume is increased, the soundstage moves toward the plane of the drivers and images start to over-lap. This is the case with every speaker of course. So there may be an opportunity to shape the response as a function of SPL although I do realize this would require more computational resources.

https://open.spotify.com/track/7aghcqWLL9hGMIb0VFdbyD?si=6OctZR-WSG6xsgM8urA9BA

House of the Rising Sone
Out in the mid or far field
Dedicated mid-woofers are over-rated