Narrow vs Wide Speakers - Which is Best?
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 Published On Sep 11, 2023

The current thinking is that narrow speakers create a better defined sound stage and imaging than speakers that have a wide baffle. But is this true? And if true, how true is it?

In this video I tried to set up a test to determine that, but consider the results partly inconclusive. While I didn't hear a notable change in the sound stage and imaging, the speakers sounded different enough to cause a distraction. My impression is that if there is a change to the sound stage and imaging, it is very subtle and probably not something that could be used to consider when building (or buying) a new pair of speakers.

Also worth mentioning that I'm doing this in my acoustically treated listening room, and the results may differ if listening in the typical echo-chamber that most people listen in.
My listening to compare the two conditions was several songs that I'm very familiar with, playing them with and without the extensions in place.

The recordings were done one channel at a time with the mic placed 1 meter from the speaker pointed at the area between the midrange and tweeter. I then combined both of those mono recordings into a single stereo track and that's what played in the video. One is without the baffle extensions and the other is with it, while the third is the original track used.

The music I used is from the YouTube audio library and has a fairly good amount of stereo separation to project a reasonable sound stage. However it's not a particularly well recorded and produced piece to begin with, but I can't spend hours looking for something better. I would love to use something better, but use of copyright material could cause problems, including having the video taken down.

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