Most dacs for many years have been absolutely adequate in real world use. If you want better spec, there can be improvements.....but audibly, not so much.
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running dual speakers per channel in stereo, WTF!?
- Thread starter khaliss
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All audiophile refers to is someone interested in high fidelity reproduction for the most part....long term members aren't ranking your opinion if that's your thought.
OP
khaliss
Active Member
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- #23
gotcha... alright, I'm really just someone who likes to listen to music, watch movies, and enjoy a good audio system (at least to my ears). So, I'm just posting my setup here with some measurements, share my experience, try to get feedback from the community, & hope to learn something new
That's all there is to it, if you or anyone else got something constructive to say (or critic), that's welcome of course. My point is measurements don't lie, correct? So the question here is with the graphs... if you were to choose, which one would it be?
gotcha... alright, I'm really just someone who likes to listen to music, watch movies, and enjoy a good audio system (at least to my ears). So, I'm just posting my setup here with some measurements, share my experience, try to get feedback from the community, & hope to learn something new
That's all there is to it, if you or anyone else got something constructive to say (or critic), that's welcome of course. My point is measurements don't lie, correct? So the question here is with the graphs... if you were to choose, which one would it be?
Steady-state in-room measurements can and absolutely do lie (at least some of the time).
kemmler3D
Master Contributor
In this case it would be more a matter of taste, (a little more mids / highs, or not?) -I might go for just the electrostat because the peaks look a little less objectionable... not a definitive take, YMMV.
But as @DVDdoug mentions, more action will be in the phase view, I also think you might see bigger differences in the unsmoothed amplitude view.
And, also, based on your first post, what you're really after is different dispersion, which doesn't really show up on a single point measurement either. So I think your biggest benefits and detriments will be seen in different graphs or with additional sweeps at different angles. As @Beave alludes to, measurements can typically capture everything we hear, but no one graph tells everything.
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khaliss
Active Member
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- #27
I thought VAR smoothing would be what is considered as what is the audible range for human ears... it almost seems to me that the dual speaker graph has a more "steady" average line across the frequency range than the electrostat only... also the dips are not as bad as well... yeah I know the peaks are a little bad, but I don't listen loud, on average around 70-75db, rarely past 80 (my wife won't tolerate it LOL), so wouldn't it better to have lesser dips, a more consistent median line, in exchange for slightly more pronounced peaks?
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Hello, nice speakers.
I was auditioning for Martin Logan Electrostats and the salesman literally made me go to the corner of the room to show me how the sound doesn't change. And it really isn't as much as it is with normal speakers.Especially the ones with waveguide.
So that surprises me a bit. Can you clarify a little bit about what you're hearing on and off axis?
But we all have our speakers tuned to give the best sound at one point and that's how we listen to music 80% of the time, if not more.
I was auditioning for Martin Logan Electrostats and the salesman literally made me go to the corner of the room to show me how the sound doesn't change. And it really isn't as much as it is with normal speakers.Especially the ones with waveguide.
So that surprises me a bit. Can you clarify a little bit about what you're hearing on and off axis?
But we all have our speakers tuned to give the best sound at one point and that's how we listen to music 80% of the time, if not more.
kemmler3D
Master Contributor
Generally peaks are considered more audible than a comparable dip, but like I said it's probably more a matter of taste between the two frequency responses.
The phase doesn't look too different, actually.
VAR or ERB smoothing is usually what you want to represent how something sounds in practice, in aggregate, but comb filtering manifests as a regular series of very narrow dips (hence the name, it can look like a comb) depending on how far apart the sources are, so any smoothed view will tend to hide it.
Lion♡
Senior Member
I always liked the interesting experiment. good for you.
It wasn’t aimed at extending the listening position, but I remember seeing a user who deliberately stacked speakers to create a vertically larger sound image—though I can’t recall the exact details and post.
You might find it helpful to open the impulse overlay, zoom in on the first peak, and check the peaks of L1, L2, R1, and R2.
It wasn’t aimed at extending the listening position, but I remember seeing a user who deliberately stacked speakers to create a vertically larger sound image—though I can’t recall the exact details and post.
You might find it helpful to open the impulse overlay, zoom in on the first peak, and check the peaks of L1, L2, R1, and R2.
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khaliss
Active Member
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- #32
so again, as I was trying to explain in my original post... my ESL electrostats are the entry-level model and they have the smallest panels along ML's product line... so therefore the "sweetspot" zone would be proportional. When I'm sitting down dead-center between the speakers, it's great & magical, I'm soaking in 100% of the sound reproduction. But once I stand up and move around the room, basically I lose the midrange and the highs, the sound collapses down to maybe 40-20% as I'm moving about. My wife, when she walks in my little listening room.. she chides me saying I spent a considerable amount of money in my system, but the sound is NOT good LOL. Then I tell her, okay sit down on my recliner and listen... then she nods and say, yep it does sound GOOD!
So my objective here is by adding the RS6 (conventional speaker) into the mix, I'm now able to hear 75-80% of the sound when I'm moving about the room (instead of just 20-40%), does that make sense?
Are you going to run the two DACs in parallel and feed each one to each speaker set?
kemmler3D
Master Contributor
Joking aside, it's a bad idea, DAC clocks can drift enough that it would get noticeably out of sync and cause weird phasey / comb filter-y sound.
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khaliss
Active Member
- Thread Starter
- #38
here it is: Yellow (single) + Pink (Dual)
I do see now the peaks/dips are longer with the Dual speakers & are a bit worse than the Single speaker. The question is how much does it affect a listener on how the soundwaves are translated into our brains as music or audio in movies? The videos I watched to kinda learn how these things work (like taking REW room measurements) claim that 1/6 smoothing is probably the resolution that sound is translated into our brains(?) That's why I haven't paid close attention to unsmoothed graphs... but hey I'm trying to learn here =)
To me, VAR smoothing looks more like 1/3.
And that seems to me to be how we "see" music, unlike some reviewers who swear they hear drops of 0.2DB.
But all that aside, you probably picked up your speakers for their speed and clean performance, the transparency they're known for.
You don't want multiple sources playing together because that basically causes twice as much intermodulation as you can see.....
That's why three-way design is more appreciated than two and a half way.
Now, as far as it's heard, I'd bet it's definitely not, but now that you've seen it, I couldn't help but hear it, if that makes sense to you.
Maybe get a speaker switch so you can switch when you move around or working to just one pair, and Martin Logan for critical listening?
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