For a few years now I've been noticing some occasional playback glitches that result in obvious and serious distortion. Fixing it usually involves restarting one or more components. This got me wondering if more subtle playback errors may be creeping in sometimes and tonight I caught one red handed messing with my mind. I've been plagued with a sense of a lack of midrange brightness, a sort or recessed sound that took some life and magic out of vocals. I thought perhaps I was imagining it. But last night it was sounding good and I measured it. Tonight I felt it was missing something so I took a measurement. The frequency response was different. So I restarted everything in the digital chain and re-measured. It was back to normal and sounding good again.
This stuff is driving me nuts!
If you look at the image below, the green curve is the bad one. It's got a broad band recess centered around 2000 Hz, or maybe it's a hump around 7000 Hz. However you want to interpret it, it's wrong! The curves below are multiple measurements after I re-started everything. Looking good! Sounding good! I moved stuff around in the room between measurements to rule out any possible room effects, including moving acoustic panels in and out. They didn't change the response significantly. It's the electronics.
I guess I should be releived to know that what I'm hearing is measurable. I'm not crazy. It's really happening. I think changing sources can cause it to change sometimes so that leads me to conclusions like one streamer sounding better than another when really it's just the fact that I changed sources that caused the system to stop working or start working correctly.
This stuff is driving me nuts!
If you look at the image below, the green curve is the bad one. It's got a broad band recess centered around 2000 Hz, or maybe it's a hump around 7000 Hz. However you want to interpret it, it's wrong! The curves below are multiple measurements after I re-started everything. Looking good! Sounding good! I moved stuff around in the room between measurements to rule out any possible room effects, including moving acoustic panels in and out. They didn't change the response significantly. It's the electronics.
I guess I should be releived to know that what I'm hearing is measurable. I'm not crazy. It's really happening. I think changing sources can cause it to change sometimes so that leads me to conclusions like one streamer sounding better than another when really it's just the fact that I changed sources that caused the system to stop working or start working correctly.
