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Welcome to ASR. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions.
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Moving house and improving the acoustics of my new listening room
Learning to use a measurement microphone
Ensuring the quality of the source (dynamics and recording quality)
Buying a Chinese DAC
Upgrading speakers
Registering on ASR
Measurements and parametric corrections were performed over 20 years ago with a Behringer.
Tact 2.2X was used 20 years ago.
Audyssey XT32 was used 4 or 5 years ago with its app for manual adjustments.
After my custom build cabinet was done, placing my speakers in a near perfect equilateral triangle with adequate spacing and distance from the walls, together with time alligning the subs made the biggest difference.
But I have a feeling it's also because the KEF R3 meta are such great speakers.
New purchases, installments since Dec. 2024. 7.2.4
1. Anthem MRX 1140 and lots of ARC Genesis fun runs and tweeks as I changed out speakers
2. Room treatments including a large custom made New Zealand wool rug from India. "A river runs through it"
3. Outboard amps for fronts. SpeakerPower HTB-700 monoblock amps for two 15" DIY subs 12 dB low end shelf filter programmed by Rigo.
4. Dolby enabled ATMOS heights, 4 Klipsch
5. New KEF backs (not shown)
6. Addition of a SVS 5000 Revolution to my DIY parallel wired subs, 4 ohm.
7. Ascend Acoustic ELX-RAAL L/R and Horizon V2 center
8. Nvidia Shield Pro streamer
Very integrated, rich, tight bass litereally disappears. Super clean and dynamic. Fronts crossed over at 70 Hz.
Back in the day, when all I had was an inexpensive pair of small bookshelf speakers, adding a subwoofer completely changed my audio experience for the better.
I gave three experience dates... Three unique experiments, staggered in time: each time similar because they are based on the same principle: correction by measurement... Therein lies the unique experiment, validated three times.
Nothing changed my system like installing tube connectors! Ok, seriously when adding a sub. Even just setting it in position and firing it up it makes a HUGE difference in overall sound, even with floorstanders.
Ok, seriously when adding a sub. Even just setting it in position and firing it up it makes a HUGE difference in overall sound, even with floorstanders.
Using a miniDSP Flex HTx and adding a Raspberry pi to connect to it. I can experiment with routing, delays, and presets.
I use my AVR as a pre-pro for video, but I can leave it off entirely for music. With sources directly connected to Flex HTx.
Nice to A/B different subwoofer integration approaches by changing routing, delay, etc. I learned small timing and routing changes make a difference and it is very useful to quickly try and revert changes.
The Pi is useful for automatic preset switching, web-based GUI (able to check status of Denon, miniDSP, Spotify, CD transport), device control (power/volume/input), Plex Amp endpoint, control over in-home lighting, and automation programed to above functions.
Back in the day, when all I had was an inexpensive pair of small bookshelf speakers, adding a subwoofer completely changed my audio experience for the better.
That... and also when I screwed my own head back right and started realizing major investments often turned into SQ non-events. Reprogramming myself was a great way to improve my system... which includes my auditory processing.
Speakers and letting go of shite zero feedback tube amps. I was misled for far too long. There's no magic and hum and buzz sucks no matter how quiet it is. I still have some tube amps I swap in from time to time but they are all dead quiet with my ears inside the horns. But really no better at anything else than a competent solid state amp.
Tone controls too. I like being able to tilt things one way or the other 3db or so via three shelves as well as adding 1 or 2db of bass shelf at 100hz or so on top of that. Some recording don't need this stuff. Some do.
I can easily guess and understand your "amazing" experience when you first listened to your audio system with a subwoofer.
In my case, I too very much enjoy hearing music with my L&R subwoofers (ref. #931, #1009 on my project thread).
I also shared many posts focusing on subwoofer(s) including these posts, just for your possible reference and interests. Excellent Recording Quality Music Albums/Tracks for Subjective (and Possibly Objective) Test/Check/Tuning of Multichannel Multi-Driver Multi-Amplifier Time-Aligned Active Stereo Audio System and Room Acoustics; at least a Portion and/or One Track being Analyzed by Color Spectrum of Adobe Audition in Common Parameters: [Part-08] (Smooth?) Jazz Trio:#640 [Part-09] Organ Music:#641
- Reproduction and listening/hearing/feeling sensations to 16 Hz (organ) sound with my DSP-based multichannel multi-SP-driver multi-amplifier fully active stereo audio system having big-heavy active L&R sub-woofers: #782
- A nice smooth-jazz album for bass (low Fq) and higher Fq tonality check and tuning: #63(remote thread)
