Can Your Speakers Disappear?

It sounds almost impossible when you think about it.

How can two loudspeakers sitting in front of you create the impression of depth, height, width, and specific image placement?

Yet when everything is working properly, that is exactly what should happen.

In fact, the goal is for the music to stop sounding as though it is coming directly from the two speakers at all. Instead, the performance should detach itself from them and appear behind the loudspeakers, as though the musicians themselves were standing there.

That disappearing act is one of the most magical things a properly set-up two-channel system can accomplish.

And this week, we're going to listen for it.

Start With The Room Around You

Before thinking about your stereo, try something simple.

Close your eyes and listen to your surroundings.

Once the visual information disappears, your hearing becomes more sensitive to what is happening around you. You can often tell where a sound is coming from, how close it is, and even get some sense of the size of the object producing it.

Our ears are constantly collecting and comparing information.

Each ear is measuring differences in timing, relative loudness, angle of approach, and phase relationships. Our brains use those differences to help determine where sounds exist around us.

I like to compare the process to the way our eyes work.

Each eye sees a slightly different image. Our brains combine those two images into a three-dimensional picture containing depth and spatial information.

Our two ears perform much the same function with sound.

And that's the trick stereo reproduction takes advantage of.

Now Listen To Your Speakers

Put on some music, settle into your normal listening position, and close your eyes again.

This time, pay attention to where the music seems to originate.

Does everything still seem to be coming directly from the left and right loudspeakers?

Or do the speakers begin to disappear?

When everything is right, the music should become detached from those two physical boxes. Instead, it should present itself in the space behind them.

You begin hearing a performance rather than a pair of speakers.

That's what we're after.

Try It With A Couple Of My Favorites

The recording you choose can make this exercise much easier. Over the years, I've collected plenty of tracks I use when evaluating systems, and a couple are particularly helpful for listening to imaging, depth, and the ability of the loudspeakers to get out of the way. 

Holly Cole — “Train Song”

Temptation

This is a great place to start because the recording is built around space. Holly Cole’s voice and David Piltch’s upright bass are presented in a deliberately sparse arrangement, leaving plenty of silence between each part.

Start with the upright bass. It sits prominently in the recording, letting you hear the attack of the finger on the string, the character of the instrument’s body, and the way each low note blooms and decays into the surrounding space.

Then shift your attention to Holly’s vocal. She’s recorded very close to the microphone, making the small details of her voice easy to hear while still giving you a sense of the space around her. 

For this test, focus on the empty space between the performers. Do the voice and bass feel like separate sources occupying their own positions, or does everything pull back toward the speakers?

On a well-set-up system, the sparse arrangement should make it easier to stop hearing a conventional stereo mix and start getting the impression of the musicians existing independently in the room.

Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers — “Get Lucky”

Random Access Memories — Hi-Res Version

Where “Train Song” is useful because of all the empty space in the arrangement, “Get Lucky” is a great test of how well your system can keep a denser mix organized.

Listen for Nile Rodgers’ guitar, Nathan East’s bass, Omar Hakim’s drums, and Pharrell’s vocal as separate pieces of the same groove. The track has a lot going on, but each part should still feel distinct rather than collapsing into one flat wall of sound.

For this test, focus on whether the system can keep the mix organized as more elements play at once. Can you follow the guitar, bass, drums, and vocal independently without the presentation turning into one flat wall of sound?

The hi-res version makes details like cymbal decay, drum ambience, and bass articulation easier to hear, but a regular stream is still perfectly fine for the exercise.

Imagine The Musicians Standing Behind Your Speakers

Here's an easy way I like to picture what's happening.

Imagine three musicians standing in your living room behind your loudspeakers: a standup bass player, a singer, and an acoustic guitarist.

Now imagine your two loudspeakers have turned into microphones.

Point those microphones away from you and toward the performers and press record.

Those microphones capture the performance, including its space, depth, and placement.

Once the musicians leave, reverse the process. Turn those two microphones back into loudspeakers and point them toward your listening position.

If we've done a good job, the speakers should reproduce what the microphones originally captured, including the spatial information that tells our ears where those musicians were.

The bass player should seem to occupy a place.

The singer should occupy another.

The guitarist another.

The physical speakers are still sitting right there in front of us, but the performance should no longer sound trapped inside them.

What Are You Listening For?

Don't overcomplicate this exercise.

We're trying to answer a few very simple questions.

Does the performance have width?

Can you hear depth behind the loudspeakers?

Do sounds seem to occupy specific positions?

And most importantly, does the music feel detached from the speakers themselves?

Imaging and soundstage aren't quite the same thing. Imaging describes the precision of where something appears, while soundstage describes the larger sense of width, depth, air, and space. When both come together, the illusion becomes considerably more convincing.

That's when two speakers begin sounding like something much bigger than two sources of sound. 

So, Can Your Speakers Disappear?

Sit down, put on one of the tracks above, and close your eyes.

Forget about the equipment for a few minutes.

Listen to the space behind it.

The goal isn't simply to hear a left channel and a right channel. It's for those two physical sources to seemingly disappear and for the performance to take their place: with depth, width, height, space, and placement that suggest musicians rather than loudspeakers.

It might seem crazy that two speakers can pull off that illusion.

But when everything is right, they can.

And over the next installments, we'll continue working toward making that magic happen in your own system.