Is my system effectively transparent?

[DearSX]

Don't worry about the electronics, the distortion inherent even for state of the art speakers is orders of magnitudes higher.

On top of that, the distortions from your room are orders of magnitude worse than the speakers. Take any pair of speakers, and use any measurement mic to check the decay times at your listening position, measured in cycles. It takes a lot of acoustic treatment to get consistent decay behaviour.

Agree, I'm gonna take a step back with the electronics.

 

[DearSX]

If you have not seen it already, the spinorama database (https://www.spinorama.org/scores.html) is good for looking at the performance of loudspeakers measured here and reliable measurements from elsewhere. Would suggest reading the brief help section and the cited material if you're keen on learning more if these things are new to you.

There are very competent calibrated mics even the $80 usb umik-1 from minidsp is a great option many people love here, there are guides on both here and youtube on how measure and do everything with REW/peq, which is enough to see what kinds of benefits you could get with your current speakers. Worth giving it a try with even just a PC as a source to test if it's not your regular source. The mic will always be useful to reuse if you rearrange the room, change speakers and so on. Definitely the best value/$ anyone can ever spend on a system if you are willing to take a little bit of time to learn and measure. Definitely a great way to also spend another <$100 bucks.

I have an old Dayton XLR mic, I think a USB mic makes more sense like the MiniDSP one.

 

[Mart68]

Thanks,

What would you choose and why?

I also have the Parasound A21 and older Adcom G555 which may be fine also.

I also have loads of amplifiers, i decided which to use on a permanent basis the old-fashioned way - trying all of them and going with the one that I felt gave the best sound

Given they are all 'audibly transparent' I think the only differentiating factor can be how well they cope with the load offered by the speaker. Compared to that SINAD is pretty inconsequential.

 

[DearSX]

I also have loads of amplifiers, i decided which to use on a permanent basis the old-fashioned way - trying all of them and going with the one that I felt gave the best sound

Given they are all 'audibly transparent' I think the only differentiating factor can be how well they cope with the load offered by the speaker. Compared to that SINAD is pretty inconsequential.

Right