klettermann
Active Member
[rant]
As I remember my days as a college student, there was always some rich kid with a fabulous stereo. It would be a pair of AR 2a's, maybe a Phase Linear amp, a Dynaco preamp (or maybe Pioneer receiver). You get the idea. Speakers went wherever they fit in a dorm cubicle room, not a thought about acoustics or much else. We all thought it sounded fabulous! Fast forward a few years later as we advanced to fancier stuff. McIntosh! KEF! Maybe Magneplaners for the oddballs. Still, little thought about acoustics except to do the best you could. If you were fancy maybe some kind of equalizer. But no SPL sweeps, no waterfalls, measurements, none of that. Somehow we still managed and enjoyed the results. Who had the ability to obsess about a 1/8 octive 10dB null at 74Hz?
Fast forward to now. DSP now allows us to tweak to a degree previously unimaginable. Pefection seems theoreticaly attainable, though perhaps always just out of reach. Is this creating a new cohort of audio neurotics? Are we tweaking things that we never heard before, or didn't care, just cause we can? I'm finding myself increasingly drawn into the DSP rabbit hole (I refer to 2ch, HT/video is another matter). This distrubs me, cause I think my system already sounds damn good. The perfect has become the enemy of the good. God save us all.
[/rant]
As I remember my days as a college student, there was always some rich kid with a fabulous stereo. It would be a pair of AR 2a's, maybe a Phase Linear amp, a Dynaco preamp (or maybe Pioneer receiver). You get the idea. Speakers went wherever they fit in a dorm cubicle room, not a thought about acoustics or much else. We all thought it sounded fabulous! Fast forward a few years later as we advanced to fancier stuff. McIntosh! KEF! Maybe Magneplaners for the oddballs. Still, little thought about acoustics except to do the best you could. If you were fancy maybe some kind of equalizer. But no SPL sweeps, no waterfalls, measurements, none of that. Somehow we still managed and enjoyed the results. Who had the ability to obsess about a 1/8 octive 10dB null at 74Hz?
Fast forward to now. DSP now allows us to tweak to a degree previously unimaginable. Pefection seems theoreticaly attainable, though perhaps always just out of reach. Is this creating a new cohort of audio neurotics? Are we tweaking things that we never heard before, or didn't care, just cause we can? I'm finding myself increasingly drawn into the DSP rabbit hole (I refer to 2ch, HT/video is another matter). This distrubs me, cause I think my system already sounds damn good. The perfect has become the enemy of the good. God save us all.
[/rant]