Wartybliggens
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I am looking for informed advice: what changes to my current system will result in an audible improvement?
What I have now, dating from around 2011-13, in a medium-sized rectangular room:
I don't have a zillion dollars. And my system sounds good. So drool notwithstanding, I am wondering what would actually move the needle (especially in a way that I can afford). My focus for this thread is music: I have quite a lot of multichannel SACD music, mostly classical, and of course tons of two-channel music: I listen to music a lot and am music-obsessed most hours of the day. Let's say that the processor does die, or the Oppo, or both - what should be my next move, to make an improvement that I will actually hear?
My complaints about the sound of my current system are vague, and some days I have them less than others. Mostly it's a feeling that there should be more clarity with orchestral music, especially as it gets louder. I suspect that it's possible to sound more wide open. But I could be making that up, since I don't have anything to compare with right now - not only Covid, but also the fact that so many audio stores no longer exist around these parts. And some days it all sounds great, so maybe it's just me?
Assumptions / guesses, some more debatable than others:
What I have now, dating from around 2011-13, in a medium-sized rectangular room:
- Oppo BDP-95 universal disc player (the one with the dedicated analog audio board).
- Emotiva UMC-200: processor only used for Roku or computer output; set to pass through the output of the Oppo as a preamp only.
- Emotiva XPA-5 five-channel amp: this has some hum on certain channels but it's barely audible from a distance.
- Monitor Audio Silver RX speakers x 5: RX8 towers, plus matching center and surrounds.
- Rythmik F15 subwoofer (sealed).
- Blue Jeans Cables: Belden "ten white" speaker cables and "LC-1 Low Capacitance" RCA interconnects.
- Room Treatments: large floor-to-ceiling bass traps in the front corners of the room (I built these myself), cedar lattice on the ceiling, rugs hung on opposite side walls.
- The UMC-200 processor may die - it still works but it's acting fishy, sometimes giving a flash memory mismatch error, getting stuck in its startup routine, and making me restart it to get it to handshake with the Roku.
- The Oppo might die. It's still going strong, but it can't last forever. There are modern universal disc players that also do 4k video, so I'm not too worried about the Oppo fizzling, but then I will care more about the DAC for discs, since a new player wouldn't have Oppo's dedicated audio board - so that got me thinking that I would want a better processor, especially since I expect to play more multichannel FLAC files from my computer in the future.
I don't have a zillion dollars. And my system sounds good. So drool notwithstanding, I am wondering what would actually move the needle (especially in a way that I can afford). My focus for this thread is music: I have quite a lot of multichannel SACD music, mostly classical, and of course tons of two-channel music: I listen to music a lot and am music-obsessed most hours of the day. Let's say that the processor does die, or the Oppo, or both - what should be my next move, to make an improvement that I will actually hear?
My complaints about the sound of my current system are vague, and some days I have them less than others. Mostly it's a feeling that there should be more clarity with orchestral music, especially as it gets louder. I suspect that it's possible to sound more wide open. But I could be making that up, since I don't have anything to compare with right now - not only Covid, but also the fact that so many audio stores no longer exist around these parts. And some days it all sounds great, so maybe it's just me?
Assumptions / guesses, some more debatable than others:
- The amp is probably good enough, hum or no. It's just power after all. ...right?
- I can't do better than the cables & interconnects I already have, except if I were to have a balanced system with XLR cables (how much better that would sound I do not know, having no available real-life comparison).
- I'm not going to improve on the speakers I already have without spending a zillion dollars, and even then the improvement would be modest.
- If I were to get the RMC-1L (only if they honor the discount, otherwise no more Emotiva for me ever again), despite it not being perfect, it would probably still be an audible improvement over my old UMC-200 - though I wonder how much different and whether it justifies the cost. And what about two-channel music? From reading here, I wonder whether a dedicated DAC + preamp may be both better and cheaper, not to mention smaller.
- Room correction EQ may pay bigger dividends than anything else.