Has DSP turned us into audio neurotics? [rant]

[MattHooper]

Fair point.
For 2 channel, I listen to the Salon2s via Roon (DietPi) Benchmark: DAC3B, HPA4, AHB2s.

The subs are used for HT, but that represents most of the system use.
The Rythmik subs are very clean and are felt more than heard.

- Rich

Sorry, didn’t know that was your set up. Didn’t mean to diss your system! If you’re going to have visible subs, that’s about as good as it gets!

 

[Keith_W]

I understand that, and it is true. But, reflections also matter, just not to the extent of direct sound. That is why people use room treatments, so that they can control the reflections. I don't have that luxury. So, instead, I use DSP and it helps. Does it help as much as room treatment? No. But it is better than completely ignoring the issue of asymmetric reflections.

I think it is more helpful to think of DSP and room treatment as complimentary rather than competing.

For low frequencies, DSP is definitely a better tool than room treatment. Reasons: it is less intrusive, and it can do almost everything that room treatment can (including reducing ringing to an extent and fixing nulls), and it can do a lot of things that room treatment can not - such as time and phase alignment. It is overall a much more precise tool for low frequencies.

For upper frequencies, room treatment is unquestionably superior. DSP should not be used as gently as possible because what is measured does not correlate with what is heard.

 

[terryforsythe]

I think it is more helpful to think of DSP and room treatment as complimentary rather than competing.

I agree. But, as I previously noted, I don't have the luxury of room treatment - it will not fly with the boss.

For low frequencies, DSP is definitely a better tool than room treatment. Reasons: it is less intrusive, and it can do almost everything that room treatment can (including reducing ringing to an extent and fixing nulls), and it can do a lot of things that room treatment can not - such as time and phase alignment. It is overall a much more precise tool for low frequencies.

I agree.

For upper frequencies, room treatment is unquestionably superior.

I agree, but see my first response above.

DSP should not be used as gently as possible because what is measured does not correlate with what is heard.

I do use DSP in the upper frequencies. I tuned - measured - listened - repeated until I found what sounded optimal for my system. My imaging with DSP in the upper frequencies is better than it is without. Apparently that is hard for people to believe. As I have stated, if anyone wants to come listen, let me know. Considering that I have a very asymmetrical room and no room treatment beyond normal furnishings, how well my system images is impressive.

EDIT: Also, regardless of frequency, implementing crossovers using DSP filters is superior to using passive filters in numerous respects, with the only downside being that you need more amplifiers. And, I'm stating that as somebody who designed passive filters, inductors and capacitors as a career, for well over a decade. That experience includes an in-depth investigation into laminated steel inductor core losses.

 

[CapMan]

What if someone does not have a typical room? My room must not be typical - my in-room response certainly is not "quite linear" above 500 Hz.

I changed my speakers and the response above 500Hz became much more linear - they are flat on axis and have very even / well controlled directivity.

My room is bad - a bay window on one side, angled wall on the other, and it's pretty small.

I use Dirac with Bass Control up to 500Hz. Works wonders to clean up the low end and integrate two little subs .

 

[terryforsythe]

I changed my speakers and the response above 500Hz became much more linear - they are flat on axis and have very even / well controlled directivity.

My room is bad - a bay window on one side, angled wall on the other, and it's pretty small.

I use Dirac with Bass Control up to 500Hz. Works wonders to clean up the low end.

I agree that Dirac is good for bass control. But, I didn't have to change speakers.

My issue was that even with the L and R channels close to one another anechoic, they were not as close in-room and that created smearing of the phantom images.

 

[CapMan]

I agree that Dirac is good for bass control. But, I didn't have to change speakers.

My issue was that even with the L and R channels close to one another anechoic, they were not as close in-room and that created smearing of the phantom images.

I think we can use all tools available to us to optimise our enjoyment in our specific living environments.

If subs help fill out a low frequency suck out go ahead and use them. If DSP helps address left and right and imbalances why not take advantage.

It's not a binary discussion with a right and wrong - every room is different, as are peoples' acumen and appetite to try out technology.

I think the trend will be towards more DSP and not less, but geared towards simplicity of use and consumer level devices. Like Sonos true play.

 

[Sal1950]

It’s nice that the sub has a good finish, but it still strikes me as ungainly looking. The set up would look much more sleek and neat with just the floorstanding speakers , without another big box with giant drivers like that sub. I find adding the subs makes it look cluttered, like when you go to an audio store and they have various speakers set up beside each other.

But that’s my taste.

Form follows function.
I've got 2 in my room because I want top notch bass.
Don't give a rodents butt what they look like, if they work right.

 

[A Surfer]

Absolutely agree with the notion that in the world of audio reproduction, calibration and correction, there are few absolute and isolated technological approaches. Mix and match, have fun experimenting if that your thing.

Frankly, I wish that I had the patience and motivation to play with DSP and room treatment. They both appeal to me, especially the potential for synergistic applications.

 

[Sal1950]

Absolutely agree with the notion that in the world of audio reproduction, calibration and correction, there are few absolute and isolated technological approaches. Mix and match, have fun experimenting if that your thing.

Frankly, I wish that I had the patience and motivation to play with DSP and room treatment. They both appeal to me, especially the potential for synergistic applications.

Doing the job very well but not "perfectly" doesn't really ask very much of you..
A few absorption panels in the first refection point of the L & R speakers is easy peasy to determine and can be dirt cheap to implement.
A mostly automated program like Audyssey or Dirac will take an hour at most to run. If you chose to measure the results with a $100 mik and free REW
and then tweak the curve a bit might consume an evening. This can really take your system to the next level with very little time and stress involved.
Just don't get all OCD over things and just enjoy the music.

 

[DLS79]

For whoever said their wife won't let them use room treatments, show her this.

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MY wife is particular about some things as well, but she was pretty receptive on a conceptual level of treatments like this.

 

[Snarfie]

I presume people with adequate room acoustics like i had in my former home are not really looking for DSP the natural balanced sound in a acousticly good room is preferable imo over DSP. The moment i moved to another house i came in a living room of acoustic horror. Moved to the attic same situation but with DSP listening to farfield colume speakers on a more ore less near field listening triangle position 1,9 meters i got atleast my liquid sound back i had in my former home.

Now i been in quite some living/listening rooms equiped with DSP (Lyngdorf, Mathaudio, Dirac) an probably because of placement speakers an WAF the sound is better but imo in lot of rooms not good enough let say 20% improvement (which is already a lot) i guess because of named reasons here above. Point is i'm happy with my DSP which correct my FR that sometimes exeeds almost 15 db in the mid high frequency range. So when one of us get a excelent result it could be not the same for everyone their are just to much variabels that are involved getting the best out of DSP imo. Above could be part of neurotic behaviour.

 

[Jost Buergi]

I don’t quite get the point of this rant. The nostalgic view on the “simpler but luckier past” may apply to many hobbies or even broader areas of life. Considering all the (almost) useless upgrade fashions in Audio of the past I am more than happy spending my time not just on improving my sound at home but also and learning so much about acoustics, integrating subwoofers, DSP etc. And if you don´t want to, well then just stick with what got, no problem at all.

 

[Todd68]

Do I really have to be a scientist or a working audio engineer, isn't it enough to understand what Toole says about the matter?
I have been recording my music and have experimented with digital signal processing almost every day for the last 10 years, if that is good enough. (I don't really see the importance of this)

Yes, science is always evolving, but the thing that has not evolved is the way microphones work, and how differently they work compared to our hearing.
A microphone picks up everything as if they are equally important no matter if it's the direct sound from the source, or reflected sounds from the room. But that's not how our hearing works as it puts more emphasis on the direct sound, and treats the reflected sounds as secondary sounds.

You can easily test this by placing your recording microphone beside you while your lovely wife speaks to you from say a 3-meter distance. Listen carefully to how she sounds to you and compare that to the recorded sound of her voice (use headphones), notice how much of the direct sound you hear of her voice hearing her in real life compared to how dominating the room reflections are on the recording.

That simple little test is all that is needed to understand that our hearing will put way more emphasis on the direct sound from the loudspeakers, in comparison to the in-room measurement made by the microphone.

Isn’t physcoacoustic smoothing a more accurate representation of what we hear? Also, my speakers sound good (acceptable balanced frequency response) at different locations in the room, but moving the mic even small amounts shows how much the measured response changes, I definitely can’t hear as much a difference as the measurements would lead me to believe.

 

[mhardy6647]

Thinking about acoustic room treatments and aesthetics (and/or WAF/SAF, as the case may be) put me in mind of a corny old joke given life on the original Dick Van Dyke show (season 1, episode 27, 1962):

 

[coonmanx]

I don’t quite get the point of this rant. The nostalgic view on the “simpler but luckier past” may apply to many hobbies or even broader areas of life. Considering all the (almost) useless upgrade fashions in Audio of the past I am more than happy spending my time not just on improving my sound at home but also and learning so much about acoustics, integrating subwoofers, DSP etc. And if you don´t want to, well then just stick with what got, no problem at all.

I understand hte point of the "rant". But this hobby has always been neurotic. I remember back in 1980 when I got my first system and then I subscribed to Stereo Review. Stereo Review was neurosis central because there was always something that was better than what you had. And I even thought about changing some of my gear only to realize that it wouldn't really be much of an improvement. So over the years and especially lately I have learned to be happy with the good sound that I have. I know what I like. I don't stream anything. I listen to CDs. I rarely sit exactly in the sweet spot anymore. No DSP, no outboard DAC, no room treatments. Could I go down that rabbit hole? Sure but it wouldn't do much for me at all. I am content and that is a good place to be.

The hobby wants you to keep tweaking and changing things. It promises there is always something better. But that is an individual choice. I have no issue with anyone who decides to stream, has an outboard DAC, does room treatments and DSP. If that makes them happy then fine. But if they have to keep chasing the next greatest thing then are they truly happy? I don't know...

I could also use a subwoofer to extend the bass on one of my systems. But I choose not to and that suits me just fine. Also I live in an apartment so I don't want to disturb the neighbors. But I did think about what it might sound like. Just never felt the need to follow through on that.

 

[levimax]

Very true - Yes, DSP is encouraging poor basic speaker design and construction. As long as the drivers between them are capable of producing the entire range of frequencies needed for music, cheap speaker builders can cut their design and R&D budget and leave us relying on DSP to make a poorly-performing speaker appear like a well-designed one! How bad is that?

DSP can do some things quite well, mostly cleaning up bass below Schroeder. It can not make "poorly-performing speakers" sound like well-designed speakers. Since it can, as you mention, make "poorly-performing speakers APPEAR to be performing like a well-designed speakers", and this incorrect notion is pushed by "automatic DSP vendors", how is that not "bad"? Some of the claims make by the DSP vendors are certainly snake oil. I think the reason DSP gets controversial is because it can be both an effective science based tool and snake oil.

 

[Todd68]

DSP can do some things quite well, mostly cleaning up bass below Schroeder. It can not make "poorly-performing speakers" sound like well-designed speakers. Since it can, as you mention, make "poorly-performing speakers APPEAR to be performing like a well-designed speakers", and this incorrect notion is pushed by "automatic DSP vendors", how is that not "bad"? Some of the claims make by the DSP vendors are certainly snake oil. I think the reason DSP gets controversial is because it can be both an effective science based tool and snake oil.

Agree, it’s good for knocking down room modes, but if the speakers aren’t sounding good in the upper range, look at room acoustics and speakers positioning before trying to DSP the upper range. In my opinion, using DSP over Schroeder is the last resort.

 

[ElJaimito]

I have been involved with audio since I was 7, so that's 64 years. I have worked professionally as a studio engineer and in a low-key way as a design engineer, with products in production. I have designed the acoustics for small professional recording studios. I also have a degree in psychology. I am not boasting, many are much more skilled and gifted than I, just setting the basis for my comments.

Nowadays on my recording desktop I have access to facilities that would have cost me literal millions of pounds in the 70's.

But we still have the same problems now that we had then:

- rooms
- transducers
- ears (as a special subset of transducers)
- brains
- expectations

Most of all the above are all kerap just as they always have been. Microphones have not noticeably improved since the 1950's (except in noise level), modern speaker drivers are better than Kellogg & Rice managed - note Kellogg also invented an electrostatic speaker - but not remarkably so. Ears need a tremendous amount of help and support to make any useful judgement of quality, and the expectations of brains ruin all objectivity and twist what we hear. Fewer and fewer people are actually familiar with what direct acoustic instruments sound like.

Unless it's a recording control room, or another room with a lot of acoustic treatment, most rooms are useless for analytical listening (though perhaps fine for just enjoying music).

Now DSP is what provides the million £/$/€ value in my systems, and DSP is what I use to correct the near-field response of my Neumann monitors so I can make accurate decisions - it's also used in most of my monitors to correct time and phase errors.

Some of this stuff can be done without DSP -- but -- why?!? When DSP is so much more precise and accurate.

Kindly realise that there is no analog signal path from the eardrum to the brain. A form of analog-y sort-of DSP is involved in the inner ear (as well of course as in the retina of the eye) and the signals sent to the brain are pre-processed.

All of which is why extreme caution is required in judging audio quality with "the ear". "The ear" is the final arbiter, but as I said, you need to give it a lot of support. I have absolutely zero empathy for anyone who adopts a belief-based approach to audio, and I have met many of them, some of extreme disconnect to audio reality, in studios, including engineers (!) and musicians, conductors, and of course audio "enthusiasts", even designers.

The idea that there was ever a "golden-age" of analog audio is simply wrong. Most of the older gear I had was kerap, and that's why I sold it. It was the best I could do at that time, and now I have digital gear to beat it. I do have analog processors, but I have them because of their characteristic flaws, which sometimes are useful in livening up synthetic production. I have kept JBL monitors, Lowther Acoustas, because they are interesting, not good - but sold every old valve/tube ReVoX I had (awful things), my RCA Orthophonics, my Tannoy Silvers and Golds, my Quad 303 and 405, (my II's were nicked), Leak, Radford, and so many more -- it's a long list -- and changed to Class D amplifiers everywhere I can, now that they have achieved decent quality. For main monitors I only use active speakers with inbuilt DSP correction.

DSP for me is the best thing that has happened to audio, and is slowly enabling us to get rid of the worst persisting features of microphones and loudspeakers, and via psycho-acoustic understanding, ears and brains. The only issue - latency.

There. I have set out my stall

 

[levimax]

but if the speakers aren’t sounding good in the upper range

Or get better speakers. The problem is above Schroeder you don't know what you are measuring so in essence "driving blind". To me it seems like above Schroeder DSP should be done "by ear" as there is not going to be reliable correlations between measurements and what you hear.

 

[goat76]

Isn’t physcoacoustic smoothing a more accurate representation of what we hear? Also, my speakers sound good (acceptable balanced frequency response) at different locations in the room, but moving the mic even small amounts shows how much the measured response changes, I definitely can’t hear as much a difference as the measurements would lead me to believe.

Maybe for the bass frequency range, but for the higher frequency range It shouldn't matter what type of smoothing is used if the in-room measurement is the wrong sort of measurement to begin with.