Hi everyone, Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields.
Today we're going to talk about what is a sound stage.
I get some questions about this and sometimes I'm kind of baffled that people haven't heard
the term before, especially if they're two-channel people and they listen to stereo music.
Let's kind of define it and give some examples of those of us that are familiar with it know
a little bit about.
Two-channel stereo to me has always been magical.
I mean even when I was 16 years old and I would take my stereo system from one room
in our house to the other and noticed how different it sounded because the rooms were
different sizes.
It always amazed me that two speakers can produce this beautiful image between them
and there's no source there, it's a phantom image so to speak but it's always been amazing
to me.
The process that a two-channel the playback does we'll leave it for another video because
it's a little bit complicated but it's really interesting to see that two speakers can produce
that center image that's focused and defined.
We also get with the center image, we get left and right, too.
So the goal of any properly set up two-channel system and a properly tuned room is to create
that sound stage in front of you, that stage, if you will, where all instruments are present
in their respective position.
We can have left stage, right stage, we can have center-stage but in a properly-designed
room that's treated correctly, we can get a height, width and a depth.
I mean in my studio in Los Angeles, even though it's only 16-17 foot wide, it sounds like
it's 2,530 feet wide.
So you can actually treat the room to maximize all of these issues that two-channel can produce
for you.
So our goal in any kind of treatment is a nice combination of absorption and diffusion
to produce separation, definition and what we call darkness.
Now, darkness is a really great thing and it's kind of the ultimate compliment you can
pay to a room if it's designed correctly and it has the proper size and volume and ratio
of distance to speakers apart, distance to listening position, distance to treatment
on the rear wall.
So darkness is that quiet space between voice and instruments when the vocals quit, the
instruments quit and the next note is sung or struck, it's that quiet time, that blackness
where nothing else is going on and that's where you have to get the right treatment.
And when you get it, it's quite magical.
It's actually breathtaking.
So darkness is what we go for in both vocals and instruments.
What are some of the requirements to achieve all that?
Proper room size and volume, definitely speaker size matched to the room and things like that.
If you don't have any sidewalls, that's probably the ultimate – but most of us do.
So if we have those we have to control the proper rates and levels with treatment in
them.
So create that sound stage, create that magical place, if you will, and you have some control
over the dimensionality of it: the height, the width and the depth but you've got to
use the right kind of treatment.
You've got to have the low frequencies managed correctly, you have to have the proper rates
and levels of absorption for the mids and highs and if you're using diffusion you have
to have the right prime number sequence for distances from speakers to listening position
and from listening position to the back wall, side walls and ceiling.
So it's all kind of important.
So work on your sound stage.
Stay focused on it, try to move your speakers around a little bit, put them in closer, pull
them apart, move them farther away from the front wall and try to get the maximum sound
stage you can that has the height, width and depth that source contains, the engineer put
it in there.
It's up to you to
get it out.
Thank you.