State-of-the-Art Digital

[Lagonda]

Is "not officially" a loss the same as an unrealized loss?

Is it a loss if it has not been sold ? Mentally it works for me, im simple

 

[christoph]

as long as you never sell your old equipment you have not officially suffered a los financially ! Micro, Tang and i have mastered this strategy, it only requires sufficient storage space

It certainly helps to have a huge house with many suitable rooms to indulge in that "collector style" enjoying different systems of different kinds
I love to have so many different flavors.
I almost listen the same amount of time to the Universum system and to the Apogee system.

Ooops, that was completely OT

 

[acousticsguru]

To second acousticsguru’s post about the impact of room acoustics and treatments, about a year ago I (with considerable help from my local dealer) treated my listening room with a combination of absorption and diffusion panels. The room had a fairly nasty ‘slap echo’ which made even the best components sound harsh in the upper midrange and lower treble. I had lived with it for a long time, and finally decided to do something about it. The effect was pretty dramatic. I hadn’t realized just how bad the room was until it was fixed. Although the total cost of the treatment was only about 5% of the total system cost, it probably produced the biggest positive contribution to the systems overall sound. The midrange in particular went from having a harsh sound at certain frequencies to being rich and detailed. I realize now that You can’t really make a judgement about how a piece of equipment really sounds unless you hear it in a decent room.

Glad to hear it worked for you - as indeed it should. I guess what I had on my mind last night is I'm still looking at source equipment from the perspective of a loudspeaker designer (hobbyist and/or semi-professional at one time) - it's supposed to get out of the way, not supposed to get compensated for in the loudspeaker design. The same goes for the other major factor in the overall sound of a system: the room.

Bottom line: audiophiles tend to overestimate the importance of electronics, cables, etc., while underestimating the importance of what they're listening to even when they turn the volume down and have a chat.

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[Steve Vu]

1. Electric
2. Room
3. Set, arrange
4. Rack, stand

 

[christoph]

I'm having an acoustic ceiling (not to mention new floor and - Yikes! - windows) built into what I'm hoping is going to be my future listening room.

Wow, that sounds awesome
Is there a time frame for this already?

 

[Al M.]

I'm concerned with the relevance of some of the critical statements here and elsewhere. I do believe a SOTA DAC is worth owning, that's not the point. Even so, if someone had asked me a year ago, I'd have said that loudspeakers and room acoustics are ten times as important. That's being coy: they're contribution to the overall sonic result may well be a hundred times as important (or more). Can't be overestimated is more to the point.

Thanks for bringing up this topic, acousticsguru. I totally agree with you about the importance of room treatment, and that it cannot be overstated.

I might not quite express the effect in those numbers. Rather, I would say that electronics, including the DAC as a source, and the speakers are the foundation of the quality of the system, and that room treatment and set-up need to be right to bring out the potential.

A $ 5,000 system will still sound like that in a perfect room and not better, while a $ 200,000 system may sound like a less than $ 2,000 system in a bad room. Well, I may be slightly exaggerating here -- in a bad room you may still hear some hallmarks of the $ 200,000 value that you may not hear from a much cheaper system, but the overall sound quality will still be inferior to the $ 5,000 system in a perfect room. In a perfect or at least very good room the $ 200,000 system will sound more like the price that was paid for.

Some rooms may have a very good base quality by themselves, but set-up of the system, including speaker positioning, will still matter greatly. Since he is fortunate to have a room with unusually favorable acoustics, a friend could take out all his audiophile room treatments. Yet that does not mean his room isn't fine-tuned acoustically. As a an example, he has removed all glass from the picture frames -- and it matters.

Earlier this year, I got to hear a dCS Vivaldi stack in a room that had an all-glass front on one side, concrete on the other, and when the owner said something to the extent that he couldn't hear an appreciable difference between his Vivaldi stack and a Chord Dave, I was quick-minded enough to reply: "I believe you." What I really meant to say was, I would not have been able to tell a difference in an acoustically untreated listening room like that either.

That mirrors my experiences. Before I started out with acoustic treatment in 2012, I could not hear a difference in my system between a then almost 20 year old Wadia 12 DAC and a Berkeley Alpha DAC. After the first set of treatments, the difference between the DACs was huge, starting with resolution of fine detail of timbre.

 

[Al M.]

To second acousticsguru’s post about the impact of room acoustics and treatments, about a year ago I (with considerable help from my local dealer) treated my listening room with a combination of absorption and diffusion panels. The room had a fairly nasty ‘slap echo’ which made even the best components sound harsh in the upper midrange and lower treble. I had lived with it for a long time, and finally decided to do something about it. The effect was pretty dramatic. I hadn’t realized just how bad the room was until it was fixed. Although the total cost of the treatment was only about 5% of the total system cost, it probably produced the biggest positive contribution to the systems overall sound. The midrange in particular went from having a harsh sound at certain frequencies to being rich and detailed. I realize now that You can’t really make a judgement about how a piece of equipment really sounds unless you hear it in a decent room.

Agreed. Also in my case acoustics treatment of the room was crucial. I spent about 10 % of the value of my system on it (the treatment also includes a series of relatively expensive but in my case invaluable ASC window plugs), but the % positive effect is wildly disproportionate to the still rather moderate amount of money spent.

And it's not just audiophile treatments. One of the best acoustic investments I made, which catapulted detail and accuracy of timbre, as well as quality of transients, on string quartet reproduction to a new level, was a large polypropylene basket-weave carpet from Target for $ 167 for my listening seat area (I already had a wool carpet covering the front half of the room, from speakers to front wall).

The past few days my system has taken another significant step forward in reduction of distortion, and with it increase of depth and detail of timbre. I covered the reflective gloss paint of my two JL Audio subwoofers with rubber sheets:

Lazy Dog Warehouse Neoprene Sponge Foam Rubber Sheet Rolls

Cost: $ 32 incl. tax (free shipping).

Every detail matters. I have worked on my room and set-up for years, and i still discover new areas of improvement, like this latest one.

 

[morricab]

That mirrors my experiences. Before I started out with acoustic treatment in 2012, I could not hear a difference in my system between a then almost 20 year old Wadia 12 DAC and a Berkeley Alpha DAC. After the first set of treatments, the difference between the DACs was huge, starting with resolution of fine detail of timbre.

Either your room was REALLY bad or your system at that time lacking serious resolution. I haven't had a system, well ever, that could easily hear the difference between amps, DACs, preamps and even cables. Even my relatively low resolution Dynaudio system from 20 years ago could easily tell preamps, DACs and yes even power amps.

Once I moved to higher resolution systems (at that time planar speakers: Apogees, STAX, Audiostatic, BG ribbon hybrids, Acoustat) the differences got significantly larger when switching gear around (read my review series on preamps, for example, in Positive Feedback back in early 2000s) in the same, untreated (concrete walls all around, one medium size glass door/window to balcony) room. I will not try to dispute that room treatment can improve the overall result...for sure it can. HOwever, to hear relative improvements in electronics and cables being dependent on the room and treatments, I have to dispute this claim rather strongly. Furthermore, to claim that improvements in the sound compared to room acoustics is far less important has been contrary to all of my experience in doing years and years of testing.

I don't accept AcousticGuru's statement that the room acoustics/treatments is 10x or even 100x more important. I have found systems to be perfectly listenable even in challenging environments when they were well constructed systems: good source, good speakers, good amps etc. whereas I have found many systems to be unpleasant (perhaps not so extreme as unlistenable but not very good) even in well treated rooms when one or more pieces of gear are not living up to potential.

I ran my Reference 3a speakers (all three pairs) in a small, untreated room and they could sound radically different depending what I had them hooked up to.

I have furthermore found that speakers that were widely regarded as average or even poor can sound extremely good with a really good source and and amps. It is interesting to hear how much elevation in performance of speaker is possible when you give it proper support. I would much rather have, if I had to choose, a system built around mid-level speakers and reference level electronics than I would a reference speaker with mid level electronics...the former is more likely to have a far more realistic presentation.

I once bought a system for a non-audiophile female colleague. At first she wanted a home theater system but first we went shopping for speakers. We bought a nice pair of Audioplan Kontrast 3s that fit within the budget. She came back to me saying that she and her husband now wanted a good 2 channel stereo system and we had to find a cd player and amp. The amp they had (an old Denon integrated) made the poor speakers sound broken. Numerous others eventually lead to them buying the Cary Audio CAD572se monos and a modified Transcendent Sound GG preamp from me and a cd player from Primare (I wanted to find something better but the budget prevented it). It was no contest really compared to other items in the price range... The room was nothing special, no treatment, just some furniture but the difference in sound was between never listening to music for pleasure to budding audiophiles...just from amp changes. It totally changed how they looked at sound reproduction. This was a lesson to me in how electronic artifacts destroy the sense of realism in reproduced sound. Room treatment won't fix that problem. The other lesson it taught me was that the devil really is in the details as to what inhibits realism in reproduction and the big fixes will help in some ways but they don't attack the underlying issue of unnaturalness.

A real performance in a bad room is still easily identified as a real performance...never forget this easy lesson! It might make the performance less pleasant to listen to but it doesn't undermine the realness of the sound of that performance. You might say, "Oh that sounds poor" but you won't say, "Oh that sounds like a bad recording or reproduction".

 

[PeterA]

Some rooms may have a very good base quality by themselves, but set-up of the system, including speaker positioning, will still matter greatly. Since he is fortunate to have a room with unusually favorable acoustics, a friend could take out all his audiophile room treatments. Yet that does not mean his room isn't fine-tuned acoustically. As a an example, he has removed all glass from the picture frames -- and it matters.

Hi Al. Yes my room is decent, but I would love to have the bigger dimensions of your room. As long as I could keep the fireplace and have complete freedom with regards to room treatments and speaker and listening seat positioning, I would love to see what my gear could sound like in a bigger room like yours.

Based on my own experience in my room with my treatments, I now happen to think that audiophile room treatments, well mine and in my room context, can easily cause more problems than they solve, mostly by over dampening the sound and filtering out information. And I have heard great sound in completely untreated rooms.

It's an interesting topic, but perhaps better left to its own dedicated thread. I don't even know what I am doing on a "SOTA Digital" thread. LOL.

 

[acousticsguru]

Wow, that sounds awesome
Is there a time frame for this already?

You're kidding, right? Heard of the pandemic? Works have been postponed repeatedly all year long. Meant to have parts of the house painted, meant to have Ethernet cabling swapped, meant to have fibre installed, never happened. I'll send a pic of that one room via WhatsApp, tomorrow or the day after, when the floor is dry… Speaking of which: it's snowing outside, not even plaster is drying, worker leaving fan heaters on, so it'll shrink and needs to be redone etc., super-cool for the environment, we're partly looking forward to the end result, partly fuming…

Regarding time frame, I'm reminded of the quote from Lear: "You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!"

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[acousticsguru]

A real performance in a bad room is still easily identified as a real performance...never forget this easy lesson! It might make the performance less pleasant to listen to but it doesn't undermine the realness of the sound of that performance. You might say, "Oh that sounds poor" but you won't say, "Oh that sounds like a bad recording or reproduction".

But that is exactly what goes through my mind. Paul McGowan once said that when one walks by an open window and hears a piano play or voice sing, we instinctively know whether there's a human being practicing or a system playing back. Same is true for the difference between we perceive as inherent to the recording and the playback system. You only need to listen to your favorite music in your car. You could tell if it's the recording. What about if the song were on the radio and completely unknown to you?

As to SOTA DACs, a good friend once quipped about one brand (you know which): "In a best case scenario, you'll hear everything. In a worst case scenario, you'll hear everything."

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[Al M.]

Either your room was REALLY bad or your system at that time lacking serious resolution.

Read again what I wrote. Only one of these two options is logically possible.

I have furthermore found that speakers that were widely regarded as average or even poor can sound extremely good with a really good source and and amps. It is interesting to hear how much elevation in performance of speaker is possible when you give it proper support. I would much rather have, if I had to choose, a system built around mid-level speakers and reference level electronics than I would a reference speaker with mid level electronics...the former is more likely to have a far more realistic presentation.

Agreed!

I once bought a system for a non-audiophile female colleague. At first she wanted a home theater system but first we went shopping for speakers. We bought a nice pair of Audioplan Kontrast 3s that fit within the budget. She came back to me saying that she and her husband now wanted a good 2 channel stereo system and we had to find a cd player and amp. The amp they had (an old Denon integrated) made the poor speakers sound broken. Numerous others eventually lead to them buying the Cary Audio CAD572se monos and a modified Transcendent Sound GG preamp from me and a cd player from Primare (I wanted to find something better but the budget prevented it). It was no contest really compared to other items in the price range... The room was nothing special, no treatment, just some furniture but the difference in sound was between never listening to music for pleasure to budding audiophiles...just from amp changes. It totally changed how they looked at sound reproduction. This was a lesson to me in how electronic artifacts destroy the sense of realism in reproduced sound. Room treatment won't fix that problem. The other lesson it taught me was that the devil really is in the details as to what inhibits realism in reproduction and the big fixes will help in some ways but they don't attack the underlying issue of unnaturalness.

As I said above, good electronics are the foundation, so agreed on that point.

Yet you grossly underestimate the importance of good room acoustics, and Acousticsguru is right to stress them.

The effect of the room will also depend on the speaker type, however. It appears that because of their radiation patterns electrostats are less sensitive to quality of room acoustics than conventional cone speakers. It seems to be a consensus that similar holds true for horn speakers.

 

[Al M.]

Hi Al. Yes my room is decent, but I would love to have the bigger dimensions of your room. As long as I could keep the fireplace and have complete freedom with regards to room treatments and speaker and listening seat positioning, I would love to see what my gear could sound like in a bigger room like yours.

My room does have some advantages in terms of dimensions, yes. However, it also has one essential disadvantage, which is width (12 feet). Your room, Peter, is considerably wider. I am almost certain that your larger speakers would give some boundary problems in my room due to interaction with the side walls, if not very well set up. These problems might be minor, but they could also be major. The speakers might still sound good right away, but probably not good enough according to the high standards we are used to from our systems. The problems might be fixable in the long run (perhaps with room treatments, oh horror), but it's unlikely plug-n-play.

Based on my own experience in my room with my treatments, I now happen to think that audiophile room treatments, well mine and in my room context, can easily cause more problems than they solve, mostly by over dampening the sound and filtering out information. And I have heard great sound in completely untreated rooms.

You are over-generalizing, Peter.

It's an interesting topic, but perhaps better left to its own dedicated thread. I don't even know what I am doing on a "SOTA Digital" thread. LOL.

Actually, it is a topic very appropriate for this thread.

In a less than optimal room, a SOTA digital rig might look nice and shiny in its rack -- pretty, for sure.

But it will NOT deliver the sonics of SOTA digital playback.

 

[acousticsguru]

The effect of the room will also depend on the speaker type, however. It appears that because of their radiation patterns electrostats are less sensitive to quality of room acoustics than conventional cone speakers. It seems to be a consensus that similar holds true for horn speakers.

True. The problem is that room treatment may differ depending on the dispersion pattern of a speaker (e.g. open baffle needs diffusion IF the distance to the rear wall is greater than 2.5x the lowest wave length of the diffuser, and/or absorption if not, etc. & etc.). Unfortunately, there is no speaker type whose dispersion pattern will solve all problems by itself. And even if there were, any such concept would directly translate into a room size (including golden ratio proportions) that I've yet to see in this country. I've visited audiophiles in countries where real estate and cost of labour permits building audiophile "barns", but I also know some Japanese who shower at the gym because they're storing their wine in the bathroom, and have to sit on the bed to listen to their system (as, incidentally, I have to these days), so…

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

[microstrip]

Well, knowing less than .001% of the existing audiophile listening rooms I can't comment on other people firm and antagonistic statements concerning listening room treatments.

IMHO stereo SOTA sound reproduction includes a lot of experimentation and some good luck. The system is extremely compromised and ambiguous - the person carrying the recording phase can't anticipate what is the system, room and preferences of audiophiles.

Many people fundament their opinions on their negative experiences - IMHO there are too many reasons behind the negatives to allow generalization. My listening room needs some treatment - it was foreseen, according to text books. I keep it to a minimum, as I do not have the expertise, time or will to carry it more extensively. As a consequence it is optimized for specific speakers and I had to change it drastically when I move the speakers.

BTW, according to the experts the main problem is not just over treating - it is also the quality of the treatments. It is curious that many people who are so exigent in their equipment are so little demanding concerning the quality of room treatments.

Going back to the thread subject, the DCS Vivaldi is a great source of music, but also an excellent tool to evaluate subjectively the room treatments - the other DACs I have used are much less ambitious.

 

[Al M.]

Going back to the thread subject, the DCS Vivaldi is a great source of music, but also an excellent tool to evaluate subjectively the room treatments - the other DACs I have used are much less ambitious.

Yes, a high resolution DAC will be very revealing of room issues and the effects of room treatments.

And it can give a mediocre, or even uncomfortably annoying, sound if the downstream electronic chain has problems and/or if the room acoustics impede the intrinsic playback quality of the DAC.

A less revealing DAC may be more accommodating of suboptimal circumstances.

 

[microstrip]

(...)
The effect of the room will also depend on the speaker type, however. It appears that because of their radiation patterns electrostats are less sensitive to quality of room acoustics than conventional cone speakers. (...)

The idea that electrostatics are less sensitive to quality of room acoustics than conventional cone speakers comes from the old Quad ESL63 that had a narrow figure of 8 radiation pattern, as they were a point like dipole. IMHO this isn't true of most electrostatic speakers. In fact I found that most electrostatics, due to cancellation modes, are very dependent of listening room acoustics - they can sound miserable is non supportive rooms.

 

[PeterA]

The idea that electrostatics are less sensitive to quality of room acoustics than conventional cone speakers comes from the old Quad ESL63 that had a narrow figure of 8 radiation pattern, as they were a point like dipole. IMHO this isn't true of most electrostatic speakers. In fact I found that most electrostatics, due to cancellation modes, are very dependent of listening room acoustics - they can sound miserable is non supportive rooms.

Fransisco, what do you mean by a "non supportive room"? And what are the sonic consequences with electrostatic speakers in such a room?

 

[PeterA]

My room does have some advantages in terms of dimensions, yes. However, it also has one essential disadvantage, which is width (12 feet). Your room, Peter, is considerably wider. I am almost certain that your larger speakers would give some boundary problems in my room due to interaction with the side walls, if not very well set up. These problems might be minor, but they could also be major. The speakers might still sound good right away, but probably not good enough according to the high standards we are used to from our systems. The problems might be fixable in the long run (perhaps with room treatments, oh horror), but it's unlikely plug-n-play.



You are over-generalizing, Peter.



Actually, it is a topic very appropriate for this thread.

In a less than optimal room, a SOTA digital rig might look nice and shiny in its rack -- pretty, for sure.

But it will NOT deliver the sonics of SOTA digital playback.

Al, yes, your room is very narrow which may be an issue with zero toe-in, but I am certainly not suggesting that the speakers would not be "very well set up." Nor am I suggesting they would sound good right away or are in any way "plug-n-play". On the contrary, I would anticipate a lot of hard work to get it right, but it might be fun and a good experience. I'm only saying I would love to try to set up my system in your room, without any of the audiophile room treatments to hear the quality of the sound and to learn something. Germain to this discussion, it would then be interesting to see the effect (improvement even?) of very gradually adding some room treatment.

I am trying not to generalize as I qualified my early comment that my impressions are based on my system, my room, my acoustic treatments. However, I have heard the benefits in other systems and rooms when treatments have been gradually removed. As I wrote, I think treatments can tend to over-dampen a room, at least to my preferences. Great for audio effects and shaping of the sound, but not for a more natural sound experience. IMO. I used to think the opposite but have completely changed my mind about this. Others surely disagree.

 

[microstrip]

Fransisco, what do you mean by a "non supportive room"? And what are the sonic consequences with electrostatic speakers in such a room?

In theory a dipole speaker in a room without boundaries cancels its bass due to phase cancellation.The room interaction is a key point to get a decent bass response from a full range electrostatic. This implies proper distance to front and back wall, as well as proper absorption/reflection properties of the wall - when we address phase cancellation, wall reflection means less and spiky bass. I found that ESL 63 electrostatics can sound lean and analytical is some rooms.