Originally Posted by Mr. Widget
To be clear, I am not expressing 'my opinions' as to "sonics" of audio electronics, though other parts of my posts are opinion. But on that subject, I am merely the stating observed reality, as demonstrated by every single controlled listening test, that only incompetently designed or broken audio electronics sound different. You are going more on blind faith and pecuniary interest in the mythology of "high end" audio.
Which is great, because we actually seem to agree on the utility, and limits, of room correction.
I never wrote anything that would reasonably lead to your "I don't agree" statement, and frankly your "I don't agree" rhetoric is intellectually dishonest. (Though I will assume by "gear" you mean the loudspeaker/room interaction, because to ascribe "sound" to competently designed and built electronic parts is to be nonsensical.) My claim, if you read it carefully, was much narrower than the caricature you drew: the electronics themselves sound the same (I'm talking about competently designed and built electronics, not proven crappy stuff like that $7000+ Pass integrated amp, mind), so logically the part with the extra degree of freedom (room correction) is superior.
I certainly never claimed that the "order of operations" is anything but, first, get the basics right - controlled directivity speakers with reasonably smooth response and a pattern that is well-suited to the surfaces of the room (i.e. narrower if the room is more reflective, so as to avoid the need for unsightly "room treatments"), placed to maximize one's desired sonic qualities (apparent source width, image focus, spaciousness, etc), multiple subwoofers calibrated to smooth out the impact of the room in the modal region, sufficient power on tap for all loudspeakers in the system to hit one's desired SPL, etc., - and only then go to stuff like room correction.
Yes, you are biased against the reality that has time and time again been demonstrated in controlled listening tests (which is, frankly, that electronics don't matter) because to do so would be simple business suicide for an audio parts vender. Self-interest has over the years led a lot of otherwise smart and well-meaning people into black holes of reality-denial. I'm sure there are still some execs in North Carolina who are otherwise sharp as can be but who honestly believe that any links "scientists" have found between cigarette smoking and lung cancer are speculative and ill-founded...
But what matters to a salesman is different from what matters to a music lover with no pecuniary interest in the audio business.
What matters to a "pure" music lover is, to put it simply, the stuff with moving parts (analog sources, loudspeakers), the room, and the electronic signal processing. Everything else just needs to not suck. (Which means, for instance, no crappy Pass labs integrated amps.)
Well, I did point out two instances of gear (a Pass Labs integrated oddly touted by you as a superior part, and a Theta multichannel amp) that objective testing by Stereophile, as well as subjective comments, revealed to be absolute low-fidelity garbage not worth being mentioned in the same breath as a typical base-model major brand AVR. So obviously unless you consider calling attention to the obvious flaws in "Emperor's New Clothes" gear like that crappy Pass integrated to be "trying to get attention," that is not the case.
That said, my latest audio purchase was a used Meridian 551, for the bedroom, to replace a pint-sized KEF Picoforte iPod Class D amp. I bought it because it has a more compact footprint than most integrateds, and I find it attractively styled. I also needed a piece of kit with multiple inputs and a built-in MM phono preamp, because I moved my TT from the main rig to the bedroom. The thought was the TT might get more use in the bedroom for background/mood music music, because my main system is simply too revealing of vinyl's flaws. However, the primary source for bedroom background music is still my old AppleTV2, feeding through a $40 DAC from Monoprice. (A new AppleTV3 replaced it in the main system.) Yes, a Monoprice DAC feeding into a Meridian integrated!
Truth be told, I would've much preferred something new. But the current remote-controlled integrateds with my needed I/O (an MM phono stage, a line-level input, and either stereo preouts or a mono subwoofer output), such as models from Cambridge Audio , Rotel, Music Hall, and NAD, were all too wide and/or deep and/or tall to not stick out in the bedroom. (The Rega Brio-r not only lacked preouts, but also as a half-baked remote that is very insensitive to commands, and isn't even set up to power down the part into standby mode!) So I was happy to find a used Meridian 551 with the MM phono pre option installed.
Perhaps you do, and perhaps there are some, but the rest of your text was merely your unsupported opinion and the not the uncovering of any flaw in my logic.
In his review of that crappy Pass part, supra, Stereophile's Erick Lichte commented that he's had many integrated amps come through his home. He also made idiotic and snotty comments about people who think amps all sound the same being brainwashed, etc.
Please point out one point in that review where Mr. Lichte commented that amp noise is a common problem with different amps in his home. Or another review of an amp where he discusses its hum or noise. (I've looked in a few, and saw no such mention.)
Also, please point out a review of a competent part in which John Atkinson's discovers significant line noise in his bench tests.
It's a reality-based view, yes. If you wish to substantively disagree with that, please point me to a single controlled subjective same/different listening test, in which the listeners were able to reliably distinguish two competently designed, non-broken amplifiers. I will be happy to be proven wrong. But that is the only proof that a thinking person can accept for the claim that competently designed and non-broken amps sound different from one another.
Most amps, from "mid-fi" AVR's to the Bryston/McIntosh/Levinson/Anthem Statement/Burmeister level "high end" stuff, are competently designed.
There are a few amps on the extreme low and high ends that are incompetently designed to begin with, or constructed with insufficient attention to quality control. Nobody is claiming that those lower-fidelity devices won't sound different from a high-fidelity device.
No, there really isn't. Look closely at Stereophile's simulated (NHT?) loudspeaker load curves. The variance in them is captured entirely by one variable: output impedance.
Yes, to be sonically transparent an amp needs to have extremely low output impedance. Competently designed ones have that. Incompetently designed ones (see the Theta multichannel, supra) do not have very low output impedance, and those can have response errors severe enough to be audible with some speakers, depending on the speaker's impedance curve.
Yes, it's true, some may prefer the sound of an amp that is poorly designed. One can, however, get the same response errors by putting a resistor on the output of a competently designed amp. That's what Sideshow Bob did on his "soul of a 9-watt triode" or whatever Sunfire models.
My Goddess was the first car I owned, and she will be the last car I own. There have been, and will be, lesser cars used as daily drivers. But they are disposable, not enduring like the DS.DS-21 Always was an odd duck:
Thanks for posting a pic of the more attractive (IMO) quad-lamp refresh, instead of the earlier shark nose.
Did you read my posts?
I'm basing them on data from all over the world dating back to David L. Clark's 1983 JAES article. That dataset includes a well-known case where a Miami-area audio dealer was unable to distinguish his own Pass amps from a cheap Yamaha integrated in his own system, in his own home, using music he personally selected as being revealing of his Pass amps so-called sonic character.
Not really, because every time the so-called golden ears actually man up and compare gear without relying on their eyes and level differences, they learn what flights of fancy they had believed in. Or, they become science-deniers, and make mental contortions to find loopholes that excuse their inability to hear things that seem oh so obvious when one knows what fancy part is in the signal chain.
As for my own hearing acuity, suffice it to say that I can be driven out of a room by a CRT television's transformer. Have YOU had YOUR hearing checked by a medical professional? You must have, I presume, if you felt comfortable making such a smarmy insult.
For example one member here who will remain nameless knowling bashed his ears for years in the college dorm with JBL 100s and thought they were the holy grail until he heard the JBL 4345.
No, it's actually quite simple, and accurate. Fidelity means that the output equals the input, excepting deliberate manipulation (increased gain, an EQ curve, etc.).
Noise, hum, etc., make a device fundamentally low-fidelity.
To smooth out the frequency response at the listening room and fit it to their target curve (there's also propaganda about time, but it boils down to frequency response), based on in situ measurements. Audyssey also has a couple other goals.
One thing I dislike about Audyssey (that is not present in other and IMO better room correction systems, such as Anthem's ARC) is a "crappy speaker compensation notch" at ~2kHz. The reason they do that is because speakers with a 6-7" woofer and a flush-mounted tweeter will have an excess of energy in that region, due to the uncontrolled directivity of the tweeter. But if one starts with competently designed speakers, such compensation is obviously not needed.
Considering that there's zero benefit to "premium two channel amplification," the advantage is that one has a tool that may be useful. It may not be, of course, and if misused (poor attention to detail during the measurements phase, etc.) can result in far more problems than solutions.
How do you reach that silly conclusion? There's no fundamental difference between the purpose of multichannel and 2-channel gear. Read Prof. Rubinson's "Music in the Round" column sometime! Audio gear is about reproducing music.
That's not been my experience.
Some of the worst-sounding systems are those where someone takes crappy speakers, places them haphazardly, and then expects the magic box to clean things up.
What good digital processing can do is compensate for a few issues, such as tubby bass from having mains too close to the wall behind them.
It cannot compensate for speakers with poor power response (EQ can only work at one point with such speakers, after all).
It cannot compensate for negligent placement.
It cannot, except in a very small area, compensate for other points of negligence in system design, such as failing to use multiple subwoofers to smooth out upper bass response.
Projection, much?Your speech reads more like an affirmation performed daily in front of a mirror to reverse some deep insecurity .... not saying thats the case ,it just reads that way . Like the kid that shows up first day of term not wearing the right trainers
It is amusing the lengths religious zealots will go to assassinate the character of people who actually understand things on a deeper, level.
As for shoes, though, for casual wear I generally favor adult shoes - e.g. JM Weston 180s, RM Williams wholecut chelsea boots, and Alden chukkas in unlined suede in the summer or no. 8 shell cordovan in the winter, that sort of thing - to trainers. And pretty much always have. Though I have since I was a teenager always kept a pair of "Austrian flag" (rot-weiss-rot logo stripe) Bally trainers in my rotation.
I only made an aside about Tannoy. My point was and is about a reality-based understanding of the role of audio electronics. Blind faith has many important roles to play in life, in answering the Big Questions. But the "sound" of an amp or DAC or whatever is not something a person capable of rational thought will take on faith. Rather, it is a falsifiable claim. The way a civilized person tests a falsifiable claim it is to control every other variable, and test for variance along the one isolated variable of interest. (In audio terms, that means matching levels and listening blind.) The data from such tests thus far is entirely on the side of audio kit that's not loudspeakers, analog sources, or signal processors only mattering when they're crappy to begin with (see, e.g. that low-fi Pass integrated), or when user error/incompetence creates a problem (improper gain structure, etc.).
One JBL thing I'm looking forward to hearing, as soon as the cabinets I commissioned for them are finished, are a pair of SUB 1500's I recently scored. I've thus far tested them for mechanical integrity and to measure their small-signal parameters, but haven't listened to them beyond that They're getting cabinets with a removable back panel. That way, I can not only compare them to my reference Aurasound-based subs, but also compare them as both monopoles and quasi-cardoids. I've played with commercial (Gradient, Audio Artistry) and DIY (Linkwitz-inspired) bass dipoles before, but not cardoids. There's some interesting theory behind them, but nobody to my knowledge has compared cardoids to a monopole multisub system. Only to that horrible-sounding hack of two "full range" speakers, or even worse two speakers highpassed in the modal region to a single subwoofer, which is itself low-passed. Pretty much anything can improve upon those two horrid options.
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