Archsam
Senior Member
ASR dissuaded me from buying a pair of used Focal Electra 1008 Be speakers on Ebay, but not for the reason you might think.
Not long ago I purchased the Matrix Element X and it made a marked improvement over my old Benchmark DAC1. Whilst I am very happy with the current sound, I started to think about upgrading my Harbeth P3esr not because there was anything wrong with them, but I got into the thinking that there might be 'more' I can extract from the DAC / amp, and my speakers might now be my weakest link in the system. There were a few pairs of Focal 1008 Be on sale on Ebay at the time, and they started to look very tempting.
I debated over the Harbeth vs Focal decision, both in my mind as well as having a few related discussions on ASR forums. My time spend reading here have taught me a few (little) things about what measurable attribute of a speaker will likely contribute to a good sound (flat frequency response, low distortion, etc), I soon started digging up measurements of my P3esr to have a better look at what they do. I found the old Stereophile measurements from 2010 and, what do you know, it looks like the Harbeth actually measured really flat around 200 - 4000Hz , but the treble started to drop off above 10kHz, which might contributed to my feeling that there might be something 'missing' in my music.
I started reading up on room correction and DSP to see if there is something I can do about the dip in treble. I read up on dirac room correction and miniDSP but realized they don't work with DSD files, which I spend a lot of time listening to. Luckily I then remembered that my Yamaha amp has tone control - looking up the manual I saw the graph that illustrates the treble boost curve, and I thought it might be worth playing with the treble dial to see what happens.
Within a few minutes I settled on turning up the dial by around 30% of full rotation, which translate to less than 3 dB boost at 20kHz, with a gentle enough slope from 2kHz upward that I thought will not effect the mid range frequencies too much. This give me just enough of an extra 'sparkle' that, while I won't say it transformed the sound, is definitely giving the music a little bit more detail which I liked.
I am now happy enough to not go for the Focal.
Not long ago I purchased the Matrix Element X and it made a marked improvement over my old Benchmark DAC1. Whilst I am very happy with the current sound, I started to think about upgrading my Harbeth P3esr not because there was anything wrong with them, but I got into the thinking that there might be 'more' I can extract from the DAC / amp, and my speakers might now be my weakest link in the system. There were a few pairs of Focal 1008 Be on sale on Ebay at the time, and they started to look very tempting.
I debated over the Harbeth vs Focal decision, both in my mind as well as having a few related discussions on ASR forums. My time spend reading here have taught me a few (little) things about what measurable attribute of a speaker will likely contribute to a good sound (flat frequency response, low distortion, etc), I soon started digging up measurements of my P3esr to have a better look at what they do. I found the old Stereophile measurements from 2010 and, what do you know, it looks like the Harbeth actually measured really flat around 200 - 4000Hz , but the treble started to drop off above 10kHz, which might contributed to my feeling that there might be something 'missing' in my music.
I started reading up on room correction and DSP to see if there is something I can do about the dip in treble. I read up on dirac room correction and miniDSP but realized they don't work with DSD files, which I spend a lot of time listening to. Luckily I then remembered that my Yamaha amp has tone control - looking up the manual I saw the graph that illustrates the treble boost curve, and I thought it might be worth playing with the treble dial to see what happens.
Within a few minutes I settled on turning up the dial by around 30% of full rotation, which translate to less than 3 dB boost at 20kHz, with a gentle enough slope from 2kHz upward that I thought will not effect the mid range frequencies too much. This give me just enough of an extra 'sparkle' that, while I won't say it transformed the sound, is definitely giving the music a little bit more detail which I liked.
I am now happy enough to not go for the Focal.
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