The best system upgrade I've had in a while! I've been auditioning new speakers, and I bought an external amp to see if I can improve my current setup.
To start at the beginning, I get pretty good sound when I feed FLAC files to my Marantz AVR using DLNA/uPnP. Wide airy sound stage, precise instruments, loud bass. What I don't like is a bit of rattling in my room. Shelves, picture frames on the wall, etc. The bass sounds a bit loose. REW+Umik measurements reveal a couple of "room modes" but I was never quite sure how to handle those. I tried various things with Audyssey, introducing WiiM mini for Equalization, buying a new amp to see if driving my speakers was an issue, etc.
Last couple of weeks I was learning and playing with Equalizer APO with a Windows PC. After lots of reading and experiments, I set up two tests last night. One EQ was automatically generated using REW for 20Hz to 20K. It gave me some 6-7 corrections. And one EQ was manually created by me. Simply looking at the two frequency peaks and reducing them by 5dB with a Q of 5 (I think). After several A/B comparisons (non-blind) I found that I did NOT like the auto generated EQ too much. But the manual one! Man oh man! Absolutely amazing sound. It took away those rattles and the extra loudness in bass and "lifted a veil" from the sound further enhancing clarity. It was stunning. Subtle but very significant.
Now the problem is that I cannot go back. I was well set up with my sources before. Logitech Media Server, DLNA, etc. I have an Apple TV device for playing lossless Apple Music (this gives me the same audio quality as FLAC files via DLNA). But as soon as I listened to these source, all I heard was the rattling (I have to say it happens only on some songs. Most songs don't hit those low frequencies). But I want to listen to all those songs "the right way" now.
With the new EQ, I only have Foobar2000 playing in non-exclusive mode (because I need Equalizer APO). So my music selection gets limited to my own FLAC (and mp3) files. I have Spotify running on Windows which does give me pretty decent sound quality but to raise it up all the way I will have to get CD's and FLAC files because I can't EQ the Apple TV and the FireTV stick, and the DLNA playback etc. Or can I? Any pointers appreciated.
I will look into buying and setting up a raspberry pi with volumio if it can help. Or those $100 mini PC devices on Amazon. Maybe a $200 DAC or something. Or I can continue to use the existing Windows PC tower connected to the AVR via HDMI. (I don't know if I can live with using remote desktop and Foobar2000 though)... How do others do this? TIA.
To start at the beginning, I get pretty good sound when I feed FLAC files to my Marantz AVR using DLNA/uPnP. Wide airy sound stage, precise instruments, loud bass. What I don't like is a bit of rattling in my room. Shelves, picture frames on the wall, etc. The bass sounds a bit loose. REW+Umik measurements reveal a couple of "room modes" but I was never quite sure how to handle those. I tried various things with Audyssey, introducing WiiM mini for Equalization, buying a new amp to see if driving my speakers was an issue, etc.
Last couple of weeks I was learning and playing with Equalizer APO with a Windows PC. After lots of reading and experiments, I set up two tests last night. One EQ was automatically generated using REW for 20Hz to 20K. It gave me some 6-7 corrections. And one EQ was manually created by me. Simply looking at the two frequency peaks and reducing them by 5dB with a Q of 5 (I think). After several A/B comparisons (non-blind) I found that I did NOT like the auto generated EQ too much. But the manual one! Man oh man! Absolutely amazing sound. It took away those rattles and the extra loudness in bass and "lifted a veil" from the sound further enhancing clarity. It was stunning. Subtle but very significant.
Now the problem is that I cannot go back. I was well set up with my sources before. Logitech Media Server, DLNA, etc. I have an Apple TV device for playing lossless Apple Music (this gives me the same audio quality as FLAC files via DLNA). But as soon as I listened to these source, all I heard was the rattling (I have to say it happens only on some songs. Most songs don't hit those low frequencies). But I want to listen to all those songs "the right way" now.
With the new EQ, I only have Foobar2000 playing in non-exclusive mode (because I need Equalizer APO). So my music selection gets limited to my own FLAC (and mp3) files. I have Spotify running on Windows which does give me pretty decent sound quality but to raise it up all the way I will have to get CD's and FLAC files because I can't EQ the Apple TV and the FireTV stick, and the DLNA playback etc. Or can I? Any pointers appreciated.
I will look into buying and setting up a raspberry pi with volumio if it can help. Or those $100 mini PC devices on Amazon. Maybe a $200 DAC or something. Or I can continue to use the existing Windows PC tower connected to the AVR via HDMI. (I don't know if I can live with using remote desktop and Foobar2000 though)... How do others do this? TIA.
