Like most audiophiles what I was looking for in a sound system were mainly things like bass extension and low distortion, resolution and clarity. Now that I have started a company building loudspeakers I realize that the one attribute that makes our product stand out, stereo imaging,wasn´t much on my menu. Getting to the bottom of this this has become somewhat of an obsession of mine. You see, Stereo imaging is important not only as the creation of the illusion of live music and an immersive experience but there is a much more subtle reason why it is such an important attribute. Come in the Cocktail Party Effect:
The cocktail party effect per Wikipedia is the phenomenon of "being able to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room"
This effect is what allows most people, and particularly us audiophiles, to "tune into" a single voice or musical instrument and "tune out" all others. If you experience this in any way similar to me, it is almost like zooming in acoustically into a single minute detail of sound.
I would be hard pressed to believe that much of audiophilia as a pleasant form of obsession would exist in the world without this ability to focus our attention on the finer subtleties of music.
For the auditory cortex to be able to perform this fantastic task of filtering out the irrelevant, binaural hearing and thus a precise stereo image is very important. You can test this yourself by listening to the same noisy scene twice, once in stereo and once in mono while reviewing your own ability to discern details in the conversations and shift the focus of interest and listening to any particular aspect of sound.
People hearing with only one ear are much more easily distracted by noisy environments and often find it impossible to follow conversations through a background noise level because of their lack of special hearing.
This is what makes good stereo imaging of a sound system so important. A crystal clear stereo image can only make it possible to focus our attention to the minuscule details of all the other attributes we might be looking for in our audiophile quest for auditory perfection. The clarity might be there, the lack of distortion, the responsiveness and resolution, but without being able to focus our attention to such subtleties, it will be rather hard to become aware and appreciative. In other words, a sound system that performs well in all attributes, but stereo imaging, will be impossible to appreciate.
The question still remained; why our loudspeaker imaged that particularly well with reviewers like Steve Guttenberg on CNET saying that the “Sommeliers disappear as sources of sound and project a stereo image that extends well beyond the actual locations of the speakers”
I will talk in my next issue about what is important about a system that images well and how to set such system up to have a wide and stable image.