SACD: Is it worth it? - Page 5

You don't know what you are talking about here. An EQ is very different from room correction. Room correction (of the sort that TACT and DEQx) implement involves time alignment. Hear a true room ocrrected system first, then tell me that your $400 EQ will do the same thing. It is just not the case. No voodoo involved, just a ton of automatic computing.

Sleestack being a speaker person myself I find time alignment very easy to get right with ears. But the biggest problem in my room, and a good mate of mine's room, is sound waves cancelling producing dips in frequency response, and ofcourse sound bouncing from the walls.

I assume you mean time alignment between speakers correct? There may be something I missed.

Correct. No offense to you, but there is nothing you can do by ear to get time alignment correct, especially with low frequencies. I only say this because we are talking about measurements that fall within less than 2 ms of each other. I don't think people can really understand this until they here the impact of a fully corrected system. Room acoustic issues are also resolved by advanced room correction, however, deep nulls can't be corrected.

When we walk into a room, the way it reverberates is part of the experience of the room. Your ears accomodate the tiny amounts of delay in a normal living room because it's a *natural* delay... seeing the size of the room and the sound of your normal speaking voice in the room verify this to you. Unless you're dealing with a living room the size of a concert hall, you don't need to address it. In fact, a little bit of liveness to the sound in a living room makes it sound better.

However, frequency response can be seriously affected by carpeting, upholstered furniture, large glass windows, etc. If you can get the main listening area EQed to the proper spot, the rest of the room will fall into a natural variation on that. Time shifts affect higher frequencies more than lower ones. An offset equal to half the width of the soundwave is phase cancellation. That width would be wider for a low sound than a high one. When it comes to deep bass notes, you need space to be able to reproduce them. A 20 hz sound wave is something like 45 feet long.

Equalization is one of the most important aspects of sound reproduction, but most systems are unbalanced. Getting the frequency response corrected is much more important than correcting infinitessimal time delays. It's easy to see which is more important. Just take a song into an audio editor and open the parametric equalizer... shift various parts of the range by 5-10 db or so and see what you hear. An average living room might affect the response by that much. Then take the same track and add a small amount of reverb- just the tiny amount you might hear in the average living room. See which of the two is more listenable.

See ya
Steve

Room correction affects frequency response, phase and time issues. All are important. If you had gear that let you adjust each of these factors independently on the fly and compare results graphically, you would realize that room acoustics dramatically affect proper imaging and soundstage, and those have everything to do with proper time alignment. Room correction corrects it within miliseconds of accuracy, however the actual correction may require more significant timing adjustments. Furthermore, low frequencies and their timing get destroyed in a room with poor acoustics. If those factors aren't important to you, so be it, but to say you don't need to address acoustic issues as they relate to timing, in any room other than large rooms is nonsense.

OK I'll say so... I think worrying about correcting phase and timing in the average living room is a total waste of time. The best sound I've ever heard was when live performers were playing acoustic instruments in a room replete with phase and timing errors. I'm sure the equalization function in those units you mentioned are very useful, however. I've been able to do great things with my Rane.

The most important factors in sound in a decent listening room are volume, frequency response, dynamics, distortion and noise floor... With most equipment sold today, their degree of importance is in that order. Feel free to add to the end of the list, but those five are enough to keep anyone busy. And if you tame just those five and nothing else, you'll still have jaw droppingly great sound.

See ya
Steve

We're not just talking about equipment, we are talking about the interaction of your speakers and the room. If you want to argue your point without actually knowing anything about the technology and issues I am talking about, I can't stop you. Neverthless, you definitely have no idea what you are talking about and are needlessly providing misinformation. A simple push of a button will show you the dramatic effects an average room can have on proper imaging. Why wouldn't you want to get that right? It just doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, the equipment is not complicated and the only thing one needs to worry about is placing the mic in the right place.

another sacd lover here The best SACD player I have heard is made by Japanese companies.

I'm not talking about equipment or the interaction of speakers in a room. I'm talking about what really matters in achieving great sound. I could read a bunch of pseudo-scientific sales pitch to decide how to get a stereo system to sound good, I could buy a magic box that does it for me, or I could just use my ears and a basic knowledge of how they work. I've read and read and read about minute phase shifting and jitter. None of it adds up to a hill of beans compared to the five principles I listed. I know exactly what a fraction of a milisecond (doesn't) sound like!

You can continue to try to bully me down by telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, but what I say is based on experience, not the reading of sales pitch on a manufacturer's website. I'm not even saying that those room correction devices are useless. The equalization function would be very useful for balancing the output of just about any speaker system. And with a 5:1 setup, adjusting the delay on each speaker individually can be used to synthesize different types of acoustics for effects. But with two channels, there just isn't much point.

A traditional stereo system is supposed to put the music in the room, not the room in the music.

See ya
Steve

Why do things need to be traditional? They could be traditional as in speakers bulit in the 60's and you wouldn't have a very good sounding system. Furthermore, if a system can seamlessly adjust for the gorss deficincies that are in almost every room, how could it not make things sound better? Of course, you seem to think most rooms are just fine and clearly don't understand the importance of acoustic environments as you think they don't really matter in creating good sound.

Why mention jitter? Again, it is not a matter of millisconds. The systems can adjust things to within milliseconds of precision, but the actual corrections may be greater than a few milliseconds.

I'm not trying to bully you. Neverhtheless, how can you take asuch a strong stance when you cleraly know nothing about this type of equipment? Furthermore, this isn't about sales pitches. It's about sound acoustic principles backed by very well developed software and robust hardware for computations. If I had never tried advanced room correction I'd probably be singing the same song as you. Nevetheless, I would at least get some first hand experience before drawing unfounded conclusions.

There is some slight difference between a live performance inside a certain room and playback of a recording of said performance in a different room. What is tried by any room tuning and electronic room correction measures is to recreate the impression of the room the recording was done in. Playback without any of these measures might still result in great-sounding fun results of course. It is a matter of what you want to archive.

Am I missing something?

Have you even heard a poorly misaligned system? If there's nothing that can be done by ear to get it right why bother doing it in the first place as by your logic it would make no audible difference. Time alignement is very noticable, easily fixable by ear, if you feel that you need the last few ns to be right then by all means use some sophisticated computer system to adjust your hifi, but once you've reached a point where it sounds good why mess with it at all.

Also some of the best speakers I have ever heard are ported. One thing about ported speakers is the phase is affected. But like I said before why mess with it. If you want a perfectly linear system built by mathematicians then by all means, but prehapse you should show bigshot and I a little respect in the music we enjoy. If I did not love the way my system currently sounds then I would be all over your sugestions.

If you have any of those nasty old 1960s JBL studio monitors laying around, I'd be happy to take them off your hands and suffer their inferiority!

See ya
Steve

That's the goal if you have a 5:1 surround setup. For stereo, you're looking for a horizontal soundstage spread out in front of the listener. That's best achieved with speakers set between 8 and 10 feet apart. How much timing error are you going to get in a normal living room with speakers that close together?

See ya
Steve

Sometimes I wonder if people would even notice if speakers with inverted phase were set on opposite sides of the room. The cancellation in the middle might be viewed as a "laid back analogue smoothness"!

Balancing frequency response with speakers is a HUGE job, yet some folks complain about noise introduced by the tone pots on their amp.

Some things really matter, and some things don't.

See ya
Steve