OFF: What hi-fi equipment do you use to listen to Hawkwind?

[Alastair Sumner]

>One of the things that always intrigues me is why some music sounds great
>on headphones but some doesn't, often because it seems to need that space
>you refer to, to "breathe" somehow...

Here's a short article about Stereo that I found yesterday. They make a
distinction between multi-track recordings mixed down to two channels and
true stereo recordings. I wish I knew more about this from a technical
point of view because I've no idea what techniques are actually used in the
modern music recording industry.

http://www.tnt-audio.com/topics/realstereo_e.html

One area where I frequently hear the stereo effect is through my bog-
standard Nicam Sharp tv. When you are sat a certain distance and angle in
front of the two little loudspeakers the speakers themselves seem to
disappear and you can hear voices and other sounds way over to the left or
to the right. You can hear the whole space, not merely left channel, right
channel and middle. Interestingly the effect seems to be much more common
and pronounced on Channel 5 than it is on BBC 1 or 2. I've always wondered
how this works through headphones because it seems like the angle of the
listener in relation to the two loudspeakers is crucial.