Garbage in = garbage out is a red herring.. even entry level source and amps are pretty good.. therefore there is no "garbage in". There is a little bit better in, there is I like the sound of that in a little better than another in, but there is no garbage in.
ALL speakers are colored, have the highest levels of distortion of all components by a LARGE margin, and have the most severe limitations when it comes to integrating them into the room.... so this is actually a stupid debate. You have to find a speaker that fits your room and your tastes. What comes before is icing on the cake,, the speaker is the cake.
1. Drive a $1000 speaker with a $100,000 front end and it sounds like a $1000 speaker.
2. Drive $100,000 speakers with a $1000 front end and its not as good as it can be, but it will sound much better than #1
end of debate, you can close this thread
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This is EASY to buy a relatively good pair of speakers, very easy.... BUT Controls of the room are NOT so easy to install...
the thread is about the most critical component, not about what is easy and if you hire an expert in room acoustics the room is also very easy Then in a word: speakers are REPLACEABLE, room are not, especially a room under controls...... You are going on and on about modifying the room..isn't that in effect "replacing" the room? No, not the walls, but you are replacing how they react to the sound waves so you are effectively replacing the room. But you missed my point because you cannot imagine what is a controlled room and how powerful it is.... how do you know what I missed or what I can imagine.?? . My room is under control, The RT60 is perfect, it is lively enough without being too lively, The soundstage is expansive and coherent.. it sounds fantastic.. but back to the beginning...the original point of this thread..it is not about what is easiest, it is about what is most critical... crap speakers sound like crap no matter what you do to the room AND you can mitigate the room by listening in the near field ... . Speakers are therefore most critical Start at the other end... envision the perfect system.. Wonderful speakers in a wonderful room with a wonderful front and and amplification. Then you are forced to start taking things away and replace them with entry level stuff one by one. Where do you start, what is the last thing? Maybe you start with cables or power conditioning. along with some tweaks. Then sell the DCS Vivaldi stack and get a decent DAC. At the end... Sell the $330,000 Wilson Chronosonics or get rid of the room treatments? Of course you keep the speakers , you keep the most critical component... case closed , and I'm outta here |
All what you say after miss the essential point...
The room is the cake, you must design a room with all the passive and active acoustical controls necessary to help your speakers...“ No , I nailed the essential point, which I stated very clearly,.... you have to pick speakers that work in the room. Crap speakers in a great room still sound like crap. Great speakers in a crap room will still sound pretty good just like great speakers with entry level electronics will still sound pretty good soooooo it all comes back to the most important thing to get right ... speakers, which are therefore the cake...... a great room can’t fix bad speakers so you start with speakers everything else is icing Although not ideal, you can mitigate a lot about a bad room by listening in the near field , there is nothing you can do to overcome bad speakers i’ve had the same speakers for 20 years because they work for me in my room |
Try my test with Kurt Weill and listen the singers ....If they comes from your back where there is no speakers then the room is not only good BUT under controls. I'm done with the "most critical component" discussion. But I'm curious how you determined that this test proves your point? The recording you reference is not live. It is a studio recording so there is no "back of the room" as far as the recording is concerned. Any effect of depth and width of soundstage is artificially mixed into the recording so it seems to me you really can't have any confidence what you are using as your reference is accurate or what was intended. Maybe they wanted it to sound like the singers are out in front of the orchestra? |
What he confuse with "echo" is the walking speed and changes of position while singing of the singers...They move constantly on the stage or in the studio and their head is never fixed but turn right or left singing or speaking... It is easy to hear...In a good room we SEE the singers... I’m glad you enjoy this recording so much, but your conclusions about what is correct are nothing more than guesses. By manipulating the phase of the signal from various microphones while panning them left - right - left the person mastering the recording can create the illusion of movement when the singer is standing in one spot behind the microphone. I’m not saying this happened, I have no idea how it was recorded, but given it is a studio recording it is unlikely the singers were moving about the room, but perhaps they were. It is also impossible to create a 3 dimensional soundstage (sounds from behind or outside the speakers) without manipulating the signal. Listen to a recording by Steve Swallow called "Running in the Family" on his album Deconstructed. His bass is waaaaay off to the side completely disengaged from the rest of the music. It is so pronounced I find it difficult to listen to. This effect is created by shifting the phase of the signals in the left and right channels after it is recorded.. Note the word "created." If the same sound arrives at one ear later than the other, (phase shifted) our brain interprets this as the signal coming from the direction of the ear where it first arrives. By manipulating the phase and amplitude of the bass in the 2 channels it can be "pushed" off to the side. So I agree that if your system/room has issues with phase shifts it will change how the sound is produced, but we have no way to know if what we are hearing is an accurate representation of what happened unless we were there. It seldom is and definitely is not if you hear sounds from behind you. How do you know your system isn't phase shifting some frequencies more than others and exaggerating these effects? Frankly, all components are important; duh Of course a system is a sum of its parts. That’s not the point of the thread. I settled on Pass Aleph 1.2 mono’s for my amp, then I got Von Schweikert VR-6 speakers. so you did it backwards. . The point is, various electronics are much more alike than different while speakers vary widely. So find speakers you like then optimize the rest. Matching speakers to amps is a fools game.. sorry to be blunt but can’t come up with a nicer word than fools at the moment |
DOAH !!!
FR = Full Range .. HA! I get it
unfortunately, despite your passion, you are incorrect. Full range drivers as dletch2 pointed out are inherently flawed, just like all speakers are inherently flawed. This is the reason they are the most critical component. Obviously you prefer to live with the flaws inherent in FR drivers. However, others prefer to live with the flaws in other designs.. my preference is horns as you can see from my system.
Modern day sources and amplifiers are approaching perfection relative to what has been achieved with speakers therefore one must choose a speaker they are willing to tolerate and then feed it with whatever maximizes its strengths and minimizes its weaknesses.
It really is irrefutable... you are welcome
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OK I‘ll nail my colours to the mast: my primary directive is ’garbage in garbage out‘, with ’weakest link’ lurking in the background. By that I mean that the source should always take precedence, and that a top down hierarchy is justified Give me your best shot.
that is so easy it is not a "shot". There is so little "garbage in" it can be ignored. I have a Raspberry Pi with a HiFiBerry DAC running off of a wall wart power supply. Somewhere in the $100 range. Currently have a $10K Denafrips DAC and DDC, I've had a $30K DCS Rossini with clock, A $15K Chord DAVE with Mscaler with linear DC supplies, and others.. The more expensive are clearly better, but the Pi sounds really good and is nowhere near garbage. So the source can in no way be considered the most critical component. Weakest link is off topic, the thread is supposed to be about "the single most critical component." By definition "single" means one which eliminates links from the discussion. @Mozartfan, you win the prize for the longest most rambling posts... hands down... but I have a question what is this FR you keep going on and on about? When I googled "Berlin FR" I found in one of your diatribes I got something about a German farmers market and a German Ford dealer. |
Mr Mozart... we may differ on details but fundamentally agree. The path to the truth for me is highly efficient speakers and low powered amplifiers. That has led me to the horns I have today which are around 110dB efficient - 30-180 Hz covered by the bass horn with a single inductor as a low pass filter
- mid range horn that naturally rolls off 180-2200 Hz with no crossover
- high frequency horn with a single capacitor as high pass filter
Perfect? .. no People who say horns blare or honk are misinformed, mostly parroting what they’ve read as they have obviously never heard a properly designed and implemented horn system. If I didn’t have the space for the horns I would go with a so called full range driver like a Lowther or other similar design perhaps supplemented by a horn tweeter as you suggest. In any case, we agree that low efficiency, multi driver speakers in boxes with complex crossovers unsuccessfully trying to get them integrated is not the way to go |
Active DSP crossovers negate many of those issues.
point taken You can also implement DSP in a digital front end but impossible to implement in my analog chain .... Turntable >> Phono stage >> volume control >> amplifier >> speaker without digitizing my signal which is a non-starter. It also adds another layer of complexity and expense to a digital path that many wish to avoid. however, if already in the digital domain I'm not opposed to additional processing as I do have convolution filters created using AudioLense implemented in HQplayer |
The notion that there is only one right approach, which implies only one correct set of priorities, is unreasonable. I am a fan of extremely dynamic speakers, such as full-range, full-range used as wide range drivers in multiway systems, and horn-based systems. But, there is no one approach that does everything right and so we all pick our favored set of compromise
Completely agree, which brings us full circle to the original point of this thread which is "most critical component" which to me means the one component you must start with ........ again we all pick our favored set of compromises so the one component that has the largest number of inherent weaknesses that must be overcome or lived with, the one with the largest number of differences in performance from model to model, the one that must be most carefully chosen to integrate into the given room, the one which forces us to make the largest number of compromises is the speaker... so therefore, one must start with speakers that meet their criteria then build from there i.e. speakers are the most critical component. Mahgister has been relentless in his posts about his room and I appreciate his passion, but optimizing the room does not fit with the idea above about picking the most critical component because most of us don't have the luxury of picking our room. We do pick our speakers. So I'm fine with the idea that the room is critically important when optimizing your system, but it does not fit with the idea of picking the most critical component because again, most don't pick their room. My philosophy which has served me well is you have to start somewhere and build around it otherwise you will be constantly changing one thing to make up for a difference in another. You need a solid foundation to build on. You need one constant in your system to build on.... buy the best speakers you can afford to meet your preferences then go from there. I've had the same speakers for almost 20 years with no desire to change.. everything else has changed and most many times. Which leads me to me final point. Most of this thread has been people talking past each other because they are talking about different things. "Weakest Link" and "room optimization" and "garbage in/out" and "speaker differences" and "everything matters" and "most critical component" and all the rest are all valid considerations, but even though it is all intertwined, they are different considerations. If you have a different definition for "critical component " then the points above don't apply. |
@phusis
yes, good eye, that is a Genelec HT3 sub. It is part of a home theater system completely separate from the 2 channel. I have a Trinnov processor running a 7.3.6 system. You can see the L-R Paradigms sitting inside the bass horns too. You can't see the 10 foot screen that hinges down from the ceiling in front of the rack or the 4K Sony projector in the back of the room. I'll post that system one of these days
Genelec is highly recommended BTW |
