Q: What is sound stage and imaging with regards to audio?

Setting The Stage

Sound stage and imaging are important concepts in high-performance audio. You'll also want to familiarize yourself with dispersion, which refers to how well a loudspeaker can maintain a consistent sound throughout the room.

Since we don't always sit in the "sweet spot" of a room, speakers with wide dispersion and a quality sound stage are ideal, especially in larger media rooms. When you say a sound stage is produced by a system, you are talking about how clearly and convincingly it reproduces a sense of space encoded on the recording.

Though the terms sound stage and imaging are often used interchangeably, imaging actually describes how precisely sounds occur or emanate within a sound stage

Picture a concert hall: This is your sound stage. Now imagine players standing on stage with their instruments: These are your images.

Playing In The Same Band

There's a strong possibility that not all of your speakers will be from the same maker-and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

However, combining speakers from the same manufacturer generally is a good thing. Companies often design complementary speaker types to form a 5.1 system, from the highly affordable home-theater-in-a-box systems at your local megastore to high-performing custom audio companies that may build you a setup with $5,000-per-pair front channels, $3,000-per-pair rears, a $2,500 center channel and a $1,000 subwoofer. Speakers from the same company should ensure that they will be well matched in terms of overall performance: frequency response (tonal balance), low distortion, dynamic capabilities and more-all to achieve greater consistency in your audio. On the other hand, you don't want to settle for a mediocre system just because the speakers all bear the same name. It's conceivable to start with a great pair of left and right front channels and go from there as your budget will allow.

Center Of Attention

You can make your surround-sound setup sound like a large concert hall, a small hall, a jazz club, a church, a sports arena and much more, thanks to digital signal processing in receivers, with other settings allowing you to give more or less weight to certain speakers in your arrangement. With DVD movies and TV programs supplying the majority of your entertainment, keep in mind that much of the dialogue you will hear fires straight from the center channel, generally located right below your TV.

The center channel is usually the hardest-working speaker in your multichannel setup. If you were responsible for just about all the sound in the middle of the screen, including the dialogue, singing and music, you'd be pretty tired, too. So make sure you pick out a center channel that's up to the task.