On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 20:17 -0700, Dave D wrote: > I'm listening through my Labtec :) headphones,
Be warned, headphones have all sorts of non-linearities. > since they sound better > than my old Advent speakers (might get new speakers later this year). Large Advents? I had four of them. Still have two. Altho they were kinda like my gradfather's ax, in that I replaced the tweeters and the woofers in each. I bought the first ones in 1971 or so. Large Advents have a serious problem with linearity. They sound great when played fairly loud with an amplifier that delivers a lot of watts. But they do not sound good at low levels. You need to crank them up to near live sound levels. And you have to deliver at least 100 real watts per channel to them. A lot of receivers are rated 70 or so watts, but can't deliver it continually, and the Advents have to have it constantly. Advents sound a lot better with 200 or more watts per channel, which is a bit weird, as you rarely listen to more than about 5 to 10 watts at normal listening levels. But the transient stuff with Advents are brutal loads. I retired mine because my wife was tired of looking at them. She was actually tired of looking at them a decade before I replaced them. > It is a bit depressing. Feel like I'm missing out; didn't think my > hearing was _that_ bad. Try this, re-encode them at something far lower fidelity, like 120 CBR. See if you can tell then. Or even worse. For a lot of music, moderate VBR can sound pretty decent. What you need to listen to are subtle things like the sense of acoustic space, the way that the piano sounds decay slowly, or the snap and sizzle of hit hats. Or brushes on a snare in a jazz trio. When it is right, it sounds more real. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
