magiccarpetride;685370 Wrote: > I now feel that there comes a time when you somehow manage to fine tune > your audio system to the point where apparent minor upgrades carry the > potential of making major inroads in terms of improved bass > reproduction, lowered noise floor, lowered upper midrange glassiness > and glare, more crisp and unwavering soundstage, etc. > > Raise your hand if you're with me!
I have experienced this several times in other fields as well as audio. One of the most dramtic is in color printing (making color prints in a darkroom, film chemicals all that sort of thing, for you young people this is the way we used to do it back in the stone age). The problem was that the color characteristics of different film and paper varied significantly, you had to use different color filters in the light path to get a good color balance in the print. When you started you made a guess, set the filters appropriately and made a test print. Invariably it was not right, it was too green or too magenta etc. You then made another guess as to how to change the filter "pack" to push it in the right direction, you started out with large changes which didn't seem to make much difference. Then as you got close to the correct filter pack, there was a massive perceptual shift, the result started looking "real" and now very small changes in the filter pack made big differences in the perceived image. If you actually measured the differences in the colors in the print they were much smaller than the changes you were making at the beginning, but they LOOKED much larger when you were close to "getting it right". I've experienced this in audio systems many times. If you have something in the system that is causing an issue it can push the perception of the sound far enough away from "real" (whatever that is), that other fairly large changes don't make much perceptual difference, but when that issue gets corrected now all of the sudden small changes in other areas can start becomming perceptually significant. And as others have stated, of COURSE its all in your head, its about perception. It doesn't have to be an issue that is excrutiatingly bad either. Sometimes it things like room acoustics or speaker placement. At one point I moved speakers around in the room, it didn't make a huge night and difference, but now other things being done to the system started making a bigger difference in the perceived sound. At one point someone sent me a DAC to look at, the designer had done a very good job in certain parts of the analog circuit, but no so great in others. The owner had been tweaking the analog stage and was expecting some differences in sound based on doing similar things to other DACs. I took this DAC and analyzed the digital section and found the clock had fairly high jitter, I modified this circuit and reduced the jitter by about 20 times (it still wasn't really low jitter, but it was much better than before). NOW those changes in the analog stage did make significant differences. Now further changes to the DAC circuit to get get the jitter down into the really low jitter ranges made big differences in sound. If I'd have made those changes originally you never would have heard it, they would have been swamped by the bad clock to begin with. Note that at no point did this DAC sound "BAD" or obviously distorted, it just made music sound significantly more real as the changes were made. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93154 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
