How does widening the soundstage works?

[JSBach]

Hi, just being curious

How does the soundstage widening really works?

I had some portable speakers from Creative, The Travelsound 200 or 2000 i don't remember them well, the were rectangular and foldable

They had a switch that widened the soundstage, as i recall they sounded impressive with the widened soundstage, like they were placed feet away from me. But they were only a few inches from me.

They have extra-speakers hidden?

[CrowdAds]

[dfkt]

Usually it's some psychoacoustic trick that messes with the phase of the stereo signal, or adds complementary/canceling/delayed signals to the opposite channels, similar to an inverse crossfeed.

[WalkGood]

I've never had a unit that offers that, good point on "inverse crossfeed" description dfkt, that makes total sense to me.

Edit: I mean good analogy.

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by JSBach

They had a switch that widened the soundstage, as i recall they sounded impressive with the widened soundstage, like they were placed feet away from me. But they were only a few inches from me.

I guess its very similar to how a headphone crossfeed works. Some fraction of the bass frequencies is time delayed and then added to the other channel to make it feel like they're originating from further away.

[xnor]

There are a couple of ways to do this but a common one is to take the L channel, attenuate it, invert the phase and add it to the R channel and vice-versa.

Crossfeeds are usually a bit more sophisticated by adding phase shift / delay instead of inverting the phase (to reduce stereo separation) and treating lows/mids (lower attenuation) differently from treble (higher attenuation, see head shadow).

[dfkt]

I really like the way your foo_dsp_xfeed sounds, xnor.