Does DSP belong in State of the Art Systems?

[PGA]

Nice system ! You prove my point, no dsp in the higher frequencies, and the XVR1 is a state of the art analog crossover, i don't understand why they stopped making it, to bad

DSP is applied full bandwidth. This was contrary to Andrew Jones’s advice. That said, the TAD coax did benefit from a little smoothing and shaping.

Having gone through this experience, selling a $20,000 system without educating the customer on DSP and offering a basic convolution filter to them is nothing less than malpractice. I agree that you’re not going to tranform a poor system to a great system, but without DSP you’ll never know how good a great system actually will sound.

 

[Lagonda]

DSP is applied full bandwidth. This was contrary to Andrew Jones’s advice. That said, the TAD coax did benefit from a little smoothing and shaping.

Having gone through this experience, selling a $20,000 system without educating the customer on DSP and offering a basic convolution filter to them is nothing less than malpractice. I agree that you’re not going to tranform a poor system to a great system, but without DSP you’ll never know how good a great system actually will sound.

In a very difficult room maybe. In a decent sized room without big problems in the low frequencies, using mostly high quality analog sources i don't want the degradation that digital brings to the high frequencies. Using some dsp on the bass amplifiers is not out of the question if it can be done seamlessly.

 

[Maril555]

Nice system ! You prove my point, no dsp in the higher frequencies, and the XVR1 is a state of the art analog crossover, i don't understand why they stopped making it, to bad

They stopped making XVR-1 because they ran out of some critical parts that couldn’t be obtained from another supplier.
I’ve had one and when wanted to buy a second unit, that’s what Kent English told me.

 

[Tim Link]

View attachment 127925

What's your RT60 and Clarity measurements look like in that room? My experience is that for a really smooth response to sound natural the room has to be pretty tight with a very fast RT60. A more lively room I've found must be allowed to have the ups and downs it naturally does, at least for my tastes. I'd definitely get after that peak at 30 Hz because it's broad. But those narrow ones seem to be required to keep the vibrance alive. I've gotten response to look like that too but it's just too tight sounding for me. It's interesting and beautiful in it's own way but it just feels like the speakers are getting pinched too much. Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome and I've come to identify with room effects. Of course I haven't done it with Mitch's expertise. I don't have that software. I use a Mac Mini and I don't think that runs on a Mac.

 

[schlager]

Tim Link, Audiolense don't run an a Mac, but the convolution filter can. So you can have your filters generated by Mitch Barnett or any other providing that service and then run it from your Mac. Or simply buy a Windows PC, even an old cheap one would suffice, but you will have to check with the Audiolense requirements.

 

[PGA]

They stopped making XVR-1 because they ran out of some critical parts that couldn’t be obtained from another supplier.
I’ve had one and when wanted to buy a second unit, that’s what Kent English told me.

True, but they surely could make a modern version of it using modern parts. The real answer I suspect is there is very little demand. Every now and then used ones show up for around 5000. That’s how I got mine. Kent checked the unit to make sure it was working to spec. All no charge,

Pass had single ended crossovers under the First Watt brand available until a couple years ago. I believe they still white label these for a speaker manufacture. When I spoke with Nelson he suggested I buy the circuit boards for the single ended units and make one myself …. with my soldering skills, that would not have worked out!

 

[PGA]

What's your RT60 and Clarity measurements look like in that room? My experience is that for a really smooth response to sound natural the room has to be pretty tight with a very fast RT60. A more lively room I've found must be allowed to have the ups and downs it naturally does, at least for my tastes. I'd definitely get after that peak at 30 Hz because it's broad. But those narrow ones seem to be required to keep the vibrance alive. I've gotten response to look like that too but it's just too tight sounding for me. It's interesting and beautiful in its own way but it just feels like the speakers are getting pinched too much. Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome and I've come to identify with room effects. Of course I haven't done it with Mitch's expertise. I don't have that software. I use a Mac Mini and I don't think that runs on a Mac.

I don’t have the numbers, but if anything the room is a little on the over damped side. Mitch Barnett did look at the RT60 and waterfall plots. His assessment was that the room was on the dry side but within spec for what you’d have in a mastering studio. It sounds great with R1s. It was not great with Mágico Q5s.

 

[Tim Link]

Tim Link, Audiolense don't run an a Mac, but the convolution filter can. So you can have your filters generated by Mitch Barnett or any other providing that service and then run it from your Mac. Or simply buy a Windows PC, even an old cheap one would suffice, but you will have to check with the Audiolense requirements.

Thanks! So that's an option as I'm already setup to run the convolution filter. My system is a strange one so it'd be interesting to see what he would come up with.

 

[schlager]

Tim, if you want to get your feet wet, I can generate some filters for you, free of charge All you need to do is take left and right measurements of your speakers in the listening position and export them as wav files. REW can do that, or just send me the mdat REW file.Then I can generate different filters with different time windows. PM me if you are interested.

 

[schlager]

DSP/EQ crash course for Dummies.

EQ is for adjusting the room impact in the bass and correct the speakers near field response over aprox. 500 Hz. It sounds most natural, if the sound from the speakers has approximately the same timbre as live musicians would get when performing in the same room. It is also important that the dispersion pattern from the loudspeakers is fairly constant with frequency, so that reflected sound and reverberation do not have a completely different timbre to the direct sound. A good target curve falls by about 1 dB/octave, but is room, speaker and listening distance dependant. This tilt is the normal frequency response in a normal listening room, of a loudspeaker with a flat on-axis frequency response, when measured in an anechoic chamber and with a fairly normal dispersion characteristic. If you eq it to a flat response in the listening room, it is the same as a speaker with a rising frequency response on the axis in an anechoic room - i.e. thin and shrill sound, and then definitely a speaker that "measures poorly". Again, this is very well known, and no one who has played with eq and understands a bit of what they are doing, would set up a system like this.

So what EQ can do for your frequency response, is to even out the room impact and the often relatively nonlinear near field response from the speaker. If we translate it to the more traditional part of hifi where you share listening impressions, we can perhaps compare it to a sound were "nothing sticks out". When people write this about a sound experience, it is usually a positive characteristic.

But then again, in this idiosyncratic hobby, for many it is precisely a point, that the system should produce a sound, in addition to the original signal, aka all these buzzwords as "warmth", "soul", "human connection", "musicality" that should be added to all parts of the playback.
The rest of us who just wants to listen to the music and not the system, we want to have it reproduced as it was intended/recorded.

 

[tony22]

Good write up. Personally I've seen (among those who've done EQ) far too many rooms that measure dead flat in FR. To my ears they've all sounded terrible.

 

[schlager]

Yes, hence the room target curve becomes a critical point, where small adjustment of 0,1 dB over the entire audio frequency band, aka very broad Q (small number Q), is audible. This room tilt is paramount, to get the right overall sound balance, but is often overlooked or ignored. One will have a hard time changing the room tilt without the use of EQ. Knowledge is your hifi friend.

 

[Tim Link]

Tim, if you want to get your feet wet, I can generate some filters for you, free of charge All you need to do is take left and right measurements of your speakers in the listening position and export them as wav files. REW can do that, or just send me the mdat REW file.Then I can generate different filters with different time windows. PM me if you are interested.

I think I'd be a fool to not take you up on this.

 

[PGA]

Yes, hence the room target curve becomes a critical point, where small adjustment of 0,1 dB over the entire audio frequency band, aka very broad Q (small number Q), is audible. This room tilt is paramount, to get the right overall sound balance, but is often overlooked or ignored. One will have a hard time changing the room tilt without the use of EQ. Knowledge is your hifi friend.

Much more effective and predictable to tweak your target curve to dial in your system versus swapping cables, interconnects, DACs and amps.