Sound localization is excellent when you carefully listen to a song, and you can tell exactly where all the instruments are and how far away they are from each other. However, not all headphones have very accurate imaging. Sound waves can travel from one ear to another with a slight delay, interfering with a stereo balance. On some occasions, you can also tell the sound’s size, and even shape. They can move from left channel to right, giving you a feeling of sound floating around your head. If you pay close attention when listening to music, you will realize that instruments sometimes change their position. That is why you normally hear the singer somewhere in front of you, while slightly on the right the guitarist is jamming his solo. In audio, the term “imaging” or “sound localization” stands for the ability to accurately pinpointing the direction of individual sounds in an audio recording.
Apart from isolation, sound signature, sound quality, and soundstage, there is also a capability of how accurate they are at imaging.
Headphones have many different characteristics that make them individually unique. Stereo imaging represents how precisely a headphone (or speaker) can pinpoint a direction of a specific sound.
