Mike, when you highlight speaker “DESIGN” are you implicitly saying that certain DESIGNS are likely to provide better soundstage? And if so, in what order would you rate the speaker DESIGNS from the soundstage point of view?
Nicoff - I can make some generalization concerning design and their overall affect on soundstaging.
I always prefer to look at a speaker in terms of its design rather brand A is better than brand B. Once we decide on a design, then we can have discussions regarding our preference for brand A vs brand B. At the outset, each design has its pro's and con's and some designs are jack of all trades, master of none. It's amazing to me how often we get caught up in arguments like: "Rockport is better than Wilson or Wilson is better than B&W or Tidal speakers are better than YG or Harbeth is better than Spendor or Martin Logan is better than Raidho and so on." One need only compare the design of the new Borensen speakers to Raidho speakers to understand what I'm trying to say.
Instead, I think we advance as audiophiles once we begin to look at different designs and understand what they do well and what their short falls are and their strengths are. I don't look at Magenepan's and think "Magnepan vs B&W". I look at Magnepan and think "planar magnetic" and start thinking about that design. How does that design interact with the room? How does that design interact with the listener? How is that design off-axis? How is that design with accompanying equipment, cables and sources? How does that design deliver ultimate dynamics? And so on...
There are so many wonderful designs to deliver music. Cone & dome is by far the most popular and quite honestly, offers many wonderful advantages and is probably why it's so popular, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate, understand and experience other designs.
Back to your question....when we are defining soundstage, it's important to look at a number of factors (3D/depth, width and height to name a few). I think the soundstage champion, that I've heard, has to be omnipolar designs by the simple nature of their intended design and the more the speaker incorporates more omnipolar design principles and technology, the greater the affect on soundstaging. What do I mean? Speakers which use a dipole tweeter, such as the old Mirage speakers can't compare to a speaker which incorporates omnipolar tweeter, midrange and midbass (down to 100hz for example).
Dipoles, which can include planar magnetic and electrostatic would come in second. Horns and Cone & Domes would come in third. This does not mean that a cone & dome speaker can't be setup to achieve greater soundstaging than a dipole. We have all heard incredible soundstaging by many traditional box speakers. What it means is that different designs attempt to achieve different and superior results in certain areas. For example, by the sheer nature of their design, horns can offer the greatest level of dynamics without sacrificing time domain issues like some line arrays for example. However, even with horns, proper care must be taken should the bass horns be separate from the midrange and tweeter.
I find speaker designs absolutely fascinating and there are many areas of exploration. We could start a whole new thread about the integration of different driver designs within a single speaker (plasma tweeter with traditional cone drivers for example or cone drivers with or without wave guides with horns). This is where the issue of coherency comes into play. A plasma tweeter might be the greatest thing in the world, but if it doesn't integrate well with the other drivers, then who cares? Then we can look at speakers with external crossovers, active speakers vs passive and so on.
