What makes the biggest difference in sound quality?
When making changes or adding things to your system, what makes the bigger difference in sound quality on preamp‘s and power amps? Interconnects, speaker cables, power cords, or fuses?
Thanks it is my experience also with 2 years full time acoustic experiments in my room...
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Because i was thinking erroneously that he will be able to discuss audio matter, not only selling his devices... I like to learn... Some other sellers are more honest and give very good information here, like atmasphere for example... I am naive more than most ....I know... 😁😊 One of his thread has been erased where he articicially opposed for the need of his business objective measurements in engineering and subjective perception, forgetting completely the acoustic field where there is ONLY a continuous correlation PROCESS between this two aspects and not opposition and the obligation to chose one over the other... He perceive my arguments as threats to his business then refer people with some inuendo to my virtual page photos... Pathetical move...
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Your referencing old photos of some of my first devices is not an argument about acoustic...
No speakers at any cost will beat by his upgrading power acoustic control, And no electronical toy " costly tweaks" or electronic equalizer....... What i will describe here is INVISIBLE in these photos and are devices and bottles designed like Helmoltz resonators and diffusers which are not in these old images from many years ago... Ted Denney is a seller not an audiophile...He does not want to use argument just to close the mouth of someone with another perspective... Here are these 6 aspects of acoustic control parameters in a room i experimented with : 1 -Balance between absorbing surfaces, 2 -Reflecting one, 3 -Diffusive one.... This was "classical" passive material treatment of a room, now these 3 new other factors are related to my concept of the mechanical active control of a room ( what i called a mechanical equalizer): 4-control over reverberation time and timing of the wavefronts 5- control over the distribution of the pressure zones 6- fine layering and tuning of the laminar flow These 3 last aspects could be controlled with Helmhotz mechanical method NOT by electronical equalization... Then the piano will not sound the same from the same pair of speakers in a non controlled room and in a controlled one...Not even close...
Dont upgrade good speakers with costly one BEFORE studying and experimenting with acoustic... My acoustic devices and experiments were all homemade and cost me nothing...Yes Ted Denney here you can laugh at my straws and cardboaord empty roll paper and plumbers discarded tubes etc... I will laugh with you but not for the same reason... Do you catch? I can then claim that great hi-Fi experience is possible at low cost contrary to what is claimed or supposed almost everywhere by almost everyone... People dont know acoustic and never seriously try experimenting with it in a dedicated small room. Dont buy costly toy, if you can keep a dedicated room... All the rest cost nothing save basic acoustic knowledge...
Then to answer your innuendo, my room is not the workshop of a seller who must sell finished shining product, it is an homemade laboratory... And for the "questionnable knowledge" there is more information explicit and implicit in this single post of mine here about acoustic that in all your posts here in this thread... Referencing to my virtual pages for another time will not change acoustic nor the content of my arguments... It will only reveal what elementary rethoric call "ad hominem " attack... Like you said "Inference to conclusion will take place in the minds of those reading" your posts and mine..... All people are not idiots fooled by appearance... Happily.... You sell costly devices, good or bad one, i sell creativity.... Ok i will mute myself... My best to you and to all....
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My perspective is mostly acoustic , passive naterial treatment and active mechanical tuning of the room with a grid of Helmhotz resonators and diffusers, 50 one tuned,... You cannot judge that with these old photos which describe my beginnings.. And what you suggested WITHOUT argument mimic only asubtle ad hominem attack using my virtual page... You never answer to NONE of my argument where you oppose for commercial reason measurements and subjective experience... The two separately MEANS nothing...We must CORRELATE them in a set of acoustic listenings experiments to create a room... Plugging a costly device in the wall will not do it in the same way..... By the way what you see cost me 500 bucks and i know for sure that almost no upgrade beat acoustic after all my work in acoustic of small room AT NO COST... People are not stupid they will see through your gesture and agenda which is to sell not educate ... My photo are there to be seen but they do not describe my audio room...What bother me is your innuendo instead of argument... Innuendo are not argument ...
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He did just that with me instead of arguments in a meaningless opposition he created to impose his products...(objective versus subjective) My argument was centered around the evident fact that all audio science in electronic or acoustic is the search for a correlated sets of experiments ... THEN Our subjective taste must be educated by acoustic experiments for example... Is it not clear? Instead to mock me he say to people look at his system (mine) in my virtual page...... No honest person do that... I dont give a dam about mockery but i dislike people who hypocritally attack someone instead of answering SOUND arguments.... He proved himself to be guided by his seller agenda more than by truth...
«Our tastes are there to be educated by experience»-Anonymus audiophile «There is no taste in acoustic science»-anonymus acoustician
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You are right for the fact, wrong with the 90%........ Try the same source in two different room and you will know the importance of acoustic over almost anything else... Like in a car tires are important but the motor import more... What we hear come from the speakers/room for most of the S.Q. %... Acoustic is the most important factor , engineereing is the SECOND factor...It is the opposite that what people think because we must buy an audio system first and chose one before treating and controlling the room for a specific system...Then we think that picking the system is all there is... Why is acoustic the most important? Because ANY relatively good design will play with a difference between them which will be way less than the difference between acoustically controlled room and a bad room ( almost all untreated and uncontrolled rooms).. If i am wrong, then why am i satisfied with a 500 bucks system? It is not the best there is at all then am i deaf? No it is not the best audio systewm at all, only a good one, but my room is so well controlled than a relatively good system at low price (vintage) sound extraordinarily good... So good upgrading is not appealing because of the ratio S.Q. /price scale diminishing return... If i am deaf why my 7 headphones are in a drawer definitively? Because acoustic is the sleeping princess and all pieces of gear are the 7 dwarves...
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Sorry but if you read wiki Helmholtz resonators the basic fact are explained... If you type imaging for example. scientific articles are there... one of my main inspiration for example: It is an optimization method with many resonators...You tune them one at a time... You LEARN how to listen at the same time... i design it , no one explain that to me... but with just the basic elements i described anybody in a dedicated room can begin to LISTEN and have fun at NO COST... Helmholtz is the creator of room acoustic but nobody ever said it this way why? Because small room acoustic existed only for the few last decades ONLY with the consumers access to small audio system... And why nobody ever dare to talk about H. method before me? Because all consumers audio market conditioning is directed towards the GEAR engineering and not toward acoustic and psycho-acoustic method.. Most people think they listen music directly from the gear.... The room is passive object which dont exist and must not obstruct the sound coming from the speakers... But small room acoustic is not big Hall acoustic.... Small room acoustic is more of a contemporary phenomena, but even in ancientime some H. method were used before H created them in modern context... Amphiteater acoustic exidted for millenia....13 feet square acoustic room control, or near these dimensions , is a few last decades old and was bown with the recent audiophiles consumers ...
It cost nothing but it take the time to learn how to hear and listen timbre and it take a dedicated room... It is not for most people....But if i did not speak about that who will? Even acousticians debate the rignt way to accomodate a room like mine: 13 feet irregular square with 2 windows... 8 1/2 feet roof.... i take the bull by the head, i sit, listen and i have the fun of my life ... It is described in my now abandoned thread journey : "miracles in audio... " |
Like just perfectly said oldhvymec, thanks to his generous friendship, The Helmholtz or H. method is the way to tune a room complementarily to the passive material treatment... It is a machanical adjustable set of H. bottles and tubes of different size with different necks, mechanically adjustable at will in diameter and lenghth , which are distributed in a grid around the location of my speakers and myself in the room, at key locations , beginning at few inches from each tweeter or bass drivers and at some reflection points at right and left of my speakers and behind my position of listeming,,, The grid created a new set of pressure zones distribution in the room where the goal is to accomodate FOR the specific speakers and to the specific ears of the owner the specific acoustical content of the room... These locations of some resonators near at few inches of the tweeter and bass drivers are not symmetrical for each speakers, because of the first wavefront law in psycho-acousatic, who says our brain accomodate each direct front waves from each speakers differently for each ears with a time delay...The goal is to help the brain figuring out and calculating the position of the sound sources in the room... I used it to create a better imaging then and also i used reflections time and reverberation... To use them i made listening experiments during some months each day, like a tuner tune a piano, listening instruments timbres and voices in the room to accomodate the room acoutic content characteristics to the speakers characteristic mechanically....One modification at a time.... Someone could say it is impossible to implement this in an incremental way because some modification can reverse some other positive one on the frequencies spectrum... It is relatively true but the gist and key of the art of tuning them is to adjust them not perfectly but optimally BECAUSE each of the many hundred of modifications possible COMPENSATE one another.... At the end the micro structure of the tone playing instrument and voices are natural for your SPECIFIC ears and you are able to perceive his flowing surfaces and volumes....
All is made of plumber tubes or bottles i take from my basement or from a flee market,.... By the way the H. resonators are absorbing devices but also diffusing one... i used passive materials to control but also use the reflections.... In small room reflections are NOT only negative waves to eliminate but waves you could use to reinforce imaging..... Small room acoustic is NOT great Hall acoustic....Reverberation time did not play the same role and function to the perceptive ears.... You can make the H. resonators very distributive of some frequencies range by varying the aperture of the bottles and shortening the neck....I dont made any precise calculus even if the H. method is MATHEMATICAL... Whith more than 50 H. devices they compensate each other all along the frequencies range all along the tuning process, if i used the TIMBRE perception like a meter ruler in my listening experiments...
The human ear is trained by millions years to perceive human voice....The human ears is NOT trained naturally to perceive one frequency of very thin set of frequencies like a microphone in an electrionical process of equalization...My H. grid is a MECHANICAL equalizer and the ears replace the test microphone, and the timbre large spectrum replace the test frequency used in electronical equalization...It is better because the grid is part of the room, the sweet spot is distributed in INCHES not in millimeters like in electronical equalization... It takes a dedicated room, it is impossibble to do this in a living room... The only cost is the time it takes .... Few months each day because i am retired... Peanuts costs... Then with the passive acoustic treatment and the active H. mechanical one, if you take care of vibrations in the system, and if you decrease the electrical noise floor of the house you make what i call the three main working embeddings dimensions control of any audio system, then, your system is not the better there is for sure but so much good and relatively optimally well controlled than UPGRADING will make you smile... There is a limit to optimal Sound quality / price ratio... All that seems complicated but it is not , it take much time , reading, but NO COST...
Acoustic is the sleeping queen, all the pieces of gear are only the 7 working dwarves....
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Cables cannot make a difference comparable to the huge transformation in the room acoustic...Like just says lemonhaze... No one selling gear or cables want to disclose that simple truth...
Acoustic passive treatment and especially mechanical active control with Helmholtz method WOULD KILL any desire to upgrade in most people who will implement it... And changing cable is a MINOR improvement, only seems to be a major improvement when someone has never correctly adress the room or had synergy gear problem already ... Anything else is marketting or ignorance or the two....
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Great post and true...Thanks... All tweaks effective or not, and some are effective, are only secondary tools... Controls of vibrations and a decreasing of the house level electrical noise floor matter more than ANY tweaks... But passive material treatment of the room and especially active mechanical acoustical control of the room EXCEED in S.Q. improvement almost any other upgade of gear... This is my personal experience... The only luxury in audio is a dedicated acoustically controlled room... i never read any audio magazine anymore now....
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