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Sound, neutrality and the pursuit of everything

The audiophile hobby is inherently a pursuit of some ideal. That ideal might differ from person to person, but what I am curious about is how each of us define that ideal. 

I kinda like where my system is at. I cue a well recorded track and think: damn that sounds good. But compared to what? Do I have a point of comparison to the original performance, the day it was recorded? Usually not. To use an overused album, unless I was sitting at the Olympia concert hall in Paris when Diana Krall performed there in 2001 and have a perfect auditory memory, how do I know my system if reproducing it with “fidelity”?

If the pursuit of perfection is useless as perfection is an illusion, how do you all define your level of satisfaction or achievement in this audiophile pursuit?

jabar102

Showing 1 response by toddalin

toddalin's avatar
toddalin
187 posts
 
Easy one.

You can’t trust your ears and whatever you listen to music-wise will never contain the entire spectrum. Sure you may make those songs you enjoy sound good, but what about everything else?

I use a 61-band RTA with a pink noise source and just strive to get the smoothest frequency response on the couch among the cushions where I actually sit without any form of processing or electronic eq.

This made me give up on the JBL L300s and build my own speakers, which I now have pretty darn flat through continual crossover refinements.

This was the last photo, but just today I did more work that removes the ~1.4kHz peak and distributes this energy in the 400-1KHz range flattening that area a bit more.

What you see below 250Hz is floor bounce and room nodes. There is no eq or digital processing being used.

http://www.audioheritage.org/photopost/data//500/medium/DSC_000910.JPG
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