How tall do you like your images?

I dismiss all stereo speakers that don’t sound like I have front heights, surrounds and back heights active. Many of you stereo purists crumble to dust and get washed down the gutter when the bar is set high (in spite of what you spent). 😉

(Yeah...yeah...your let down sht sounds brilliant!! Don’t i know all about it....)

@deep_333

i have a separate 9.3.6 Trinnov/Dolby Atmos home theater system in a room inside my house. my 2 channel room in my barn ’out multi-channels’ my home theater system with better media. it’s more real at energizing ever molecule in my room at it’s best.

it ought to be entirely recording dependent. the more your system shows you differences between recordings, the better it is. cuz they are all different.

if your system and room have sufficient acoustics, space and signal path headroom, then any sort of mix present on the recording should be laid out for you to hear.

you should not consciously hear speakers nor the room. it should be just the music. some mixes bring the players into your room, others bring you to the venue space. your system should be capable of both at the highest levels.

if you play ’Whole Lotta Love’ at wrap 9 the sound should be everywhere; around, above and across the soundstage. closely mic’d concert grand piano should take up the whole stage. live recordings of a small combo jazz club should sound like that. full orchestral should be spread out all across and high and low......if the mic set-up and mix/mastering engineer did his job correctly.

height of players should be slightly different every time and scaled to the recording. one size fits all is a sort of distortion.

if it’s all one height, or one space, then you have work to do. there are so many variables to work out as to cause and effect. and certain driver types struggle to recreate some soundstages.

my room was set up to be able to do large scale music at the top level. took me many years to get that part right, and then more years to get intimate music to work too. it’s not a trivial thing.

When you said 9.3.6, i already know you fooked up with cramming too many quantity over quality speakers in a li’l room ( i have a 30 by 35 room and i refuse to go any higher than 5.2.4 for atmos music listening that will startle all 6.023*10^23 molecules that make up your soul, lol)....When you said Trinnov, i already have a feeling that you heavy handed everything with the room correction algorithms and all kinds of crap that made it sound clinical and digital ( you are indeed paying for that lifetime customer support from a dimdim who knows diddly about what’s going on inside that processor, however)....

@deep_333

when someone calls me out for being on the wrong track, i take them seriously. part of which includes trying to understand where they are coming from and see what i can learn. so i looked at your previous posting history and found this description of some of your systems.

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/spend-on-the-streamer-or-on-the-dac/post?postid=2062410#2062410

you seem to have very strongly expressed viewpoints. yet looking at this, i think that our viewpoints for what is high level performance are not aligned, our expectations for quality performance are not at the same level. yet if you are happy and enjoying your path then more power to you. i wish you the best.

i was a fan of SACD multi-channel myself back 20 years ago. i built a dedicated room for 5.1 SACD listening at the highest levels.

https://www.audiogon.com/systems/615

what i discovered was that my 2 channel smoked it. the media for 2 channel was so much better that the technical advantages of 5.1 could not surpass it. my 2 channel out ’multi-channeled’ the multi-channel. i still own 1000 SACD multi-channel discs.

part of it was vinyl verses digital. the vinyl was much better, even though i had state of the art digital. so i removed the rear channels and surround gear from my 2 channel room and re-tasked those funds to reel to reel tape decks. that was in 2008.

i always had a separate home theater room in my home with multi-channel surround supporting movies. over the years it was improved as technology advanced. now it’s fairly high level with the Trinnov, 9.3.6 Revel surround speakers and 3 Funk Audio subwoofers. i only do movies there. certainly music videos which take full advantage of Dolby Atmos can be entertaining, but my 2 channel is far superior for music only.

maybe also explain your logic of how the Trinnov is not a high level processor. that does not sound right to me.

@deep_333

thank you for updating your system info. certainly some big steps up from what i had been able to find looking back at your posting. congrats on your well thought out systems.

i might recommend doing an Audiogon system page so other readers of your strongly made posts can see where you are coming from.

which does not change my basic points, which is that ultimate 2 channel surpasses multi-channel music. and i feel that dsp, however neatly applied, does not compete at the highest levels to a pure analog signal path fully executed room and system for music only. but at less than an all out effort, dsp does enter into high level performance for music. ultimately dsp is a band aid for problems. which are not always existing.

just my 2 cents, YMMV. lots of blood has been spilled discussing that question. like religion, no one ever changes their mind. if you are ever in the Seattle area, you are welcome to visit and listen for your self. i hope it happens.

Trinnov verses BACCH? i’d need to do more research about it. Trinnov is targeted at Movie Soundtracks with object based Atmos mixes primarily. it’s not ideal for tricking up conventional 2 channel music content. hard to say how that might go. i don’t ask my Trinnov to do that. but BACCH verses my conventional (analog and digital) 2 channel sources and signal path.....it’s not at that level.

and i own 12,000 records, 300 reel to reel master dubs, do lots of streaming high rez and own 20tb of 2 channel files. there is so little interesting multi-channel music content it’s hard to base my system building efforts on it.

there is more to music than soundstaging and spatial clues. there is not only timbre, but tonal density, flow, scale, weight, authority, bloom, bass articulation and tone leading edge cohesiveness, and decay. there is cohesion at high SPL’s. and all together the realism, suspension of disbelief, emotive content and human touch.

as far as what digitizing and application of dsp does to an analog signal, the only way to know is to compare it directly to the pure analog signal. and highest level vinyl, tape or even digital contains musicality that gets lost at each adc/dac stage.

Bernie Grundman said it best, every time a signal is processed digitally something is lost, and there is no recovery. you might add something, or change something, but you also lost something.

nothing is free.

no doubt there are great things with dsp and perfect situations for dsp.

when i see very high level analog sources in systems with these ultra dsp processes i pay close attention. but when i don’t, then the result is not that relevant to me. the proper reference is missing. i have top level analog, and also the highest level digital too.

and let’s face it, whether BACCH dsp digital, or all analog, these are all very high level music making processes. this is not good and bad, this is all degrees of good. but splitting hairs is what we do in this hobby. what we are passionate about.

i generally prefer the original digital master to the Lp made from it, but we don't always get the chance to own that low gen digital master, so the result is variable. so generalizing is hard. but unless you sample the choices and compare, you really don't know.

in any case i'm always wanting the native file or native analog recording. the less mucked up the better. which is why dsp is a non starter for me.

@deep_333

check out this video on upmixing from audioholics

watched the video. not sure his up-mixing comments are relevant to my situation. he starts talking about using a multi-channel receiver or processor as a preamp. and his comments seem to assume everything is already digitized.

not a right or wrong kinda thing, just a different universe of system culture.

and his absolute focus is on sound staging, not musical refinement and tonal density or texture/timbral realism. it never comes up because it’s not his focus. OTOH my opinion is that sound staging is secondary to those aspects of musical touch.

he does not really "get" where i’m at, he needs to experience some different type systems that don’t start from his place to know how this can go. he is talking to a different crowd and set of priorities.

the listener needs to look at the media type they listen to, the quality of the sources, and the potential purity of their signal path before you can judge what to do with the level of purity they have. garbage in<->garbage out. what is at risk of losing with the approaches you are contemplating? i have much to lose. but that varies.

@erik_squires

Also, the ideal height for some speakers is below the tweeter axis. B&W often does this, some do this by accident. Ear at tweeter axis / height is a starting point, the sweet spot is often below the tweeter.

and proper toe in is relative to listening position. if you sit at the top of the equilateral triangle then image height based on toe in is one reality, but move your listening position slightly far field, or slightly near field, the image height will likely vary. and ideal toe in might change.

many listeners are not comfortable listening near field or even considering it, mostly due to too much direct sound in less than mature room acoustics, where there is just too much direct sound and reflective energy. but the near field is where the holographic fireworks live. in my large room, i sit in the near field with twin 7 foot tall, huge towers in my lap visually, yet the acoustics allow for a comfortable natural tonality and cohesive experience.

you have to work at near field acoustical comfort before you dismiss it, and be open to playing with toe in for ideal staging and height.

@erik_squires

Having the proper balance of direct and indirect arrivals is critical, and one reason why I feel most audiophiles don’t use diffusion behind and to the sides of speakers enough. Too many still focus on dampening alone and that creates a headphone effect devoid of depth.

i agree. to attain that ’proper balance’ is of course, the trick. and it requires that you start out with more energy than you end up needing, so as you do the fine tuning for balance you can reach that perfect balance. in 2015, after i’d been in my dedicated room for 11 years, i took 6 months of messing around to find that perfect balance, and have not touched it since. you can reach that right place and stop. of course, since then i have improved my sources, but my system bones and room has not changed at all since then.

here are some notes i wrote at that time describing my fine tuning process. i’ve posted these before but i think it’s very relevant to this subject. i get deep into the weeds for those interested. and note that all this system tuning had almost a zero cost, just huge amounts of sweat equity and time. 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/almost-free-and-4-inches-the-final-1.17389/

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/almost-free-and-4-inches-the-final-1.17389/page-3#post-314941

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/suck-out-fixed-i-think.18116/

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/suck-out-fixed-i-think.18116/page-2#post-329496