Good read: why comparing specifications is pointless
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"I am sure plenty of people here would throw up on the idea of upmixing stereo music to multichannel/atmos." Floyd Toole- "I choose to add moderate up-mixing to most of my stereo music, finding the adjustable Auro-3D implementation in the SDP-75 to be quite pleasant." The Kota and the Toole are "critically listening" in immersive audio, please enjoy listening however you like over at "dry wall studios".
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How do you know they can't afford it? I recently reviewed a bunch of Chord gear from a member. Cost? Around $30K. He bought a Topping DAC to replace it all and said it sounded just as good. He was so nice about it that felt guilty to sell the Chord gear to someone else. I suspect money is not nearly as valuable to him as his ethics there. I personally replaced my $6,000 Mark Levinson DAC (and older multibit one), with a Topping as well. I have more capabilities and have not lost a bit of fidelity. I have however, lost prestige given how small it looks compared the Levinson DAC. A manufacturer send me a $20,000 DAC recently to test. I measure it and find a very common design flaw that Chinese DAC companies already solved (I call it ESS IMD Hump). Without measurements you would not know there is a problem here. Instead you would trust the price and heavy box this DAC in and rave about how good it is. This is the problem with you few. Instead of going by performance, you go by price as if there is any correlation between the two in audio electronics anymore. Putting a DAC in a 50 pound box and selling it in specialty dealers will surely add thousands of dollars to the retail price but likely does nothing for performance unless that is demonstrated objectively. Or subjectively with ears only. I mean which other field is judged like this? Why do you, as consumers, demand that stuff be expensive to be good? With no proof point other than some shill reviews in youtube or otherwise? When did you lose your way like this? Why not say, "show me reliably and repeatedly that this is a better device?" So we came about to change this atmosphere and change is occurring. More and more people who can easily afford expensive gear are realizing the proper way to test and review products and are changing their way. And becoming much happier for it as well. You want to live in the past and defend manufacturers over consumers, be my guest. But don't post it about me or audio science review.
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@kota1
Dr. Toole is using upmixing for enjoyment, not for evaluating performance of any product. For that, he 1000% believes in testing one speaker at a time in double blind setting, not his home. For your part, you have failed to explain why you are championing his room when it is a normal living room with hard surfaces and no acoustic products. Dr. Toole is no witness for your case: "Some reflected sound is good. Sometimes a lot of the right kind is even better. Concert halls are deliberately reflective, highly reverberant, spaces. This is my “classical” listening room in our custom-built Canadian home. Conceived as a space for enjoying large, spatially involving, works of music, it was the largest “concert hall” I could afford at the time. The very neutral, essentially omnidirectional, Mirage M1s “became” the orchestra and the room became a seamless extension of the recorded space. It provided a very satisfying, involving, experience. Because of the designed-in irregular scattering surfaces, the heavy carpet and thick felt underlay brought the reverberation time down to under 0.5s so the room sounded much less “live” than one would think. It was a nice-sounding space, pleasant to be in. Late at night I have been known to sit in the dark with a glass of good Scotch and listen to non-classical involving pieces of music like Dire Straits “Brothers in Arms” played at high level. I miss this room. Elsewhere in the house was a 7-channel home theater with very few reflections but a very good multichannel upmixer and spatial synthesizer, a Lexicon CP-1 – this was 1988." No one should feel obligated to turn their everyday listening rooms into padded cells and ugly acoustic products. Normal furnishings can act as acoustic features to serve similar purpose per above. Now, if you have a dedicated empty room for music/movie listening, then yes, you do want to put treatment there because otherwise its RT60 will be too high although even that can be cool effect for orchestral or big band music. The key to good sound in such places is a great speaker. Such a speaker will have off-axis response that is similar to on-axis so the mixing of the two does not cause a problem. Reflections laterally will then sound good and add the feeling of spaciousness which many of us crave. Please, please don't follow videos/articles from companies selling acoustic products, trying to scare you off with "reflections are bad." Per Dr. Toole statement above, and entire chapter in his book, that is absolutely wrong.
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@amir_asr I could care less if you are here. Free country. You do you. Do you have someone write your reviews?
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This entire line of thought makes zero sense. Why feel bad for selling his gear? Why did you buy it knowing Topping was better according to you?
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Half of this debate is actually user preferences versus accuracy. 'Musical' to me may mean elevated bass relative the male vocal frequencies. To the next person it may mean elevated mid range and lower high and low frequencies (i.e., 'highlighting the vocals'). One way to achieve user musical preferences is by years of mixing/ matching components, which may or may not get you where you want to be before you go bankrupt. Another way is to assemble a system that is as accurate as possible, and then dial in variances in the frequency response. Of course the room has to be dealt with as well. |
@blacktalon , welcome to the forum. I agree that preferences are going to vary and if you don't deal with the room the rest of the specs really won't matter. |
Most of us can agree that some parameters are vital, how many watts, impedance, speaker sensitivity etc in selecting hifi components. Unfortunately we are bombarded with measurements many of which are really meaningless in predicting how that component will sound. Saying that a THD of 0.005% reading means a product will sound better than one with 0.009% is absolutely ridiculous, you cannot hear such a difference, your speakers THD will be 10 times that maybe a 100. Ranking products on these measurements, or choosing them on such a basis is illogical. The measurement bears no relationship to how they will sound or interact with your system and less to what you will hear and nothing to do with what you will like. |
@kota1 Thanks. I've been here 6+ years but don't post much. |
@amir_asr |
The specs that I see that are important in this thread is speaker placement for immersive audio. I have been using the specs for a dolby 9.2.7 setup and then you see Floyd Toole with the same layout using the same specs. We both use matched speakers, bookshelf speakers for front and rear height channels, and we both use center height and VOG speakers. Our rooms are very different obviously but you can see those specs in both setups. Then you take a look at a much bigger room in Abbey Road studios and again, those same specs. Matched speakers, book shelfs as height channels tilted toward the MLP, center heights and VOG channels. The MLP for Toole and Abbey Road is also equidistant from the front and rear speakers like mine is, even though in some Dolby setup diagrams it is toward the rear of the room. Having it equidistant between front and rear channels makes a HUGE difference with the soundstage IMO. See how Abbey Road studios uses the same specs in their immersive setup:
Floyd Toole using the same specs at home:
My room is smaller than either of those, but the specs still fit in a smaller room for the speaker type, the angles and distances: |
@coralkong x10 I am out too. |
More immersive audio specs, here is a room even smaller than mine that Wilfred Van Balen also commented on, the mixing stage at Sony Pictures. It uses the same immersive audio specs that the Toole, the Kota and Abbey Road uses. Matching speakers, same angles, use of center height and VOG channel. This is where specs can be useful, if you are setting up your speakers at home using the same specs that the mixing stage uses it helps reproduce the audio as it was meant to be heard “The Sony Pictures Post Production mix stage adds to the growing footprint of Dolby Atmos enabled post production facilities and gives the Hollywood creative community the tools they need to deliver an immersive experience to consumers, adding additional depth, detail and clarity to the soundtracks,” said Curt Behlmer, Senior Vice President, Content Solutions and Industry Relations, Dolby Laboratories. “The hope of film buffs and makers alike is an experience that fully transports the audience into the world of the characters,” said Auro Technologies CEO Wilfried Van Baelen. “Having major releases from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment incorporating Auro-3D helps provide this immersive experience, with sound design unlike anything audiences have heard before, to ensure they are able to enjoy films how the creator intended—with full impact.”:
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These specs for setting up your room vary slightly between Dolby and Auro 3D. All of the rooms I have posted use a setup that work with both, a "universal" setup. The Dolby Institute lays out these specs for Speaker Specifications and Placement in the video I posted in my thread on setting up your room for Atmos. The Dolby specs also include "Room Tuning". Bryan Pennington, Senior Field Applications Engineer at Dolby Institute, discusses the importance of tuning your room. Some general specs he shares is 60/40 to 70/30 is a good rule of thumb to follow when figuring out how much absorptive surfaces to reflective surfaces to use in your room. That includes floor, walls, AND ceilings. Bryan states: "Money spent on this type of help (room treatments and acoustics) will be more valuable than ANY piece of gear you will ever buy" That brings us right back to the title of this thread, unless you have the specs of your room setup and tuning right, the specs of any gear you use in that room won’t matter.
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Bryan states there are many DIY sources for treating your room. The specs I followed are laid out by Anthony Grimani and then I tailored them for my room with the help of Wilfried Van Baelen. The specs for Anthony’s DIY acoustic treatment recipe is laid out in the diagram below. Bass traps in the corners and then combo panels on the front wall. The side walls alternate with diffusors and absorbers but do NOT mirror each other. You’ll notice if you have a diffusor on the left wall there will be an absorber on the opposite wall. 2D diffusors in the front of the room, 3D diffusors in back. Anthony recommends absorbers in the front half of the ceiling and 3D diffusors on the ceiling in back. Wilfried felt you should include bass traps on the ceiling. I found the Auralex Geofusors a perfect workaround. It is a 3D diffusor that can be back filled with absorption and double as a bass trap. I placed the Geofusors above the MLP. I hung an acoustic cloud of the Auralex Sustain Lens diffusors where you see the 3D ceiling diffusors in the diagram below. The cloud hangs perfectly beneath my PJ. Here is a diagram of Anthony’s specs for room treatment that I used for my room. IMO these are the specs that matter because unless you get them right the specs of your gear don’t matter, just like the title of this thread:
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@amir_asr you said: No, I am a private person and don’t want to walk around bragging about my own system. I only post it out of necessity where a test requires it as it did here: Almost all reviews include a list of the writers reference system components, the test conditions the equipment was used in, the content played during the review, comparisons to equipment from competitors, and possibly measurements. No one would consider you listing and posting the above bragging, it is generally required if you check around. If you need help setting up the proper test conditions in your room check with The Dolby Institute:
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@coralkong , “This will be my last post to you. You are acting like a petulant child. Go away, I'm not buying your BS, and no how many times you feel the need to get the last word, I don’t agree with you.”
+1 me as well. |
Exactly. |
When it matters, I do the same:
The Lyngdorf is the black box sitting on my (unused currently) Mark Levinson No 532 power amplifier. For those of you complaining about the cost of the Lyngdorf TDAI-3400, the 523 costs $20,000 by itself! I test my near-field/desktop products and there, equipment is listed as well: Iconoclast CLR Cable Listening Tests I don't get to enjoy it often enough given how much time I spend working at my desk. Anyway, after a while I switched to WBC cable. Once again, immediate reaction was that the sound was more open, bass was a bit more tight, etc. This too passed after a few seconds and everything sounded the same again. Really, all of these protests could be avoided if you had spent just a few minutes reading how and why I test things. There is incredibly scrutiny of what I do by members at ASR and industry at large. You have to be far more prepared to find a criticism that can stick. |
You are the one that decided to brand your website as "science". You admittedly are neither a scientist nor have a "lab"/studio/listening room that follows well established specs (see Toole, Kota1, Abbey Road, Sony, and Dolby Institute in the above posts). At this point you have two choices. Align yourself with the "science"/specs like the Toole, the Kota, et al. or make a very simple change to your brand acronym. Currently you are branded ASR Just change the first letter (A) to the very next letter in the alphabet and I think you’ll nail it. Good luck with your website and I am taking the good counsel of my fellow members, no more feeding your trolls, bye! |
@kota1
The website is not called "science." It is Audio Science Review. Audio Science and engineering is our guiding light, not what random poster says on a website. We review and digest audio science and use it to our advantage to build superbly sounding systems without wasting on nonsense that does nothing for the performance of your system. We can see the sharp difference in the way you blindly ran an automated EQ system that butchered the bass response in room. Every frequent reader of ASR forum would have been able to school you on proper target to say nothing of the formal study by Dr. Toole. These are mistakes that readers of ASR either don't make or are given immediate help to fix.
I didn't think that would ever happen! Thank you for finally letting go of my pant legs. 😀 As for luck, thankfully we don't need at ASR as there is strong appeal to both audiophiles and members of the industry to read and view objective and science based information about audio. We have more reach than this site and stereophile combined. You should wonder what the rest of the world knows that you don't.....
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“The hope of film buffs and makers alike is an experience that fully transports the audience into the world of the characters,” said Auro Technologies CEO Wilfried Van Baelen. “Having major releases from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment incorporating Auro-3D helps provide this immersive experience, with sound design unlike anything audiences have heard before, to ensure they are able to enjoy films how the creator intended—with full impact.”: Auro-3D filed for bankruptcy back in June of this year.
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Amir_asr, thank you for posting on this forum. I've never posted before. However, I think raising the profile of reproducible quantitative measurements in the audiophile world is worth supporting. I love the audiophile world because of it's confluence of science, art and what it means to perceive as a human. |
I should also add, I recently purchased a set of 802d4 speakers. I have heard the 802d3, which measure similarly, and felt there was a "harshess" at the top end. I chose to stick with my 20+ year old electrostatics at the time. After hearing the 802d4 I was immediately sold on the sound. I like them more than speakers I've listened to that measure better on your site. They also look amazing in walnut, which won't show up in acoustic measurements. 😉 Reprodicible measurements that can be compared are important, but more important is giving the consumer tools to figure out what measurable aspects are important to them. Is there something in the 802d3 vs d4 measurements that would have told me I would like one more rham the other (all other factors being equal)? If not, the value of measurements goes down. |
