Too bad that they do not define the terms because, afaik, there is no standard for those terms as applied to loudspeakers, as opposed to arrays of loudspeakers.I was reading about this on another site but they never fully explained what they were talking about. Does anyone here know the difference and can you explain it to me in layman's terms?
Let me try. 2D is width and height. 3D adds depth.
A good analogy is X, Y, and Z coordinates on a typical "grid" mathematical analysis.
I don't know if this is what you're talking about or not, but (at the risk of over-generalizing) I think there may be three different "levels" of speaker dimensionality.
Most decent speakers can give you good left-to-right imaging if they are set up well and if you sit in the right place. Sometimes these images can seem to be beyond the spread of the speakers.
Many speakers, when set up properly, can give you a good sense of depth, placing sound source images in the front-to-back dimension as well as left-to-right within the soundstage. In my opinion this is more enjoyable than mere left-to-right imaging. Sometimes these images and seem to be beyond the walls of the room.
Some speakers can do better still and seemingly take you into the acoustic space that's on the recording. I call this "envelopment", using David Griesinger's term. Achieving envelopment is particularly setup-dependent, in my experience.
All that being said, in my opinion timbre and dynamics matter more. As Jason Serinus wrote many years ago (paraphrasing), "I am not so much interested in where the musicians are on the stage, as I am in why they are on the stage."
I think there are different preferences on a continuum when it comes to soundstage dimensions. Some folks like a more focused and precise image. This side of the continuum precisely presents the soundstage front to back, side to side and top to bottom. On the other end of the continuum the soundstage can be much larger and open with a much less precise image. You might find yourself saying that "voice sounds so open but I can't tell where it's coming from."
The term envelopment isn't the best term in this context, although I think I know what it means. The problem is that there are many recordings which have the enveloping soundstage embedded in the recording. So, even if the setup tends to the more precise point on the continuum, it can still reproduce a sense of envelopment.
I believe the more off axis energy at mid and high frequencies the speakers can reproduce, the closer to enveloping end of the spectrum the soundstage may appear.
Having said the foregoing, I've also experienced some speakers setup well which have lots of off axis energy (dipoles) and was able to do do both ends of the continuum at the same time. That's a nice trick but requires a special setup and a big enough room.
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