The end of the road for Stereo

Graham Slee wrote: I find what I look for in a two channel system hard to explain, but I'll have a try. I will call it landscape for the want of a better word. An orchestra goes left to right as well as front to back, and sometimes its stage is ramped. The A and B channels should only be able to do left, right and middle, but in analogue, phase is unescapable. An artist painting a landscape might, through technique, be able to give an impression of 3D on a flat canvas. Phase is able to project an illusion that has distance, height and width, to give a musical landscape, or as some have said, the atmosphere of the hall or the ambience of the venue. These are the the things I want to hear and have been the things I've concentrated on, starting as a hobbyist, building and researching my own audio electronics (I suppose working in electronics at the same time helped), and then making my own career out of it this last 20 or so years. I found in trying to get my message across, I was fighting against alternatives. I never wanted a fight, but long ago it seems that PRAT was eroding the interest in the stereo illusion, it being replaced by muscle, a sort of sound gymnasium. I fail to understand why. Was it because the very things which lead to recreating the stereo illusion were not understood? "OK marketing department, we can't do the trick but we can do the muscle. Come up with some clever advertising." Skip to the present, and the Galaxy now has stereo speakers, with a 3D effect. Does it project these audible images I spent a good half of my life chasing? I'm going to answer that with a great big NO. And you'll not convince me otherwise. If nobody gets the point, then it collapses back to me being that hobbyist, having worked for what?

There's nothing wrong with casual listening when you're out and about (as long as it doesn't offend others), and often I'll have some music playing while getting on with things (usually to run-in a job I'm working on). While getting my mind around this post I was listening to Terminal Frost form Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason, with my back to the speakers, and even though it's a studio album, I was able to recognise the efforts of the band to get its music across using the stereo medium. I thought perhaps that's it - my part in my generation - that it was just a one-off in human history never to be repeated. And in a way, it started to make me feel better. Kids that just got together in their many separate ways and grew with it - grew with stereo and its wonderful imagery - that others simply don't comprehend. We took the equipment of the old fogeys of our generation and played at making it better. The monied got involved but they didn't comprehend either, but nevertheless, hijacked it and milked it for all it was worth. Yes, it must have been the psychedelic generation, its form of escape into its version of utopia, and some few of us stayed while others drifted away, until we became a minority, and the answer really is 63. 

Not the subject of the original posting but can anyone give a simple explanation of how the 'phasing' that Graham mentions to describe how analogue can give the illusion of depth & height to stereo recordings? I can hear the positioning of musicians in live recordings, particularly where ambient mikes are used (e.g. Buena Vista Social Club).  I appreciate such recordings can pick up the separation side and back in terms of distance the sound has to travel to the point of recording. But how is this captured on the recording?