@melvinjames , there are a lot of threads here besides this one. As a whole I feel the banter in this forum is indeed genial, but 100% genial, no,
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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