In the last few days, we’ve been focusing on setup—on imaging, speaker placement, and what it takes to make a system disappear. And one of the things that’s come up again and again is how powerful it can be when the sound doesn’t just float between the speakers, but stretches deep behind them. That sense of depth—that illusion of a stage receding into the distance—is one of the clearest signs that your system is working.
And yet, it’s also one of the easiest things to miss.
Most systems, even expensive ones, end up projecting sound flat against the front wall. The singer’s in the right place, the instruments are left and right, but everything feels stuck in a two-dimensional plane.
There are a number of reasons this happens. We tend to assume it’s just a matter of speaker placement or room acoustics—and those certainly matter—but often, the lack of depth goes much further upstream.
Your electronics play a big role here. A DAC that smears low-level detail or flattens transients will rob the recording of the subtle time and spatial cues your brain needs to hear depth. Same with the preamplifier. If it’s overusing negative feedback to chase lower distortion figures, it can sound great on paper and sterile in practice. That’s one of the big pitfalls in modern design: when feedback is used without care, you end up with something that measures clean but bleaches the life out of the music. Depth is one of the first things to go (which is why we eliminated negative feedback altogether in the new PMG Preamplifier).
Then there’s the speaker itself. Some designs simply can’t reproduce spatial information well—either because their off-axis response is uneven, or because they smear phase and time alignment. You can have them perfectly placed and still feel like the stage stops at the wall.
Of course, speaker placement still matters. You’ve got to pull them far enough from the front wall to let the sound breathe. You’ve got to match their toe-in, tune your seat, make sure the reflections in the room aren’t skewing one side of the image. It’s all connected.
That’s what this process is about. Chasing not just fidelity, but realism. The sense that the walls behind the speakers have opened up, and you’ve been dropped into another space entirely. When that happens, the gear disappears—and the music finally arrives.
