Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

I feel like ASR  has clarified some things for me. I'm not sure that anybody has changed my opinion about anything in audio. At best I get new perspectives, and sometimes conceptual corrections about various technical subjects. I definitely have some subjective preference differences with Amir about some products. Amir has also prompted me to buy some inexpensive products that I've been very pleased with overall. 

@mahgister

I dont understand why people are so polarized... With agressivity...

This is a good point. I saw an old polarizing topic revisited in the news recently. Remember the old meme that was going around with the dress, about whether the dress was white and gold or black and blue? It really got people upset because their perception was obvious to them, and others claiming to see something completely different almost feels like a blatant lie. It’s a challenge to basic reality that’s plainly evident. It feels frustrating. (As for that one, I never took a side because the photo looked odd, like the color and contrast was intentionally ambiguous so I felt like I was being set up.)

I feel some of this frustration with stereo interaural crosstalk screwing up the tone with center panned images. I just went to the Pacific Audiofest and heard a bunch of otherwise very exquisite systems just completely ignoring this problem, with everybody acting like there’s nothing wrong. I hear it so clearly that it’s mind boggling to me. It’s a huge flaw in terms of what I expect from a high end system. How can people put up with this in something that’s had so much effort and expense put in to it to approach perfection?

I think it’s kind of like the dress. They don’t interpret the comb filtering the same way I do, so it comes across completely different perceptually to them, perhaps as a sense of depth, 3D dimensionality. I just move off center when I want to hear the center panned vocals or instrumentals sound better. This works for everybody because now I’m not taking up the "prime" center seats at the show.

It's absolutely critical to try things and find out what works for you. But it means you have to try stuff. Sometimes the resulting configuration ends up looking funny and being totally unconventional. But if the months go by and you remain happy with it, that's what matters

My latest funny looking setup involves angled gobos placed at the first reflection points on the side walls and then more gobos behind me to either side. Here at work I had learned about absorbing first reflections on sidewalls, but then replacing them with delayed reflections by bouncing sound off the back wall toward the first reflection points. A panel or TubeTrap that absorbs highs on one side and reflects them on the other will let you do this. My impression is that it sounds fantastic! But wouldn't have know had I not tried it. Just absorbing or diffusing first reflections is not nearly as pleasing to me. If my room was wider this might not be necessary, actually I know it's not as important because I was set up in a wide room at one point and it sounded great. The narrow room was a relative letdown. 

I fully expect that some listeners may not be as impressed as I am with my non-standard setup, or may not like it at all. I try to be OK with that, and I mostly succeed. 

I have concluded from experience that there are things that I cannot hear. I don't hear differences in dacs or digital cables, or power conditioners. I don't hear jitter issues from digital sources, network switches and cables, or streaming devices, or distortion issues associated with feedback in solid state amplifiers. I don't hear the special magic in analog sources such as tape or vinyl, nor do I detect euphoric distortion from tube amplifiers. I don't hear differences from power cables or other expensive cables.

I'm not going to argue about whether other people hear these things or not. I only know with confidence that I can't hear them. 

What I'll claim I can hear clearly is shortcomings with the phantom center image when using only two speakers for stereo playback. Others claim they hear no problem with this in a properly setup system, and feel that it actually sounds superior to multi-channel systems or setups that employ some kind of inter-aural crosstalk reduction. I believe them. It's hard for me to fathom but they say they don't hear a problem even though they can hear all kinds of things I can't hear. 

I've been in a lot of showrooms over the years, several HiFi trade shows, and listened to high end systems in people's homes. To my ears, straight stereo two speaker playback ALWAYS has a particular sound to it, a degradation of the tone of center panned sounds that's unmistakable. It's a particular effect, and like Amir says about dipole planar speakers, I find it tiresome. 

So that's my problem. I have to deal with it. Those who don't hear it as a problem are lucky because they only have to buy two speakers and don't have to find a way to do any up-mixing. On the other hand, I'm lucky because I don't have to fuss over cables, dacs, streamers, power supplies and analog sources. 

In building my own horn speakers, I had no luck in achieving a satisfying sound until I paid attention to the science Amir is referencing. I should note that I was aware of this science from the beginning of the project and believed in it, but had some conceptual errors about how to get there, so the initial result was way off the mark. I finally realized that there was simply no way to adjust my way out of the physical arrangement choices I had made. I had to choose a different tweeter horn flare and position it differently, and work on the crossover setting until I could get a smooth on and off axis response down to below 600Hz. I didn’t have access to a Spinorama machine so it took a lot of painstaking measurements on and off axis, setting the time window in REW short enough to reasonably simulate an anechoic space, and carefully measuring the placement of the microphone. It’s amazing to hear something finally so satisfying when before I was questioning the capabilities of the drivers, cabinets, room and electronics to have the capability to get there. The science really did lead me much closer to where I wanted to be, although taste still comes in to play. I had to tweak the on-axis measured response slightly by ear but I eventually reached a sound quality that I was starting to believe might be impossible without spending a lot more on electronics and drivers. Even thought I knew it was a problem, the poor off axis response sounded bad enough that it made me doubt the quality of components that weren’t at fault. I can't imagine the rabbit's hole I would have went down trying to correct the issue by trying different amps, DACs, and cables before getting that sorted out.