What single change made the biggest improvement in your system?

[wadude]

CD

 

[OCA]

CD

True, we are almost forgetting...

 

[RexrothPigeon]

Active cardioid speakers changed everything, just a complete flip from what I had and more importantly what I hear.

 

[OldHvyMec]

For me, it's always room treatment to get a full usable FR from a decent set of speakers (which usually includes a couple of subs). Make that FR floor-standing speakers too. Everything, including a 60-16,000Hz recording, can be considered mediocre, but I can get a lot better results with a well-treated room. Usually, you don't even need subs, at least I never did.

LARGE, high ceilings, no carpets, or curtains in an empty room, are the absolute worst.

Setting up Kity Corner was a real big eye-opener for me, too. I couldn't believe the difference when I set up a shop on the midwall and then moved it to the corner. The shop was 60X120.' Huge difference in just placement.

Regards

 

[kifeep]

I think sometimes the biggest improvements aren't the most obvious and dramatic and might even be the result of second order effects. I used to have an AVR and never liked the automated room correction. So I sold it and bought a miniDSP, which of course made no difference on its own. But having direct fine control over DSP for the first time forced me to read a lot, measure a lot, experiment, fail, try again, fail better, and on and on. Over time I've made significant improvements to my system and, more importantly, developed a deeper understanding and appreciation for what works, what doesn't, what to do in DSP, what to do in the room, etc. It was a lot more than replacing a single piece of kit, and yet was all the downstream result of that single change. Does that count?

 

[ShadowBoxer]

EQ/DSP/Mic

 

[TLEDDY]

Sanders 10e Electrostatic Speakers - all of the Quad 57s glorious midrange, but with highs. And lows!!

Read the Absolute Sound review by REG… he describes them very well!

 

[AudioJester]

Sanders 10e Electrostatic Speakers - all of the Quad 57s glorious midrange, but with highs. And lows!!

Read the Absolute Sound review by REG… he describes them very well!

Adored these speakers when I heard them. Have you seen any measurements?

 

[TLEDDY]

Adored these speakers when I heard them. Have you seen any measurements?

Measuring ‘stats is a real problem due to their bipolar (!) nature. Take a look at Sanders’ web site for discussion. Kippel is essentially impossible.

I used a calibrated mic to set up in my listening space and am exceedingly pleased!

 

[Sokel]

Ceiling treatment, speakers, rest of the treatment, in that order.
Also, ways to verify performance, mostly electrically, gear may measure nice on their own but chain them and all shorts of crap can occur.

And room of course, my previous one was half as big as the one I use now.

 

[mcochris]

Room treatments, by far. And the most bang for your buck.

 

[Tell]

DSP (and a measurement mic).
Fixing especially the room modes in the bass makes it aound so much cleaner, but also tuning the whole system myself to my own specific wants have made more difference than any other thing in my system. Before my MiniDSP 2x4 I had a regular old analog EQ and while I could do some stuff with itbut not nearly the same precision as with a digital PEQ and mic
Of course speakers have made a big difference, but I can't really remember a time when I had actually bad speakers. And I mean, you can fix a quite bad frequency reaponse using a DSP, so to an extent bad speakers can be fixed with DSP.

 

[Ype]

What I needed for my biggest changes were the following:
1: Reading the research so I know what is important and what should be left alone
2: Finally having proper measurements of speakers and equipment with a special thanks to @amirm
3: Having the software tools to model and do the equalization

So I suppose the biggest single change I made that is in my system was equalizer apo and it was free!
I use it for everything. Equalizing my speakers, bass management, downmixing my center channel to stereo and up-mixing stereo to surround channels.
As well as headphone equalization, cross-feed and downmixing 7.1 to headphones.

While it is not directly in my system one cannot forget about REW, that I use for both measurements and modeling quick and dirty corrections.
vCAD is also used, as in room EQ beyond the bass is a big misunderstanding, those corrections have to be done and modeled from spinorama measurements.

The upside to all this?
As I do all my equalization in equalizer apo, I can simply turn corrections on/off to see if I hear a difference and what I prefer, there is no guesswork involved.


Beyond that of course the obvious, speakers and headphones.
My KH310s sound shockingly good in nearfield, using them with a sub and bass management due to room modes.
The HE400SE sounds great with EQ which I again do with equalizer apo, together with crossfeed or downmixing 7.1 to headphones.

The star of the show are the T5V's for surround though, after EQ their tonality is good enough for surround duty as long as I stay in the narrow vertical window.
I'd prefer something with a wider dispersion if I had more seats but right now it's just me in the sweet spot.
I also run the KH310 with a bit of EQ but the differences are subtle in midfield and in nearfield it just sounds like a subtle tone control.

I cannot think of any bad purchase I made over the years and some of my old equipment was so old that it went straight to HIFI museums.

 

[jareinertson]

Historically for me the most significant benefits have always been due to speakers (currently Sonus Faber Lumina III) and recently with room correction DSP via WiiM Pro+.

 

[Chr1]

For me, it's got to be room correction and additional tweaking via a UMIK-1, plus two pieces of free software: MathAudio RoomEQ and EasyQ.

Definitely the biggest "bang for buck", as I got the UMIK-1 second hand, so the total cost for vastly improved sound quality was under £100.

My second best would have to be inserting a pair of Tannoy T300s. Got them for under £200 recently.
Given they cost more than £3k each appx 20 years ago, I practically got them for nothing too...

 

[Redacted]

For me, sonically, I'd say spending a huge amount of time setting up speakers and then blending in subs in my room. It's all compromise, but you may as well go for a good one.

Also, K.I.S.S. and just getting down to the minimum of hardware that did the job - nothing to be fiddling endlessly with.

Lastly for user convenience (and WAF) being persuaded to get a just-add-speakers unit (CA Evo) so that "it just works", with all my music just a couple of clicks away, stored on my NAS (etc all). No fuss, no network or software issues with streamer platforms, just nice sound.

 

[Colonel7]

Adding 2 subs

 

[ehabheikal]

Room correction.

 

[Gorgonzola]

For me the most effective change I've made recently has been to install Equalizer APO on my Win 11 machine running Foobar2000. Using OCA's Gsonic, I created FIR/convolution files that I incorporated in Equalizer APO. The sound improvement, (subjectively), has been the most significant I've hear in quite a while -- principally imaging, soundstage, and bass impact.

Until I took the above measures I was using MathAudio's Room EQ as a Foobar plugin. Room EQ was quite effective and big improvement over no correction. However I deem the EqAPO+Gsonic combo to be significantly more effective, (judged subjectively).

If there is a downside to this EqAPO+Gsonic combo, it is that it definitely soaks up a lot of gain. I have to used high gain on my Schiit Kara F, (another recent addition to my setup), to get sufficient listening volume. That is, High gain vs. passive or Active zero gain on the Kara.

 

[Mort]

Better music