Tommy and Dionysus:

Although your comments are valid, they're not about the sound staging. They're about various quality, noise, and amplification issues. Perhaps I should clarify the term "sound staging".

Sound staging is the ability of a given audio product to reproduce the 3-dimensional image of the recorded instruments. Granted, the recording and mastering side of things plays a big role in this, but assuming a given "reference" recording, then different equipment will more accurately reproduce the soundstage.

The competitions use a specific recording for testing this, and the judges base their ratings on how clearly defined the instrument locations appear to be in the soundstage.

Because the soundstage is so subtle, tiny variations in equipment setup can have a large effect on the perceived soundstage. And MP3 uses a special method for compressing the stereo channels (in fact, there are some options regarding how you can control the stereo encoding of an MP3 file), which is why .WAV support is important to any discussion about sound staging with regards to the Empeg. This is why Doug "tanstaafl" Burnside is so interested in getting .WAV support into the Empeg: he competes in these competitions. I expect he'll be chiming in here pretty quickly... he's the one who told me about the way the competitions are judged.

Now I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that I don't think the head unit has very much to do with the sound staging. It's more in the speakers, amps, and the source material than it is the head unit. As long as the head unit does a correct job of turning the source data into line-level stereo output, it shouldn't matter much.

Then again, there's a whole area of audio equipment (like the Sony ES compact disc players) which are more expensive and go to extra trouble to make sure the line-level output is perfect. But some of the extra things they do sound like snake oil to me, like using an extra-stable CD transport mechanism to reduce vibrations transmitted to the disc. I mean, you can prevent skips this way, but other than that, the data is digital and the transport mechanism has nothing to do with the sound as long as the bits are there. The D/A converters are more important than the transport mechanism, and a really good D/A conversion system is vital to turning the bits into real audio waves. As I understand it, the D/A converters in the Empeg are good ones (although I don't know the technical details of all of this).

There's a good discussion of the importance of good D/A converters can be found here, and I think that any discussion of the Empeg's sound stage will have to defer to the information there about D/A conversion jitter. That's probably the one piece of the Empeg circuitry that can affect the soundstage the most, is the accuracy of the clock controlling the output of the D/A convertor.



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Tony Fabris