Unfussy setup for deeply imperfect listening space

[psqqa]

Hello all,

I'm looking to move from my ancient little Bose Colour bluetooth speaker to something that gives me a listening experience comparable in enjoyment to what I get from my really not very sophisticated headphones (i.e. I don't have well-trained ears that need optimal sound as my cheap headphones have been good enough for me, but my speakers no longer are).

I am prone to both research and decision paralysis, on top of last having taken physics over 15 years ago and not having been very good at it. I am thoroughly overwhelmed by all the technical elements, and even more deeply bamboozled by all the non-tech lingo, which does not lend itself to intuitive interpretation, and which I struggle to differentiate in terms of "actually meaningful" vs "snake oil". Essentially, please treat me like a five-year-old who barely understands that lightning is the same thing that comes out of an electrical socket.

I asked the very kind and helpful people in the r/StereoAdvice subreddit for input on this as well (see that thread here), but I like to get multiple opinions, and although I suspect some members of that subreddit are also members of this forum, this forum has an explicitly different approach to most of what I've seen out there, so I would like to see what you all have to say as well. (If anyone who saw that thread is seeing this one, please do not think I am not grateful for your input there or don't trust you, I really do just want as many opinions as possible to help offset my complete lack of understanding around this whole topic.)

Based on the responses there, I'm reframing my question somewhat to emphasize the fact that my listening space is not at all ideal, and although there are probably things I can do to make it better, I really do need speakers that will at the very least sound listenable as is within that space (and any future space I may find myself in), with any optimizations on my part only working to make them sound better, rather than baseline functional.

The main issues appear to be
1. I live in a 1 bedroom apartment so my living room and kitchen are in the same room, making for an unbalanced space
2. I require lots of natural light for my sanity, so one of my walls is entirely glass and any place I move to in the future will have similar levels of glass for similar levels of light. Yes, I could have curtains there, but I am not going to close my curtains every time I listen to music.
(3. The wall behind my couch has a bunch of framed prints on it that also have glass on them. They will not be moved.)

My couch is about 2.5/3m from where my speakers would be. The speakers will sit on my wooden credenza on each side of my TV (so about 1m apart?), which will put them about 10-20cm from an internal wall (depending on how large they are, I guess). The space does not allow for separate stands. Inevitably, the right speaker will be functionally in a corner made of the inner wall and the HVAC tube thing that runs through my unit (painted to look like a wall, and probably covered in some kind of plaster, but I'm sure that underneath it's metal (mostly really highlighting the fact that optimizing speaker placement and the space itself is just not much of an option). The overall dimensions of the room are about 3x9m, I would guess?

What I ended up with on my first go-around by going to an audio store was Klipsch The Fives, which I liked in store, but actively hurt my ears when I put them in my space. The frequency response graphs appear to indicate they are somewhat bright speakers (I cannot make heads nor tails of these graphs myself, so I'm taking people's words on it here), but the fact they were so bright as to hurt my ears suggests that I am both somewhat sensitive to brightness (which would make sense, given what I know of myself) and that my space is inevitably going to brighten any system. It also means I'm somewhat less inclined to trust my own ears in any space but my own, and also now wary of trusting salespeople to be able to advise (and at the same time, given the information overload, really needing someone to advise).

Beyond that issue, the original list of "wants" I had decided on when I set out on this journey were as follows:

1. Not too bright (the irony)
2. Detailed. The main one for me where I can tell this difference is Joanna Newsom, who I listen to pretty much only through headphones because my speakers push her voice to the foreground, and then shove the harp and all other instrumentation into one mass in the barely audible background and it drives me insane. I also really want to be able to hear detail at relatively quiet volumes because I'm somewhat paranoid about bothering my neighbours. (That being said, during daylight hours, I would also like to listen quite loudly, although I could not tell you objectively how loud that would be.)
3. A sense of closeness? Intimacy? This is one that I love through headphones but am unsure whether that is a function of having the sound essentially right against eardrums or whether it can in fact be achieved with speakers. I find a lot of music just loses a lot of its impact through my speakers because it just sounds more distant. I think if I could replicate that without having to go super loud that would also affect how loud I'd be looking to play music at.

The other relevant elements:

1. I would like one system for everything, so it needs to be able to hook up to my TV as well. Music, however, is the only one where the sound really matters to me. TV etc. will all be sufficient so long as they don't sound tinny. I'm really not that fussy about that. I'd like to have the input flexibility to add a CD player or phonograph or subwoofer, etc. in future if I so desire.
2. Mostly I am listening to music from my computer either via Spotify or my iTunes library of downloads and CD rips. I tend to connect via Bluetooth because I'm lazy, but I'll use my aux cable as well. My genres are all over the place, as are the sophistication of the original recordings (e.g. beautifully recorded classical music vs 90s lofi vs a microphone held up to an elder in North Dakota in 1952, etc.), and, as indicated, the actual quality of the source files. It may well be that because of this, there is no point in getting particularly expensive speakers as they will just catch all the weaknesses of the source file and thus actually sound worse. Please do tell me if that is the case and what level of speaker you would recommend at that point.
3. Active or passive speakers are fine, it's just that if you're recommending passive speakers to me you would also need to recommend matching amps and such, because I would be back at square one trying to figure out how to match those.
4. My budget is CAD $1500. (Originally, I said CAD $1000 but willing to go up to $1500 if I could hear a clear difference, but the sense I'm getting is 1. yes, I would hear a solid difference, and 2. $1000 really isn't very high for stereo systems anyway.)

Now, the kind reddit folks mostly suggested powered speakers (as well as helpfully pointed me to the existence of things like Dirac, which I was completely unaware was a thing) but one person suggested going passive with an integrated amp to allow the amp mellow out any brightness from the speakers and my space in general. I would be curious to hear where you guys fall on this.

I've been looking at the reviews and recommended speakers and components this forum has, but I'm not sure how to interpret the results and such in the context of my space or in matching them to each other. Again, just extremely overwhelmed by huge amounts of technical lingo tied to scientific concepts I barely remember and the difficulty of differentiating between which buzzwords are actually important vs which ones are fully meaningless. I am comforted by the fact this forum does not seem to think I need to spend $6000 on a speaker cable (which I had not been planning on ever doing anyway), but it did start calling into question the validity of many of the other opinions I had come across and some of what had appeared to be consensus), so truly, any suggestions, advice, and input would be greatly appreciated.

Many, many thanks in advance!

 

[NTK]

Welcome to ASR!

@sweetchaos has a thread on recommended speakers for Canadians. Looks like the Elac DBR-62 probably fits your budget the best.

List of Amir's Recommended Speakers, for Canadians

This thread is intended for Canadian shoppers, looking to purchase speakers. Inspiration for this thread: - Since I tend to visit the same websites everyday to check for a deal, I figure I'd share this info to save others time Limitations of this thread: - I'm only posting links for speakers...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Next is the amplifier. There are several choices you may want to take a look at:

1. Yamaha WXA-50
2. Topping PA3s
3. Sabaj A30A
4. Loxjie A30

 

[psqqa]

Welcome to ASR!

@sweetchaos has a thread on recommended speakers for Canadians. Looks like the Elac DBR-62 probably fits your budget the best.

List of Amir's Recommended Speakers, for Canadians

This thread is intended for Canadian shoppers, looking to purchase speakers. Inspiration for this thread: - Since I tend to visit the same websites everyday to check for a deal, I figure I'd share this info to save others time Limitations of this thread: - I'm only posting links for speakers...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Next is the amplifier. There are several choices you may want to take a look at:

1. Yamaha WXA-50
2. Topping PA3s
3. Sabaj A30A
4. Loxjie A30

Oh, thank you so much! That's extremely useful! Would I be correct in inferring from the structure of your response that the fact that these speakers are recommended suggests all of these would sound baseline listenable in my space regardless of the specifics (and inferiority) of its acoustics?

 

[NTK]

Oh, thank you so much! That's extremely useful! Would I be correct in inferring from the structure of your response that the fact that these speakers are recommended suggests all of these would sound baseline listenable in my space regardless of the specifics (and inferiority) of its acoustics?

Yes. Good speakers will sound better than bad speakers regardless of the space they are in.

 

[psqqa]

Yes. Good speakers will sound better than bad speakers regardless of the space they are in.

Fabulous, thank you! After the Klipsches I've really been struggling with figuring out how to take recommendations and measurements and translate them into "will sound at least functional in my space". Very much appreciate having a straightforward answer and straightforward list from which I can then decide according to my budget, etc. preferences.

 

[b7676]

Passives offer more bang for the buck in midfield dispersion. You should probably blow your budget for class a/b over d. The reigning midrange D amp to pick is the a30a, though there are probably many others to be released this year. It has tricks for not needing a traditional DAC.

Nu-Klipsch are usually pretty cheesy on the inside for the price, JBL is much more pro (580, 590 are very high value towers at the discounted price). There must be a ton of paradigm, etc canuck assembled 3-ways available used up there? Check out Erin's Audio Linton review. Look at ascend acoustic ex. Triangle, Lii / Spatial Audio, Goldenear, KEF, Q Acoustic, used.

Well, You'd be shocked at the State of Things? The whole Place had just cleared right out.

 

[Tom C]

If you’re up to the challenge of teaching yourself what all the data means, I recommend taking a look at Spinorama.org. It’s built and maintained by ASR member @pierre , and is a valuable resource. You can use it to rank speakers by price, or flatness of frequency response, or Olive preference score. Only speakers with some type of available data are listed, so most speakers out there in the market are not listed. Without any measurement data, though, you have to choose by the by gosh and by golly method , which yields unpredictable and random results, as you have experienced.
‘Getting a particular type of amp to correct frequency response errors designed and built into a speaker simply will not work, because the amp will have a flat FR if well designed. Getting an amp flat is easier than getting a speaker flat, so it’s more common to luck out and get a flat amp. Harder to find one that’s not flat, and it would be just blind, dumb luck to get one that would exactly offset a speaker’s errors correctly. Basically, not gonna happen. The proper correction can be done with EQ, but you have to have access to the anechoic FR spinorama of the speaker in order to do it correctly. Now, in the case of Klipsch The Fives, we’re in luck, as these have been measured by Erin’s Audio Corner, and the spinorama data has been published. Pierre’s website has an EQ calculated, which you can use to correct your speakers:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pierreaubert/spinorama/develop/datas/eq/Klipsch%20The%20Fives/iir-autoeq.txt

I do not believe you listening space is any more imperfect than many others that have real people living in them. To the extent you can, you want your speakers away from nearby walls, and also you want to position your head away from the walls when you listen. If that can’t be done, then you can put absorptive material behind your head, or behind or next to the speakers to cut down reflections. That’s where the curtains come in, but you can use other materials, and it doesn’t have to be the whole wall, just next to the speaker and/or you head, whatever ends up being close to a wall. The problem you’re trying to solve there is a degradation in imaging. The wall acts as a reflector, just like a mirror, to throw the image askew. You can even use a mirror temporarily placed on the wall, and moved around until you can see the speaker from your listening position. Wherever the mirror is when you can see the speakers, that’s where the absorptive material should go. You can use a pillow or cushion from a chair or sofa to put in such a position on the wall, temporarily, just to test and see the effect it has, and prove the concept to yourself.

 

[AlfaNovember]

My general input is: Don't fear equalization. You want it less bright? Have a highly reflective room? Turn that 'Treble' slider down, and do it proudly. It's your ears and your brain, and your enjoyment of the music. Ignore all the 'purity' and 'integrity' mumbo-jumbo.

Further along those lines - don't rely on secret-handshake equipment combinations to 'mellow' or 'brighten' anything - that's what equalization is for. Good electronics do not impart color to the sound. If you want it to sound less bright, use an EQ to find the sound that works for you. There are some very fancy software implementations like Dirac which use a microphone and clever math to achieve good things, but there are also simple proceedural EQ plugins that can start you on the journey.

Most of your requirements are centered in the Streamer / DAC / Preamp / Interface / Whatever ya call it device that sits in the middle. Focus your thinking on that. That's what will apply EQ, that's your volume knob, and input selector. Buy good speakers, absolutely. Buy good amplification, yes. But mostly, find a device for input switching and volume adjusting, but that also supports some amount of user-adjustable EQ. Use it shamelessly.

After that - if you can't get the sound you want, the bad news is unavoidable: the room itself will need to be addressed.

 

[psqqa]

Passives offer more bang for the buck in midfield dispersion. You should probably blow your budget for class a/b over d. The reigning midrange D amp to pick is the a30a, though there are probably many others to be released this year. It has tricks for not needing a traditional DAC.

Nu-Klipsch are usually pretty cheesy on the inside for the price, JBL is much more pro (580, 590 are very high value towers at the discounted price). There must be a ton of paradigm, etc canuck assembled 3-ways available used up there? Check out Erin's Audio Linton review. Look at ascend acoustic ex. Triangle, Lii / Spatial Audio, Goldenear, KEF, Q Acoustic, used.

Well, You'd be shocked at the State of Things? The whole Place had just cleared right out.

Thank you very much! May I use your response and recommendations as a jumping off point for some lingo clarifications that have been confounding me?

1. Midfield (/nearfield/farfield) - my assumption when I've seen these terms is that this is speaking to the distance between the speaker and the listener, but what I haven't been able to discern is what distances those terms apply to. To some degree as well I've been overthinking whether nearfield/farfield are in a sort of intuitive inverse situation where "farfield" is generally indicating being closer to a speaker and "nearfield" farther from the speaker. Mostly this is because the contexts I've seen these terms crop up in have been so impenetrable to me that I've been struggling to figure out the contextual relevance.
2. Class A/B/D (amplifiers?) - My understanding is this is kind of categorization is only for amplifiers, but what I haven't been able to figure out is if it's a classification of some kind of objective quality, or a classification based on some other category of elements/features. I've seen a lot of references to Class D amplifiers which suggests Class D isn't per se bad, but I don't know whether Class A and B are per se better than Class D, or simply Different in some other way. I also do not know where the classification is coming from. Is that a standardized classification that would be applied by the manufacturers, or is that something applied by consumers based on measurements of functionality and such? Basically, how do I know something is Class D vs Class A?
3. "3-ways"- I'm so sorry, you really do have to treat me like an idiot child who knows nothing. A quick Google suggests you're referring here to 3-way speakers, which would have a tweeter, a mid-range driver, and a woofer. Is that correct? I feel like as I've been on this journey, I've seen references to speakers' tweeters and woofers, but I'm not recalling much reference to mid-range drivers. Is this because they're sort of an unsexy given people don't discuss much, or do I generally have to be on the lookout as to whether a speaker is 3-way or 2-way?
4. "tricks for not needing a traditional DAC" - now my understanding was the beauty of integrated amplifiers means one doesn't need a separate DAC or preamp or anything else to actually be able to get a sound going. I do seem to see people around here referencing systems that have speakers, amps, AND a DAC, but I can't figure out to what degree the DACs are necessary vs a personal choice for improved sound. I use an mp3 player (FiiO M6) that was marketed as being usable as a DAC, which was immaterial (and entirely meaningless) to me at the time, but now I'm curious as to what that would mean exactly and how that would fit into a potential system. The only ports I can see are the headphone jack and the USB-C(?) port I use to charge it or connect it to my computer, so I'm really not sure how they envision it being used as a DAC and whether that would be for a very specific kind of system or if that could be applied universally (given matching ports).

By God I am going to find myself a little plot of land in the audio Garden of Eden, but it turns out that over there dirt is not all the same, so thank you so much for your help in finding my way to the right plot

 

[psqqa]

If you’re up to the challenge of teaching yourself what all the data means, I recommend taking a look at Spinorama.org. It’s built and maintained by ASR member @pierre , and is a valuable resource. You can use it to rank speakers by price, or flatness of frequency response, or Olive preference score. Only speakers with some type of available data are listed, so most speakers out there in the market are not listed. Without any measurement data, though, you have to choose by the by gosh and by golly method , which yields unpredictable and random results, as you have experienced.
‘Getting a particular type of amp to correct frequency response errors designed and built into a speaker simply will not work, because the amp will have a flat FR if well designed. Getting an amp flat is easier than getting a speaker flat, so it’s more common to luck out and get a flat amp. Harder to find one that’s not flat, and it would be just blind, dumb luck to get one that would exactly offset a speaker’s errors correctly. Basically, not gonna happen. The proper correction can be done with EQ, but you have to have access to the anechoic FR spinorama of the speaker in order to do it correctly. Now, in the case of Klipsch The Fives, we’re in luck, as these have been measured by Erin’s Audio Corner, and the spinorama data has been published. Pierre’s website has an EQ calculated, which you can use to correct your speakers:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pierreaubert/spinorama/develop/datas/eq/Klipsch%20The%20Fives/iir-autoeq.txt

I do not believe you listening space is any more imperfect than many others that have real people living in them. To the extent you can, you want your speakers away from nearby walls, and also you want to position your head away from the walls when you listen. If that can’t be done, then you can put absorptive material behind your head, or behind or next to the speakers to cut down reflections. That’s where the curtains come in, but you can use other materials, and it doesn’t have to be the whole wall, just next to the speaker and/or you head, whatever ends up being close to a wall. The problem you’re trying to solve there is a degradation in imaging. The wall acts as a reflector, just like a mirror, to throw the image askew. You can even use a mirror temporarily placed on the wall, and moved around until you can see the speaker from your listening position. Wherever the mirror is when you can see the speakers, that’s where the absorptive material should go. You can use a pillow or cushion from a chair or sofa to put in such a position on the wall, temporarily, just to test and see the effect it has, and prove the concept to yourself.

I am SO up for the challenge, or at least up for trying, which is partially why I'm continuing to bang my head against this despite the numerous headaches I've ended up with so far. "Buy speakers that will work for me" feels like it shouldn't be difficult, but it turns out there's a whole rabbit hole there and entry level navigation of it seems to require....significantly more technical knowledge than I have, so it feels both like I should get a basic grasp on it and at the same time like every time I start to think I've got a enough of a read on the space to be able to complete my ultimately really not particularly sophisticated decision, it turns out there's a whole new corner of physics I have to acquaint myself with.

I just....don't like being so confused by even the basic concepts. I don't like that despite the fact I did cover the introductory elements of electricity back in high school, I can't hold in my head the relation of speaker ohm ratings to channel watts and what effect one will have on the other and what that means for volume, etc. I don't like being faced with a graph that I literally cannot begin to understand. It frustrates me that I don't have a grasp on concepts that are basic to e.g. my parents, who grew up in the world of audio separates. I don't like going into forum discussions here with people calling themselves noobs and then referencing a bunch of concepts I have never heard of and don't know how to integrate into all my further knowledge. Basically, I don't like being wholly 100% reliant on other people's opinions in a space where nobody seems to agree on anything.

So yes, I am willing to learn. That is what I am trying to do. It's just proving annoyingly difficult and is reminding me that I only passed grade 10 physics on a dubious rounding technicality. That being said, I have actually looked into those charts a bit and now have at least a basic grasp on what data they are actually conveying and some notion of how it is interpreted. Thank you so much for the link to the spinorama.org. That looks like an incredibly helpful website, and its "help" page looks to be a godsend.

Thank you as well for your input re: amplifiers offsetting speakers. That was somewhat my intuition, if only because it seemed to me that if amplifiers can have the same kind of effects on sound as pops up in speaker discussions, the search for the optimal pairing of speakers and amplifiers would be wildly complex and would have to involve testing them paired with the same speakers, which had in turn been tested with the same amplifier as other speakers, so that you know exactly what was the amplifier and what was the speaker, and that just didn't seem to be what people were doing.

It does seem that EQ is a critical part of this puzzle, which means I'm going to have to do some learning there too (so far everything in these forums is adding to the depth of my confusion). The Klipsch app had what seemed to me a pretty basic EQ option that had sliders for treble, mids, and bass. That didn't seem to me to be flexible enough to properly fix what needed fixing. Was that a false impression of mine? The sense I'm getting is that if I really need to fix speakers (as opposed to just optimize them, but even just optimization), I would need an EQ option that shows me the frequency ranges and allows for very precise dynamic alterations within those. My sense is also that if I blindly went "treble hurt, turn treble down until it doesn't hurt", I would end up making an unbalanced mess of the overall sound. The EQ correction you linked to seems to support that as there seems to be....more there going on than "treble down this much, bass up this much", although I will fully admit I have no idea what most of that is saying or where/how that would be implemented.

Thank you for your comments on my space as well! It seemed to me that most listening spaces must be less than ideal in some way as well, and I know that my childhood home had very large windows in our living room, and yet the sound was perfectly fine. So I feel like "speakers that sound perfectly fine in whatever space" should be perfectly achievable without having had to take a single physics class at any point in ones life (although, to be fair, my parents do in fact have a far greater grasp of physics than I do). Like, maybe more research and understanding and room treatment will net me with speakers that sound better, but I feel like I should be able to spend CAD$1300 and have speakers that don't, out of the box, outright hurt my ears (which is really ultimately why I returned the Klipsches. If they were $200, or even $500 maybe I'd have kept them. But I'm not going to spend $1300 on something that I need to mess around with just to make them bearable).

Sorry, this has gotten very long, and has been a lot of me venting my frustrations, but ultimately what I'm trying to say is thank you. And thank you for turning me to places that will help me understand this all a bit better, because really that's what I'm trying to do. I really appreciate it.

 

[ahofer]

Not sure whether this has been said, but uniform dispersion across frequencies seems to help a lot with oddly-shaped and reflective rooms. I've discussed my tough room in the link below.

Room challenge and DSP

So here is my system in my weekend place. The two attached photos show the system and living area, and then turn back and show where I was taking the photo (standing on the window seat). As you can see, nothing but reflective surfaces, including an angled, high, hardwood ceiling. And very few...

www.audiosciencereview.com

You can see the setup with replacement speakers here in this post:

Room challenge and DSP

Illustrating FR from a different spot with IR is not really a good example. ? Did I do that?

audiosciencereview.com

So that's my advice, look for speakers with uniform dispersion. That leaves wider or narrower (ie rate of decay as you move off angle) Try KEF and Revel and see which you prefer (the Revel's are generally wider and will have more reflected content at listening position)

 

[psqqa]

My general input is: Don't fear equalization. You want it less bright? Have a highly reflective room? Turn that 'Treble' slider down, and do it proudly. It's your ears and your brain, and your enjoyment of the music. Ignore all the 'purity' and 'integrity' mumbo-jumbo.

Further along those lines - don't rely on secret-handshake equipment combinations to 'mellow' or 'brighten' anything - that's what equalization is for. Good electronics do not impart color to the sound. If you want it to sound less bright, use an EQ to find the sound that works for you. There are some very fancy software implementations like Dirac which use a microphone and clever math to achieve good things, but there are also simple proceedural EQ plugins that can start you on the journey.

Most of your requirements are centered in the Streamer / DAC / Preamp / Interface / Whatever ya call it device that sits in the middle. Focus your thinking on that. That's what will apply EQ, that's your volume knob, and input selector. Buy good speakers, absolutely. Buy good amplification, yes. But mostly, find a device for input switching and volume adjusting, but that also supports some amount of user-adjustable EQ. Use it shamelessly.

After that - if you can't get the sound you want, the bad news is unavoidable: the room itself will need to be addressed.

Thank you! I have no qualms about going for a sound that sounds good to me personally. It's my money, it's my space, it's my music, I really don't care what any purists say. The problem is simply that by virtue of not understanding any of the technical concepts, I am somewhat reliant on the opinions of people who do.

I really appreciate you confirming the equipment combination thing. I was somewhat skeptical of it myself. EQ does indeed seem to be the way, and I'm grateful to you, and what I've seen elsewhere in these forums, for really, explicitly going to town on EQ. That seemed to me like it would be the way as well, and part of the reason I returned the Klipsches, as I mentioned in my response above, is that the EQ options they provided really didn't seem sophisticated enough to get the speakers to a basic level of functionality, which was something I felt I should be able to get for $1300.

Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to bug you for some clarifications, because here we're getting back into the realm of "five-year-old who knows nothing".

When you say "most of your requirements are centered in the streamer/DAC/Preamp/Interface" could you specify which of those would do what and where they would fit into a system? I'm reading this as you saying I would want to get some extra device beyond speakers and an amp. Would these all go into one device, would I want multiple ones? Would some requirements be covered by one thing but not others, or is there overlap and it would depend on my preference for where I control certain things? I'm so sorry, this is really where my confusion levels start going off the charts and I was banking on being able to avoid that by going for either an integrated amp and passive speakers, or powered speakers. I also somewhat struggle with where/how EQ software/plugins are....inserted into this all, so to speak.

As I mentioned in my responses above, given that my childhood home had large windows and our system, which I'm sure was nothing special, sounded just fine, I do feel like I should be able to get a baseline functional sound without doing anything to the room, but I am certainly bearing in mind the notion that I might have to do some kind of something to the space. I am cognizant as well of the fact that less than ideal sources + very good speakers may equal unpleasant sound. At which point the pro/con analysis might suggest it's best I do just get worse speakers for now until I'm willing to go the full mile on sources. However, that's another one of those things where I find it hard to gauge to what degree or at what point that's a genuine issue vs the problem lying elsewhere.

Thanks again. I really appreciate the input on EQ and DAC/streamer/etc stuff. Even if I don't really get the whats and hows of that yet, it gives me a better sense of where issues would lie and what I would want to be focusing on to solve them.

 

[psqqa]

Not sure whether this has been said, but uniform dispersion across frequencies seems to help a lot with oddly-shaped and reflective rooms. I've discussed my tough room in the link below.

Room challenge and DSP

So here is my system in my weekend place. The two attached photos show the system and living area, and then turn back and show where I was taking the photo (standing on the window seat). As you can see, nothing but reflective surfaces, including an angled, high, hardwood ceiling. And very few...

www.audiosciencereview.com

You can see the setup with replacement speakers here in this post:

Room challenge and DSP

Illustrating FR from a different spot with IR is not really a good example. ? Did I do that?

audiosciencereview.com

So that's my advice, look for speakers with uniform dispersion. That leaves wider or narrower (ie rate of decay as you move off angle) Try KEF and Revel and see which you prefer (the Revel's are generally wider and will have more reflected content at listening position)

Thank you! I have no idea what that means, but I can work with a standard term! And I really appreciate having another thread to work off that was looking at a similar issue (and who appreciates not wanting to destroy the aesthetics of one's space for perfect sound. Your home is spectacular, I would kill to have that ceiling, and to have that garden right outside). I'm going to read through the whole thing now!

 

[NTK]

Answering your earlier qustions:

Midfield (/nearfield/farfield) - my assumption when I've seen these terms is that this is speaking to the distance between the speaker and the listener, but what I haven't been able to discern is what distances those terms apply to. To some degree as well I've been overthinking whether nearfield/farfield are in a sort of intuitive inverse situation where "farfield" is generally indicating being closer to a speaker and "nearfield" farther from the speaker. Mostly this is because the contexts I've seen these terms crop up in have been so impenetrable to me that I've been struggling to figure out the contextual relevance.

The technically correct terms are "direct field" listening vs "reverberant field" listening. There is also a term called "critical distance", which is the distance from the speakers where the contributions to the total sound from the reverberant sound (i.e. those from the room reflections) and the direct sound are the same. Beyond the critical distance, you are in reverberant field listening; within it, you are in direct field listening. The critical distance depends on the room dimensions, its shape, and the amounts of wall and other absorptions.

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/DirectFieldAndReverberantField.pdf

Class A/B/D (amplifiers?) - My understanding is this is kind of categorization is only for amplifiers, but what I haven't been able to figure out is if it's a classification of some kind of objective quality, or a classification based on some other category of elements/features. I've seen a lot of references to Class D amplifiers which suggests Class D isn't per se bad, but I don't know whether Class A and B are per se better than Class D, or simply Different in some other way. I also do not know where the classification is coming from. Is that a standardized classification that would be applied by the manufacturers, or is that something applied by consumers based on measurements of functionality and such? Basically, how do I know something is Class D vs Class A?
Answering your earlier questions:

There are already a lots of threads on this subject (an example is given below).
The short answer is it all depends on the implementation. There are class-D amps that have absolutely state of the art performance. The main advantage of class-d amp (especially when paired with switch mode power supplies) is that they generate little waste heat, and can therefore be much more compact in size. The economy of materials required to build them often leads to significantly lower cost.
You can usually tell an amp is class A or A/B if they have sizable heat sinks to help dissipate the heat from their output transistors.

Audiophiles, generally don't like class D amps!

Ok, I know I shouldn't, but I've been reading feed back on an audiophile site on experiences with various Class D based amplifiers. (Purifi, Ncore, and a couple of others less well known to me) I expected a bit of bias towards older technologies, but it was close to 100% against class D. What...

www.audiosciencereview.com

"3-ways"- I'm so sorry, you really do have to treat me like an idiot child who knows nothing. A quick Google suggests you're referring here to 3-way speakers, which would have a tweeter, a mid-range driver, and a woofer. Is that correct? I feel like as I've been on this journey, I've seen references to speakers' tweeters and woofers, but I'm not recalling much reference to mid-range drivers. Is this because they're sort of an unsexy given people don't discuss much, or do I generally have to be on the lookout as to whether a speaker is 3-way or 2-way?

This also depends on the implementation. It is more difficult to build a two way speaker that have good dispersion characteristics at the cross-over region. Most of the newer JBL Pro speakers are two ways with large waveguides for the tweeters to help blend in with the woofers at cross-over. The top of the line JBL professional monitor, the M2, is large 2 way.

"tricks for not needing a traditional DAC" - now my understanding was the beauty of integrated amplifiers means one doesn't need a separate DAC or preamp or anything else to actually be able to get a sound going. I do seem to see people around here referencing systems that have speakers, amps, AND a DAC, but I can't figure out to what degree the DACs are necessary vs a personal choice for improved sound. I use an mp3 player (FiiO M6) that was marketed as being usable as a DAC, which was immaterial (and entirely meaningless) to me at the time, but now I'm curious as to what that would mean exactly and how that would fit into a potential system. The only ports I can see are the headphone jack and the USB-C(?) port I use to charge it or connect it to my computer, so I'm really not sure how they envision it being used as a DAC and whether that would be for a very specific kind of system or if that could be applied universally (given matching ports).

If your music source is digital (anything that came from the internet/computer/smart phone), then you must have a DAC somewhere in the chain. If your speakers (active speakers in this case) accept digital inputs, then they already have DAC's built-in and you don't need a separate one. If not, then you do need one if there isn't already one in your chain.
Audio DAC is a solved problem, so many of the economical ones are just as good sound-wise as the expensive ones. However, it is not a given that someone won't botch up the implementation.

 

[kemmler3D]

one person suggested going passive with an integrated amp to allow the amp mellow out any brightness from the speakers and my space in general.

That person was wrong, amps shouldn't do anything to the sound except make it louder.

I don't like being faced with a graph that I literally cannot begin to understand.

Frequency response charts look arcane at first but they're not that bad.

Basically - volume is the vertical axis, frequency (pitch) is the horizontal access. They are typically in dB and Hz.

20-30hz is the lowest of low bass, anything under 100hz or so, you would recognize as bass, anything under 250hz or so you'd recognize as "lows" but maybe not "bass". Between that and about 2khz you'd probably call "mids", 3-5khz maybe you'd call "high mids" or "treble" and anything over 5khz is unambiguously treble. Bass is on the left, treble is on the right.

dB is well explained elsewhere so no need to go into it here.

When you're looking at a Frequency response plot of a speaker, generally you check for a few things:

• Overall, how straight and flat is the line? The ideal is basically a ruler-straight line from 20hz to 20khz. When someone says gear is "ruler flat", this is a compliment referring to this ideal. A really wiggly line is bad. Slight wiggles are very normal and somewhat unavoidable. A tiny, negligible wiggle is like 1dB. A big wiggle is maybe +/- 5dB, a horrible one is +/- 10dB.
  
  
• At what point on the left (bass) does the line start to droop significantly? This tells you how low the bass goes on the speaker. 100hz is considered really weak, 80hz is considered average for a really cheap speaker, 50-60hz is considered OK if "you're not a basshead" and 30-50hz is normal for a good speaker. Below 30hz is really solid.
  
  
• Is there droop or a rise on the right (treble?) If there's a droop the speaker might sound muffled or dull. If there's a peak or rise, it will sound bright or even harsh/piercing.
  
• Any other major droops or bumps in the line? Pay close attention to the 400-3khz range as this is where a lot of the action is with music, and where our hearing is very sensitive.
  
  
• Spikes in the line are generally considered worse than small notches, but they tend to go hand-in-hand.
• 
  

The Klipsch app had what seemed to me a pretty basic EQ option that had sliders for treble, mids, and bass. That didn't seem to me to be flexible enough to properly fix what needed fixing. Was that a false impression of mine?

No, you were correct. EQ is basically a tool to edit the frequency response. Unwanted peaks and dips can be anywhere from left to right, a 3-slider option has pre-chosen frequencies for you, so the odds of a slider lining up with a peak or dip you actually want to correct are very low. "Parametric EQ" or "PEQ" lets you pick the frequency, amplitude and width of the filter, so you can edit the frequency response accurately.

My advice would be to get a Topping DAC with a volume control, a WiiM Pro streamer (has EQ built-in) and some KEF speakers (they can be less problematic with the room because they have very even dispersion) and see how that goes. Any way you slice it, EQ will be a must because it lets you compensate for the weaknesses of your room.

Welcome to ASR and remember to have fun! It's a lot to learn all at once so don't stress out about it.

 

[AlfaNovember]

Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to bug you for some clarifications, because here we're getting back into the realm of "five-year-old who knows nothing".

When you say "most of your requirements are centered in the streamer/DAC/Preamp/Interface" could you specify which of those would do what and where they would fit into a system?

I suppose the point that I'm trying to (in)articulate is that so much of 'traditional' audiophilia is a Solved Problem. Streaming gives us literal lifetimes worth of content in flawless fidelity, or you can warehouse your own bits by the Terabyte for pennies. Amplifier power is cheap and abundant, with specs that would make Bing Crosby's recording engineer weak in the knees. Speaker drivers aren't perfect yet, but do have ever lower distortion figures, and we've figured out how to build effective enclosures for them, and how to feed each speaker driver the frequency ranges it excels at. It's no fun anymore - world-beating performance for the price of a nice restaurant dinner, delivered to your doorstep in 2 days. (folks here argue over -128dB vs -130dB noise ratings.. largely in sport. It's quieter than a gnat farting. )

The piece of the puzzle that remains fun is the part you touch and interact with. Call it a preamp, or maybe it is software running on a computer, or some folks have a "DAC" which, beyond converting digital to analog like the name suggests, also has a bluetooth input & a volume knob, or maybe it's a Streamer device with a little remote control lost in the sofa cushions. That's the device I'm interested in. Whatever is in between the source of music and the power amp/speaker combination.

Such devices sit at the nexus of all the other parts of the system - Incoming signal (probably digital) from the source, outgoing signal (probably analog) to power amps and speakers. Those devices are where you interact with your HiFi, so they'd better be delightful to use. Look good, feel nice in the hand, easy to understand at a glance, all that. Often there's a DAC chip in there, but there's also a whole bunch of software to do other parts of it's function. I'm advocating for taking the time to think about how that element of your system works. It's not just a volume control, it can be so much more. In the context of your questions about tone, eq, etc - it's where you apply your EQ settings. So get one that allows you to do that, and pick one that you enjoy operating. You're going to tuck your power amps away and never touch them, apart from the power switch. That's not the case with this "Center of the system" device, whatever we're calling it.

Now - In my own case, I'm a bit of a tinkerer and a cheap craphound, so my own system is not going to be making Stereophile's A list, but hopefully description will help illustrate. The "Center of System" control-surface I'm using is Roon, a software package that's popular for the purpose. It goes like this:

- Music files live on a NAS drive in the garage. The NAS also runs the Roon server, basically a database for the app. House has wired and wireless network throughout.

- Roon App is installed on misc iPhone / iPads / PCs around the house. That's the part that I touch to change volume, select music, etc. Importantly - it's also where I configure EQ and DSP convolution to make everything sound great in my room.

- Roon sends digital content over house network to a Raspberry Pi, which has a USB DAC attached. It sits tucked behind the speakers.

- Analog output of DAC is attached to JBL/Crown 120 Watt Class-D power amplifier, and the amp to Speakers.

Lest you think this was all just a shaggy dog salespitch for Roon - Roon doesn't incorporate TV audio, turntable or a CD player, it doesn't support incoming Airplay from a phone. It plays my locally-stored music (applying my preferred EQ) and can be a front-end for several streaming services like Tidal and Qubuz. That's it, but that's what I want my system to do, so it works for me.

So don't just focus on "what amp? what speakers?", give some real thought to the part of the chain in between the source and the speakers. I hope that's a useful perspective.

 

[Tom C]

I am SO up for the challenge, or at least up for trying, which is partially why I'm continuing to bang my head against this despite the numerous headaches I've ended up with so far. "Buy speakers that will work for me" feels like it shouldn't be difficult, but it turns out there's a whole rabbit hole there and entry level navigation of it seems to require....significantly more technical knowledge than I have, so it feels both like I should get a basic grasp on it and at the same time like every time I start to think I've got a enough of a read on the space to be able to complete my ultimately really not particularly sophisticated decision, it turns out there's a whole new corner of physics I have to acquaint myself with.

I just....don't like being so confused by even the basic concepts. I don't like that despite the fact I did cover the introductory elements of electricity back in high school, I can't hold in my head the relation of speaker ohm ratings to channel watts and what effect one will have on the other and what that means for volume, etc. I don't like being faced with a graph that I literally cannot begin to understand. It frustrates me that I don't have a grasp on concepts that are basic to e.g. my parents, who grew up in the world of audio separates. I don't like going into forum discussions here with people calling themselves noobs and then referencing a bunch of concepts I have never heard of and don't know how to integrate into all my further knowledge. Basically, I don't like being wholly 100% reliant on other people's opinions in a space where nobody seems to agree on anything.

So yes, I am willing to learn. That is what I am trying to do. It's just proving annoyingly difficult and is reminding me that I only passed grade 10 physics on a dubious rounding technicality. That being said, I have actually looked into those charts a bit and now have at least a basic grasp on what data they are actually conveying and some notion of how it is interpreted. Thank you so much for the link to the spinorama.org. That looks like an incredibly helpful website, and its "help" page looks to be a godsend.

Thank you as well for your input re: amplifiers offsetting speakers. That was somewhat my intuition, if only because it seemed to me that if amplifiers can have the same kind of effects on sound as pops up in speaker discussions, the search for the optimal pairing of speakers and amplifiers would be wildly complex and would have to involve testing them paired with the same speakers, which had in turn been tested with the same amplifier as other speakers, so that you know exactly what was the amplifier and what was the speaker, and that just didn't seem to be what people were doing.

It does seem that EQ is a critical part of this puzzle, which means I'm going to have to do some learning there too (so far everything in these forums is adding to the depth of my confusion). The Klipsch app had what seemed to me a pretty basic EQ option that had sliders for treble, mids, and bass. That didn't seem to me to be flexible enough to properly fix what needed fixing. Was that a false impression of mine? The sense I'm getting is that if I really need to fix speakers (as opposed to just optimize them, but even just optimization), I would need an EQ option that shows me the frequency ranges and allows for very precise dynamic alterations within those. My sense is also that if I blindly went "treble hurt, turn treble down until it doesn't hurt", I would end up making an unbalanced mess of the overall sound. The EQ correction you linked to seems to support that as there seems to be....more there going on than "treble down this much, bass up this much", although I will fully admit I have no idea what most of that is saying or where/how that would be implemented.

Thank you for your comments on my space as well! It seemed to me that most listening spaces must be less than ideal in some way as well, and I know that my childhood home had very large windows in our living room, and yet the sound was perfectly fine. So I feel like "speakers that sound perfectly fine in whatever space" should be perfectly achievable without having had to take a single physics class at any point in ones life (although, to be fair, my parents do in fact have a far greater grasp of physics than I do). Like, maybe more research and understanding and room treatment will net me with speakers that sound better, but I feel like I should be able to spend CAD$1300 and have speakers that don't, out of the box, outright hurt my ears (which is really ultimately why I returned the Klipsches. If they were $200, or even $500 maybe I'd have kept them. But I'm not going to spend $1300 on something that I need to mess around with just to make them bearable).

Sorry, this has gotten very long, and has been a lot of me venting my frustrations, but ultimately what I'm trying to say is thank you. And thank you for turning me to places that will help me understand this all a bit better, because really that's what I'm trying to do. I really appreciate it.

My sentiments exactly. This site has some great resources for learners. In fact, that is the main reason for existence for this site. There are members here who are some of the most knowledgeable people alive from the audio industry, as well as professional content producers, mixers, performers, etc. Of course, no one person knows everything there is to know, but for the most part, the experienced pros don’t need to learn this stuff because they already know it. It’s those of us consumers who’s knowledge base is incomplete that get the most from hanging out around here.
Given time, you can learn this stuff, too. You have to be patient, and tenacious. It might take several years, depending on how much time you end up devoting to it. Some things, a lot of things, are not intuitive, so you can’t just use your common sense to reason through and come to the right conclusion. The investment of time is worthwhile, though. I find the discovery process is fun and has practical benefits.
Amir has a YouTube channel where he’s posted some instructional videos. You might start with this one.

 

[psqqa]

I suppose the point that I'm trying to (in)articulate is that so much of 'traditional' audiophilia is a Solved Problem. Streaming gives us literal lifetimes worth of content in flawless fidelity, or you can warehouse your own bits by the Terabyte for pennies. Amplifier power is cheap and abundant, with specs that would make Bing Crosby's recording engineer weak in the knees. Speaker drivers aren't perfect yet, but do have ever lower distortion figures, and we've figured out how to build effective enclosures for them, and how to feed each speaker driver the frequency ranges it excels at. It's no fun anymore - world-beating performance for the price of a nice restaurant dinner, delivered to your doorstep in 2 days. (folks here argue over -128dB vs -130dB noise ratings.. largely in sport. It's quieter than a gnat farting. )

The piece of the puzzle that remains fun is the part you touch and interact with. Call it a preamp, or maybe it is software running on a computer, or some folks have a "DAC" which, beyond converting digital to analog like the name suggests, also has a bluetooth input & a volume knob, or maybe it's a Streamer device with a little remote control lost in the sofa cushions. That's the device I'm interested in. Whatever is in between the source of music and the power amp/speaker combination.

Such devices sit at the nexus of all the other parts of the system - Incoming signal (probably digital) from the source, outgoing signal (probably analog) to power amps and speakers. Those devices are where you interact with your HiFi, so they'd better be delightful to use. Look good, feel nice in the hand, easy to understand at a glance, all that. Often there's a DAC chip in there, but there's also a whole bunch of software to do other parts of it's function. I'm advocating for taking the time to think about how that element of your system works. It's not just a volume control, it can be so much more. In the context of your questions about tone, eq, etc - it's where you apply your EQ settings. So get one that allows you to do that, and pick one that you enjoy operating. You're going to tuck your power amps away and never touch them, apart from the power switch. That's not the case with this "Center of the system" device, whatever we're calling it.

Now - In my own case, I'm a bit of a tinkerer and a cheap craphound, so my own system is not going to be making Stereophile's A list, but hopefully description will help illustrate. The "Center of System" control-surface I'm using is Roon, a software package that's popular for the purpose. It goes like this:

- Music files live on a NAS drive in the garage. The NAS also runs the Roon server, basically a database for the app. House has wired and wireless network throughout.

- Roon App is installed on misc iPhone / iPads / PCs around the house. That's the part that I touch to change volume, select music, etc. Importantly - it's also where I configure EQ and DSP convolution to make everything sound great in my room.

- Roon sends digital content over house network to a Raspberry Pi, which has a USB DAC attached. It sits tucked behind the speakers.

- Analog output of DAC is attached to JBL/Crown 120 Watt Class-D power amplifier, and the amp to Speakers.

Lest you think this was all just a shaggy dog salespitch for Roon - Roon doesn't incorporate TV audio, turntable or a CD player, it doesn't support incoming Airplay from a phone. It plays my locally-stored music (applying my preferred EQ) and can be a front-end for several streaming services like Tidal and Qubuz. That's it, but that's what I want my system to do, so it works for me.

So don't just focus on "what amp? what speakers?", give some real thought to the part of the chain in between the source and the speakers. I hope that's a useful perspective.

That is an extremely useful perspective, thank you. I'm in a bit of a rush to make it to an appointment, so I'll have to come back to this later to address it properly, but just wanting to let you know that, yes, this indeed very helpful. Thank you!

 

[psqqa]

My sentiments exactly. This site has some great resources for learners. In fact, that is the main reason for existence for this site. There are members here who are some of the most knowledgeable people alive from the audio industry, as well as professional content producers, mixers, performers, etc. Of course, no one person knows everything there is to know, but for the most part, the experienced pros don’t need to learn this stuff because they already know it. It’s those of us consumers who’s knowledge base is incomplete that get the most from hanging out around here.
Given time, you can learn this stuff, too. You have to be patient, and tenacious. It might take several years, depending on how much time you end up devoting to it. Some things, a lot of things, are not intuitive, so you can’t just use your common sense to reason through and come to the right conclusion. The investment of time is worthwhile, though. I find the discovery process is fun and has practical benefits.
Amir has a YouTube channel where he’s posted some instructional videos. You might start with this one.

Thank you so much! The moment I found this forum (and saw you all confirming that expensive cables are fully unnecessary) it seemed a lot more like what I was looking for than what I had found. Yes, I don't understand a word most of what anyone is saying, but I can recognize that it's based in concepts that are....definable, have a higher degree of consensus, and that there are a lot of people with very serious credentials congregated in one space who also seem to be wonderfully willing to imparting some of their knowledge, so a rare kind of jackpot, really, for which I'm immensely grateful.

I have a tendency to flit in and out of interests, but having a solid project with an outcome I'm invested in is one of the ways I learn and untangle complicated material best, which is partially why I'm taking the time work this one out this way. I have a continuing dream to apply my bigger, better, less confused and overwhelmed adult brain to the physics and maths concepts I either struggled very deeply with (mechanics my beloathed) or didn't get to at all in high school (calculus). And of all the areas of physics and engineering out there, electrical engineering is the one I am actually most drawn to (and the electricity module of grade 10 physics single-handedly dragged my grade up to technically barely a pass), and by virtue of my interest in music, audio is a natural one to learn about as well, so I'm hopeful.

I don't do well with video learning, so I'll largely be trying to find texts to read (and have looked with keen interest already at the threads collecting the forum's recommendations for those), but I do appreciate having the video recs for if I decide that may in fact be the easiest route.

 

[psqqa]

That person was wrong, amps shouldn't do anything to the sound except make it louder.


Frequency response charts look arcane at first but they're not that bad.

Basically - volume is the vertical axis, frequency (pitch) is the horizontal access. They are typically in dB and Hz.

20-30hz is the lowest of low bass, anything under 100hz or so, you would recognize as bass, anything under 250hz or so you'd recognize as "lows" but maybe not "bass". Between that and about 2khz you'd probably call "mids", 3-5khz maybe you'd call "high mids" or "treble" and anything over 5khz is unambiguously treble. Bass is on the left, treble is on the right.

dB is well explained elsewhere so no need to go into it here.

When you're looking at a Frequency response plot of a speaker, generally you check for a few things:

• Overall, how straight and flat is the line? The ideal is basically a ruler-straight line from 20hz to 20khz. When someone says gear is "ruler flat", this is a compliment referring to this ideal. A really wiggly line is bad. Slight wiggles are very normal and somewhat unavoidable. A tiny, negligible wiggle is like 1dB. A big wiggle is maybe +/- 5dB, a horrible one is +/- 10dB.
  
  
• At what point on the left (bass) does the line start to droop significantly? This tells you how low the bass goes on the speaker. 100hz is considered really weak, 80hz is considered average for a really cheap speaker, 50-60hz is considered OK if "you're not a basshead" and 30-50hz is normal for a good speaker. Below 30hz is really solid.
  
  
• Is there droop or a rise on the right (treble?) If there's a droop the speaker might sound muffled or dull. If there's a peak or rise, it will sound bright or even harsh/piercing.
• Any other major droops or bumps in the line? Pay close attention to the 400-3khz range as this is where a lot of the action is with music, and where our hearing is very sensitive.
  
  
• Spikes in the line are generally considered worse than small notches, but they tend to go hand-in-hand.
• 
  

No, you were correct. EQ is basically a tool to edit the frequency response. Unwanted peaks and dips can be anywhere from left to right, a 3-slider option has pre-chosen frequencies for you, so the odds of a slider lining up with a peak or dip you actually want to correct are very low. "Parametric EQ" or "PEQ" lets you pick the frequency, amplitude and width of the filter, so you can edit the frequency response accurately.

My advice would be to get a Topping DAC with a volume control, a WiiM Pro streamer (has EQ built-in) and some KEF speakers (they can be less problematic with the room because they have very even dispersion) and see how that goes. Any way you slice it, EQ will be a must because it lets you compensate for the weaknesses of your room.

Welcome to ASR and remember to have fun! It's a lot to learn all at once so don't stress out about it.

Thanks so much for this, very helpful, easy to digest overview! I've got to run, but I'll come back to address your points in more detail. Super appreciate it!