What I find very difficult to understand and sense is soundstage . That is one thing I am not able to understand/feel/ whatever you call it
Soundstage, actually is quite simple to understand and identify if you know what you are looking for.
When you sit in front of a pair of speakers in the sweet spot, what you hear, unless you pay attention, usually comes from between the two speakers. The main singer or instrument will be dead centre between the speakers, and the accompanying instruments will come from either the left or the right speaker.
Let us call this flat line stage. All the artists are lined against a wall one beside the other.
In a recording, particularly when the number of instruments are large, all the artists cannot sit in a straight line. There is some depth between one artist and another. If you keep a mike in front of the main artist, what the other artist plays, will not be recorded with the same gain as the main artists. The sound has to travel to the mike, and it will lose some of its energy and time on the way. A good editor will recognise this energy difference and try to keep it in the CD. A good system will be able to extract this time/energy differential and recreate the distance between the main and the second artist. If you close your eyes and listen carefully, you should be able to place the second artist as being
behind the main artist.
This is called soundstage.
Modern albums take this a little forward. Each artist is recorded with individual mikes kept at the same distance from each artist. If there are 12 artists, there will be 12 mikes recording each artist individually. The editor, when mixing,
creates the time/space/energy differential. Rather than hearing the second artist as coming from the left speaker, you will feel the artist standing next to your left ear and playing. And there are no speakers there! The amp/speaker combination will be able to push particular sound beyond two dimensions into a third dimension of space around you.
All this is done with just two speakers.
Cheers