Oak works well enough for the steel plate he’s going to use it with but generally speaking denser hardwoods fare better. I never tried walnut for this purpose.
david
Sublime Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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david
Of course replacing the SRA with steel plate or anything else will sound different it’s up to you to make a value judgment. With the steel you have the opportunity to dampen it incrementally or even slightly change tonality very simply if needed. There’s a lot of value to mass loading you can’t just dismiss it. You’re assuming that draining the energy is always a good thing, how much should be drained? What’s the right way of draining it? What sonic benefit do you suppose Peter gets spending thousands on a draining platform with fixed parameters over the steel plate that he can also make adjustments to very simply?
Natural sound in context of a particular system and its limitations!
From my perspective over complication is the temptation, I never walked into a situation that I had to tell the person they haven’t put enough shit in their system and room. How many pages do we have just on cat litter boxes? People’s very long tales on how they boldly piled on tweak after tweak on top of yet another tweak as if shoving some footers and junk under equipment is some kind of accomplishment. Tweaks that no respectable maker would ever recommend! It’s as if the tweakers belief is that the person who designed and built what they spent a fortune on is somehow chachki ignorant. What is happening here isn’t simplification, it’s actually quite sophisticated and methodical. I don’t understand your aversion to everything Peter has done starting with his beautiful armbase and the tt’s suspension. All we’re doing is boosting up his rack, you’ve seen the pictures please show us a better and simpler way than the recommended path.
david
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I agree the variables (material, shape, size, weight etc.) are so many that it seems neigh impossible to predict any particular sonic result prior to trying. Maybe the best we can say in advance is that certain materials/configurations have certain proclivities, tendencies. It is the combination of the footer or platform (in a general sense) used in conjunction with a particular component (with its own materials, shape, size, weight, composition etc.) that in part creates the complexity. Throw into that the environment of what the footers/platform sits own, where it is located, what is around it and, as you say ad infinitum.
Each footer/platform and component has its own resonance frequency which will change dependent on how they are combined. So while given woods, for example, have their own characteristics, those that impact sonics may not hold consistently depending on how and with what they are used. I'm not a materials scientist but it may be the case that the resonance frequencies of the many parts and pieces inside the component itself will change. Absent fairly intimate knowledge of exactly what is placed on what, trial and error seems inevitable.
When you get a chance could you elaborate on speaker position with no toe in? The placement of the speaker is so fundamental to the base performance of a system. If we don’t get the position right then the other adjustments may be to difficult to detect. I am in a small room listening in the near field and want to get to a speaker position of no toe in.
It's always interesting to ask your components manufacturers - especially speaker makers - what they reccomend to put under their equipment. Do you think there's a handful who will tell you "my $X...X,XXX component is improved if you use this other guy's $XXX thing with it." ? Or equally interesting, observe what they show with.
In over 30 years I never met a serious manufacturer who praised any tweak or power cord, mostly call it idiocy but see it as something they’re forced to accept in fear of alienating some customers and industry members. I know many I’ve turned off many
! Some call it a learning curve believing people should make their own mistakes. At shows one is only in charge if it’s their room and they paid for it otherwise majority of the pairings are opportunistic and you live with others who a share for that space. I also know some manufacturers will lend equipment to popular tweak companies as a form of free advertising.
david
Hi Dan31,
This is an impossible question to answer properly there are too many variables in every room and setup but there are basic outcomes that I find different. Toed is usually faster and easier setup procedure you focus the sound to a point in room, avoid some of the room interaction issues and have soundstage which is full in the middle and depending on the toe in you can widen or tighten the soundstage to last. Biggest advantage is that you can have a pretty good setup without having to find "the" position in that room. The advantage of straight setup is an airier sound with more ambient presence, less forced and up in your face compared to toed-in, more natural soundstage and tonality if your preference is jazz and classical, or live rock albums that will change dramatically from recording to recording, of course all of this is also system dependent but you will hear these differences in any half way decent system with average resolution without the soundstage and image manipulating tweaks, footers, power cords, wires or some AC conditioners.
A small room is difficult because 1/4" in any direction will have a major impact, I can give you some pointers if you PM me some dimensions and pictures or take a look "Listening Room 2" link in my signature for some ideas, those are large horn speakers 5.5' away from the listener in a horrible squarish. It's very near field and none of the headphone feel you get with toed-in speakers this close up. The sound stage is at the right distance and images are the right size and the instruments have proper tone coming from the recording rather than speaker arrangement. Depending on your experience working with a professional like Jim Smith might be beneficial, specially in a difficult space.
david
Yes, the sound was more toned down in the treble and seemed weightier. Yet at the same time it was robbed of harmonics as you say, and of detail. I can achieve the benefits, a weightier, more toned down sound by simply toeing out the speakers slightly, by a few degrees, but without the negatives of lesser harmonic content.
The reason being that now the benefits are simply achieved on a mere acoustic basis, without manipulation of the signal itself.
David, now you really have my head spinning!!!
I revisited your second system from you signature link. That room looks really small, but I would love to hear what a system like that can sound like when set up well. Are your comments above based on speakers in general or primarily horn speakers? I like the attributes you describe with straight-ahead positioning. I suspect that the spacing between speakers will become closer because of the dispersion pattern from the drivers, but that is a guess. If that is indeed the case, then the speakers move further away from the side walls which should also help with reflections. I wonder too how listening seat positioning is affected, if at all.
My big concern is whether or not the speakers have to come out into the room more. This is not an issue for a dedicated listening room like the one in your photos, but it would certainly be one in my dual purpose room. 1/4" deviations sound like a real challenge without the necessary experience. I might be at that for months, but I may give it a try. Good advice regarding a pro like Jim Smith. He is generous with his time, willing to share his knowledge, and he gets results, at least in my experience. He is also a heck of a nice guy.
Hi Peter,
My comments were about any speaker, in this case it’s a largish Horn model which makes it even more challenging to shoe horn in this size room with poor dimensions and acoustics then have it set up near field without any penalties. It was a bitch to get right
!Looking at your pictures I would say you’re right about having your speakers closer together but I can’t even guess how far they need to come out from the front wall from those images. I don’t even know if your setup is near field or not. The listening position is dependent on the room nodes and speaker position, stick sliders under your chair and slide it around until the bass balance is the way you want it kind of like selecting your seats in a concert hall. Depending on the room and preference you could end up even off center, personal choice. This is one of the reasons I don’t do room measurements to start up with, IME more often than not ideal numbers don’t necessarily add up to ideal sounding setup. Mine is a more holistic approach to sound I don’t aim for “Perfection?” based on ideal numerical values, that’s a very different thing and there are a few qualified people who can do that a lot better than me. My target from start to finish is a “Natural” sound and “Natural” listening experience in a comfortable environment reminiscent of my favorite venues. The aim is to minimize and hope to remove distracting annoying aspects of a system (+room) which includes things that one might find impressive. Because ultimately that impressive “part” of your system calls attention to it and you might think what great this or that to yourself but that’s when you’re taken out of the natural immersion/suspension to notice the system instead of the music. Personally I don’t care for any of the obsessive audiophile rituals and HiFi values derived from 80’s and 90’s audio magazines and specially the very misleading meaningless phrase of “Absolute Sound”! That’s why my reviews or descriptions of a system including my own lack the usual floral language and brief. For me it’s only about musical experience and suspension of reality in a home venue hence the term “Natural”. Some prefer the Big Top approach and you can see it in the floral descriptions of bits and pieces of the system’s sound, always solo and freakishly impressive acts, the more recent adoption of the term “natural” in this context is contrary to the actual outcome. IMO these are two separate and opposite approaches and one must determine what they’re after and in the case of professional reviewers who’s their audience.
david
Vladimir Lamm likes to say the perfect review of an audio component is one that contains a single word.
Though I know your comments may be somewhat rhetorical, I'll give you a little push back. Between floral hyperbole and being brief there is plenty of ground for honest exposition and a good read.
True.Vladimir Lamm likes to say the perfect review of an audio component is one that contains a single word.
Though I know your comments may be somewhat rhetorical, I'll give you a little push back. Between floral hyperbole and being brief there is plenty of ground for honest exposition and a good read.
After 20+ years with Lamm electronics I’m sure some of Vladimir’s thoughts have become mine too. I discovered that “Natural” sound and total suspension of reality is attainable at home when I heard his ML2 back in 1998 or 99 and to this date never found any other electronics brand pull it off as convincingly as Lamm. Aside from the social aspects I really don’t find anything outside the moments of suspended reality and transportation worthwhile or endearing about high end audio anymore.
david
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I read David's post a couple of weeks ago and became quite curious to see if I could hear in my own system what David is describing. I was most intrigued by the two sections I highlighted in bold. Of course, this is all reversible, so why not give it a try? After having spent the last few weeks trying to set up my custom armpod/SME 3012R/Master Signature, I began to address speaker positioning. I was trying to set up an unfamiliar arm while at the same time adjusting speakers in a room from which I had just removed all audiophile acoustic treatments. There had been too many rapid changes, and I had lost my baseline reference which led to confusion.
Back and forth for about a week with little or no progress. I became frustrated. Once I thought I had found the right VTA setting (with the recommended Antiskate and VTF), I moved around the speakers. I thought I preferred one speaker position, but things were not quite right, so I moved the VTA again, and back and forth I went. I now know that I was too focused on sonic attributes and not on what I have come to understand as a "natural" sound as David describes above.
Having gone around in circles for about a week, I finally found the VTA setting that worked well with each of my standard weight jazz and classical LPs that I tried. I have learned "the card trick" with my 3012R, and was surprised to discover that one card could make a pretty significant difference in what I heard. One card is about 0.25mm in arm height.
Now satisfied with the arm/cartridge set up, I was ready to really address speaker positioning in a more serious way. I wanted to try a fresh approach. I tried not to focus on things like image focus, articulation, bass impact, or tonal balance - all the things I used to prioritize - but instead concentrate on the sense of energy, accurate timbre, and the ability of the system to disappear. In other words, what sounded more natural, convincing, and life-like. Individual sonic attributes became secondary.
I started with the speakers more or less in the same position as before, but I gradually moved the speakers more and more toed out or straight ahead. The sound began to open up and the system began to really disappear. I continued until the speakers were pointed straight ahead. However, the sound was more diffuse, softer, and less lively. It was less vivid, less defined. These were real trade offs and I was not sure I was moving in the right direction.
Then I remembered that David said very small changes can have big effects in a small room. So I moved the speakers 1/2" out on each side. Wow, more liveliness, less soft sounding. Another 1/4" on each side. That was it, the clarity and timbre I had before snapped back, but there was now much more room filling energy and air. However, the bass was not quite right. On massed celli, it was a bit heavy, drum thwacks were muddy, so I moved the speakers back 1", not good, forward 2", better, another 1/2", that was it. Yes, small changes made a big difference. It may not yet be perfect, but it is very close, and I want to live with this for a while.
Small changes making a big difference was the case before with the speakers toed in toward the listener too, but now the room is more energized. I'd say the images are very slightly less crisp or defined, but they are the right size, there is good layering, the tone is more life-like, and the overall sense of presence is much more real. The room is energized and filled with enveloping sound.
It is a cliche, but I listen less for sonic attributes now, and more to the music, the holistic sense of being lost with the musicians. The system is now gone, replaced with the natural sound of music. There is an energy, a liveliness, and presence to the music. It is about the performance and composition. It is no longer about the sound or the system's "sonic attributes".
I wrote about a month ago in this system thread that I was trying to be more open minded about removing tweaks, shedding old audio myths, and that I wanted to learn and move forward. The armpod project with vintage SME 3012R started this process. Removing the acoustic treatments, power cords, and pneumatic isolation, continued this effort. Finally, my tonearm and speaker set up efforts have slowly opened my ears to what David describes as a "Natural" sound. I used to throw around that term thinking I understood the meaning. I used it to distinguish what I was hearing in my system from what I consider to be "hifi" sound. This was only part of it. It is not really a description of how one sound is not another sound, it is more about how one sound is more like the real thing. That is what "Natural" means to me now.
My various recordings now sound more different from each other with the atmosphere of the recording space more clearly evident. On my better recordings, the stage is deeper and wider than before, and a bit more layered, while solo instruments are smaller, more present, but project a bigger sound from a more real stage space.
At live performances, I think that pinpoint imaging is in part due to the visual enforcement one gets from seeing the musicians in very clear positions on stage. When I close my eyes at live concerts, the sound is just as clear, but the imaging becomes slightly less focused. This is what I am now hearing at home. It is harder to separate out sonic attributes because the sound is more holistic and the experience is less of listening to an audio system.
I am now listening with eyes wide shut. I think my learning curve has just begun.
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No Peter, IMHO in this hobby the learning curve starts when we get our first stereo, when we put our imagination at the service of the stereo illusion.
It is clear that you now are wanting something different, and it is great to read about your evolution. But remember that every time we have felt it was more like the real think ...
No Peter, IMHO in this hobby the learning curve starts when we get our first stereo, when we put our imagination at the service of the stereo illusion.
It is clear that you now are wanting something different, and it is great to read about your evolution. But remember that every time we have felt it was more like the real think ...
And your point is what Francisco? That Peter doesn't know what he's doing or he can't hear properly so what he thinks is better actually isn't or is worse? As an academic and educator you should know this about the learning curve, that where one ends up depends on learning the right things vs following the same old wrong way!
david
David,
My point is simply what I wrote - that Peter narrative is one more phase in his stereo evolution and I am happy to read about it. And that probably we can have some nice exchanges of opinions on it if people have an open mind and do not become dogmatic on their positions.
BTW I am not an educator in audio, just a permanent learner as most of us ...
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