We audiophiles take a lot for granted.
Sit in the sweet spot, close your eyes, and there they are—the musicians, spread across the soundstage, each in their own space. The singer dead center, the drummer a few feet back, the bassist off to the side locking in with the kick drum.
We don’t just hear music; we see it.
Try explaining this to a non-audiophile, though, and you’ll get blank stares. “What do you mean you see them? It’s just sound.” To them, music is either coming from a speaker or it isn’t.
This is the magic of a great system—the illusion of depth, width, and placement that turns a simple recording into something almost tangible. It’s why we obsess over speaker positioning, room acoustics, and phase coherence. Get it right, and suddenly the walls disappear.
Once you’ve seen it, there’s no going back.
