Unpopular opinion: the best stereo system I own is actually built into my motorbike

Here’s an inconvenient truth: unless you listen with headphones or earbuds, most of the time you’re not experiencing stereo sound as it was intended by the artist.

It’s not your fault (probably). As humans, we tend to move around a lot. Meanwhile, our speakers tend to stay put. And that means we are forever moving in and out of the stereo sweet spot – that place where you are perfectly situated between left and right speakers, at the apex of an equilateral triangle.

This relatively tiny zone is the only place where we can hear true stereo imaging, that magical side effect of having two ears and one brain. It’s a psychoacoustic sleight of hand that lets us perceive sounds not as individual elements coming from each speaker, but from various points in space within a 180-degree arc in front of us.