magiccarpetride;613824 Wrote: > A lot of audiophiles seem to be willing to expend a lot of effort in > fighting this awful digital glare at the wrong end -- by playing with > the EQ, by placing speakers in different formations, and by treating > the listening room for minimizing various artifacts. My position is > that the problem must be attacked at the source, at its cause, not at > the symptom, or its effect. If the source signal is tainted by the > noisy power supply, noisy transport or noisy, jittery DAC, no amount of > careful speaker positioning and room treatment will be able to rectify > that mess. I don't see focusing on optimizing speaker and listening room as contradictory to the battle against digital glare. If playing with the EQ means judiciously working to remove room modes and interaction (a fact of nature), then provided it does not add more artifacts than it removes, then I think it's for the better.
I've spent most of my modding efforts in recent years on dacs, esp. on the power supply for my players and dacs, and I also agree 99% on your comments regarding the digital chain. As someone who has quite a lot of live classical music in my life (at home, with my amateur group, supporting music education, etc), I am sensitive to acoustics and timbre. Even though live music played in my home (also the main hifi area) sounds pleasant and warm, it is also fatiguing because of room modes. In some practice rooms, the acoustic is very dry, and very unpleasant for players, although some argue it helps them hear 'everything'. For music reproduction, therefore, I prefer acoustic neutrality, as I want as far as possible to hear the acoustic and timbres the performer/mastering engineer put into the recording. Here room eq works wonders for me, as I have now two listening rooms that are now much closer in tonal balance than ever. They used to sound very different (main hall vs. bedroom). That alone is a huge plus for me. Does that end the battle against digital glare, etc? Actually drc helps me distinguish among my dacs a *lot* better. It is dramatically easier for me to hear the impact of mods, sonic signatures of dacs and other components. The two systems still sound different even though their target response curves are very close, so drc has not 'cloned' the sound. In the end, surely the fight for ultimate hifi has to fought multi-dimensionally? -- mervin_b ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mervin_b's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42376 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85922 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
