Soundstage

We all treasure a wonderful soundstage with amazing depth and width.

But where does it come from?

Soundstage width is an illusion created by subtle differences between the left and right channels. Our brains decode those differences—in timing, amplitude, and phase—to build a spatial map of where instruments sit. When an amplifier preserves those differences with high fidelity, the stage opens wide.

When it doesn't, the image collapses toward the center.

Channel separation is part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Even amplifiers with excellent measured separation can sound narrow if they introduce correlated noise, phase distortion, or if their power supply allows one channel to influence the other under dynamic conditions.

Low-level linearity matters too. The quietest sounds in a recording—the reverb tails, the room ambience, a singer's breath—carry spatial information. An amplifier that's slightly nonlinear at low levels clips those whispered cues, and the stage shrinks.

Then there's the power supply. A dual-mono design, where each channel has its own dedicated supply, prevents one channel's demands from modulating the other. This independence preserves the delicate interchannel differences that our brains interpret as width and depth.

Timing matters as well. Phase coherence through the amplification stage ensures that the tiny timing differences between channels—measured in microseconds—arrive at the speakers intact.

In short, soundstage width isn't one thing. It's the cumulative result of separation, linearity, power supply independence, and phase accuracy working together.

When an amplifier gets all of that right, the speakers disappear and the room fills with music.