Room for Improvement?
Bear with me....
I have always believed that it is best to sympathetically pair equipment to your room as far as possible, and that room treatment is often (broadly) unnecessary if you can live with a few imperfections (which we do at live venues, incidentally). I have always enjoyed the live acoustic and life this has given my rig.
I guess I also have a certain sympathy with the source first philosophy, but only in part, as every component seems to become more and more critical as the music sounds better with progressive upgrades (recent pre-amp shenanigans bear this out).
So, is it possible to do more than limit/mitigate the effect of the room with our gear? To take it further, would it be possible to effectively 'cure' the room with a superlatively accurate source?
I was reading something recently which made me think along these lines, it was spread over several threads and several weeks on Computer Audiophile.
There is a chap who posts there, Peter st (he is dutch, I think) who develops playback software for Windows called XXHighEnd. He has now made himself a DAC (his company is called Phasure and it is a NOS - Non Over Sampling - DAC) which has all its filters and 'operating system' (my term) built into the XXHighEnd player, which seems a super idea. Think of the upgradeability this approach provides, and the opportunities to utilize the computer's processing power in playback..
For instance, the cornerstone of his approach seems to be to massively upsample redbook material so any artifacts of digital filtering are well above audibility. The advantage of using his own software to do this on a powerful computer makes more sense than asking a small processor inside a DAC to do it, according to Peter, and it puts him in full control of the audio output. And all I have mentioned is a gross oversimplification of his entire approach, which seems to be from beginning to end.
His DAC is therefore transparent - it has to be as it can't add anything because it cannot function without the software on the computer, though it can be configured to run with PureMusic and Audirvana apparently. According to Peter, what you hear is the playback software, as the DAC can only do as it's 'told'.
He claims to be able to get really superb SQ with his upsampling and filtering (well he would, and it's right for a designer to believe in his approach) in his large, less than ideal room. When using 'conventional' players he reckons the sound is all over the place and his room lacks "50 bass traps".
Leaving aside any doubts or questions over his motive or qualifications (none of us know, so lets give benefit of the doubt, though making such claims is plainly in Peters interests), what do you think of the concept that an accurate source can 'cure' the room?
In principle I can stretch to believing him, as recent improvements in my system have reduced room interference from being almost overbearing to simply being a part of the overall character. The implication of his stance seems to be we are only starting to be able to produce a source accurate enough in this new digital age to carry off his theory.
I have always believed that it is best to sympathetically pair equipment to your room as far as possible, and that room treatment is often (broadly) unnecessary if you can live with a few imperfections (which we do at live venues, incidentally). I have always enjoyed the live acoustic and life this has given my rig.
I guess I also have a certain sympathy with the source first philosophy, but only in part, as every component seems to become more and more critical as the music sounds better with progressive upgrades (recent pre-amp shenanigans bear this out).
So, is it possible to do more than limit/mitigate the effect of the room with our gear? To take it further, would it be possible to effectively 'cure' the room with a superlatively accurate source?
I was reading something recently which made me think along these lines, it was spread over several threads and several weeks on Computer Audiophile.
There is a chap who posts there, Peter st (he is dutch, I think) who develops playback software for Windows called XXHighEnd. He has now made himself a DAC (his company is called Phasure and it is a NOS - Non Over Sampling - DAC) which has all its filters and 'operating system' (my term) built into the XXHighEnd player, which seems a super idea. Think of the upgradeability this approach provides, and the opportunities to utilize the computer's processing power in playback..
For instance, the cornerstone of his approach seems to be to massively upsample redbook material so any artifacts of digital filtering are well above audibility. The advantage of using his own software to do this on a powerful computer makes more sense than asking a small processor inside a DAC to do it, according to Peter, and it puts him in full control of the audio output. And all I have mentioned is a gross oversimplification of his entire approach, which seems to be from beginning to end.
His DAC is therefore transparent - it has to be as it can't add anything because it cannot function without the software on the computer, though it can be configured to run with PureMusic and Audirvana apparently. According to Peter, what you hear is the playback software, as the DAC can only do as it's 'told'.
He claims to be able to get really superb SQ with his upsampling and filtering (well he would, and it's right for a designer to believe in his approach) in his large, less than ideal room. When using 'conventional' players he reckons the sound is all over the place and his room lacks "50 bass traps".
Leaving aside any doubts or questions over his motive or qualifications (none of us know, so lets give benefit of the doubt, though making such claims is plainly in Peters interests), what do you think of the concept that an accurate source can 'cure' the room?
In principle I can stretch to believing him, as recent improvements in my system have reduced room interference from being almost overbearing to simply being a part of the overall character. The implication of his stance seems to be we are only starting to be able to produce a source accurate enough in this new digital age to carry off his theory.
Comments
Keith.
nice wee post, i look forward to others (see;- more in the know and the present day) posts on this .
a source that can 'cure a room' , i dont think that the source can cure what happens after it in the chain ,what i mean by this is that if you invite some musicians to play live in your listening room (surely the purist source you can get), would they sound just like they did from a recording made at a different venue which was replayed on a hi fi in your listening room? i think we can say no ,
a source component or software designer can claim that when the signal leaves the component it is truly faithful to the recording ,but,i cannot see how they can make claims of anything that actually happens after that point , do they know my room has lift at 50hz and 9khz and is littered with standing waves ? , i may have missed what is actually meant but unless monitoring mics and some powerful ,fast and unobtrusive Eq software is in use or you have a magic listening room that has no sonic signature , i would have to call the claims somewhat questionable ,i have of course been wrong many times before though!!!
although the concept of the dac doing less is very interesting, it makes sense that computers should be able to take care of more than just spitting out bits of info for a another set of components and power supply to deal with ,
best regs
matt
The use of the phrase 'cure a room' is clumsy on my part, but I don't have anything better to replace it with. I mean to imply that a more accurate, controlled source might not incite room problems to the same degree. Does that make more sense?
You can see what I mean in action in a gross way - say you have a room with tendency to boom (like the hoose I just left) and a coloured, less resolving source. Like the modified Arcam Alpha 5+ I had. Now that would boom and set off the room like nobody's business, yet I had heard it sounding much more 'high fidelity' elsewhere.
Then I got a standalone transport, a better DAC (Theta) to go with it that had much deeper, punchier bass. The DAC was a good, decent bit of kit, I had a more powerful, dynamic system. The room? - It didn't boom nearly so much, which was really surprising - in fact as I went into computer audio, and tried four or five DACs in as many months, my system's 'accuracy' went through the roof along with all the other HiFi terms. The room became effectively more of a non-issue, you only noticed it imposing itself occasionally.
Like all things, the law of diminishing returns sets in fairly early. I have a fairly expensive (for me) front end that I cannot fork out much more for, so I won't be investigating further unless the Audiolab has something to offer, but the principle of what I have tried to describe seems to be borne out by my limited experience - unless I am misinterpreting things?
If a designer outs together a software player, his own algorithms drivers and filtering, builds his own high resolution DAC and then claims the source can negate the majority of his room issues, I am not disinclined to believe him.
I am talking about really clean, accurate sound not setting the room off.
If you played just test tones, your room would still affect them, try measuring your room, it is revealing.
As an aside have you ever tried Peters software xxHi end?
KR Keith.
Keith, I haven't tried Peters player, I am MAC based in the lounge. I have never even bothered to try the Young plugged into my Windows lappy.
{It's another discussion entirely, but it seems increasingly silly to have an entire computer dedicated just to playing music in the front room, and the dedicated transports don't seem to offer much in the way of value yet (I'm not thinking squeezeboxes).}
i would question what the designer was using previously that caused his room to react so badly and also if the new software ,player and dac are perhaps tailored to his room or system and thus may react very badly in other rooms,
my recent exploits with a valve amp bares this out, ken kessler loved it via a pair of ls3/5a's , i hated it via all my speakers as i couldnt connect a sub woofer and thus lost all bottom end apart from a 50hz thump , plugged in the Claymore with a sub and all my woes were cured, the valve amp has been well reviewed and received and given comments such as "worth double the asking price" , to me it was worth sending back to whence it came!!
of course i cant discredit the claims , just curious to know if the rest of the system was not injecting some influence on results, and if what he has corrected was an ill balanced system causing issues , but hey, if it does what is claimed the world will soon know about it,
all the best,
matt