magiccarpetride;582826 Wrote: 
> If that's the case, I'm sorry to inform you that you've wasted ten
> grand.
> 
> A progressively better audio system is indeed better because it
> progressively reveals more musical information. If you hear all the
> same things on your $10K system as you hear on your $1K system, you've
> just foolishly pissed away $9K!
> 
> Any time I've upgraded my audio system I've ended up hearing ten times
> more details. That's why I kept upgrading. If it wasn't for that
> exhilarating experience, I would've never spent an extra penny on
> audio.
> 
> Again, room treatment is meaningless the moment you put the headphones
> on. In my experience, a good, high quality system is very resilient to
> speaker positioning/room treatment. Yes, you can degrade the soundstage
> clarity with sloppy speaker placement, and yes, you can and up with a
> messier than necessary bass, but still, good system will continue
> delivering amazing illusion of music under various sub-optimal
> conditions.
> 
> If you have a system that delivers acceptable performance only under
> the most optimal conditions, and if you can coerce it into sounding
> like crap by the virtue of making minor changes in your room, I'm
> afraid your system is pretty feeble to begin with. Go back to the
> drawing board, and figure out how to build a more resilient system,
> that's all I can tell you.

In recording studios and mastering suites where decisions are made
about how recordings will sound when we buy them, more money is spent
on acoustic treatments than is spent on the technical equipment. This
is because it is (generally) done once and HAS to be right. 

What we listen to at home is a "replay system" comprised of the
speakers and the room. The two act together. You cannot seperate them.
The behaviour of speakers is determined by the room they sit in. You
cannot just hear the speakers. The closest you can get is to use
nearfield monitors to try an isolate the direct sound from the room
reflected sound...but no mastering engineer would relay on those alone,
because they are atypical of the sound consumer will experience in
domestic environments. The room has a MASSIVE impact on the sound. Even
the best speakers in the world (?) are not immune form the interaction
with the room - it really is simple physics. Humans are
designed/evolved on purpose to recognise and respond to reflected
sounds and ambient spatial clues from those reflections. 


Room correction (I prefer DRC as it gives benefits such as time/phase
alignment that bass traps etc don't even touch) makes the biggest
difference to making the music sound "good" for me - once you get past
some arbitary level of basic competency in the
source/DAC/Amp/Speakers.

I've heard a £120k system sound like cr*p in a bad (untreated) room and
a £1k system sound superb with £2.5k of DRC inserted in it.

YMMV of course. Just giving an alternate perspective.


-- 
Phil Leigh

You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it
ain't what you'd call minimal...
Touch(wired/XP) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF
Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x
LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Pekin Tuner, Townsend
Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect
cables
Kitchen Boom, Outdoors: SB Radio, Harmony One remote for everything.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82520

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