I've been recently spending some time with several audiophile friends and acquaintances, talking shop, comparing notes, exchanging tall audio stories.
One thing that caught my attention is how pretty much everyone kept insisting that speaker positioning and room treatment (even EQ-ing) are the most important things in achieving amazing sound quality. That got me thinking -- I've recently invested some effort toward experimenting more aggressively with speaker positioning and room treatment, only to achieve substantial degradation in the sound quality. Then I recalled a flurry of recent upgrades to my audio source (i.e. modified my digital transport, modified my DAC, obtained mains power conditioner, etc.). All these upgrades showed me how one can gain much greater improvement in the sound quality if one attacks the source of the signal properly. True, when the signal leaves its source and travels down the path of amplification and augmentation (or, shall I say, magnification?) it tends to degrade to a certain point. That's inevitable. Still, I firmly believe that it pays to invest as much as one can into the signal source, going all the way upstream (some would even say all the way upstream to the very power supply). In my opinion, the trick is not so much in ensuring that the original signal gets transferred without any loss (which would be extremely tricky to do), it's rather in doing everything possible to lower the noisy artifacts that tend to enter the signal chain. And these noisy artifacts tend to enter the chain mostly upstream, at the source. This is why good, clean power supply is so important. Also, good, quiet transport (both analog and digital) can make or break the sound quality. Any time I've managed to eliminate some of the noisy artifacts from my audio chain, I was gaining substantial, often times even drastic improvement in the overall sound quality. Same as wow and flutter must be kept at an absolute minimum in the analog chain, jitter must be fought back mercilessly in the digital arena. Investing in a good digital transport and then matching it with a good DAC is an essential requirement here. The transport must be ultra quiet, otherwise we end up with unlistenable glare that mars so many otherwise excellent digital setups. A lot of audiophiles seem to be willing to expend a lot of effort in fighting this awful digital glare at the wrong end -- by playing with the EQ, by placing speakers in different formations, and by treating the listening room for minimizing various artifacts. My position is that the problem must be attacked at the source, at its cause, not at the symptom, or its effect. If the source signal is tainted by the noisy power supply, noisy transport or noisy, jittery DAC, no amount of careful speaker positioning and room treatment will be able to rectify that mess. It's basically 'garbage in, garbage out'. Before we focus on speaker placements and room treatment, let's first make sure that we have solidified our signal at its source. -- magiccarpetride ------------------------------------------------------------------------ magiccarpetride's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37863 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85922 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
