Again, WiiM
If WiiM ever makes a WiiM Amp Super Deluxe Infinity and Beyond with more power, PFFB, 10-band PEQ, room correction, pre-out, and a big fat display, I'd absolutely shell out NAD D 3045 money for that, no hesitation.
At least room correction has been confirmed to be "actively worked on" for the current product range by WiiM, including the current Amp. Should it come independently of and in addition to PEQ, then I think the need for more bands is no longer as pressing.
Room correction. I remember seeing a video of the UK’s premiere room treatment company, and they had a demo room on which they’d spent many tens of thousands of pounds treating, and the boss was happy to concede it still wasn’t perfect.
I know that regularly, when room correction is discussed, we’re told that we’d absolutely hate listening in an anechoic chamber, and that our ears/brains need a ‘real’ room, inevitably with errors. So where do you draw the line?
I think you put things together quite nicely, but is there really any contradiction in what those two paragraphs are pointing to?
Did you ever spend time in an anechoic chamber? The environment makes you feel uncomfortable instantly and can drive you nuts within minutes. So, even if it was possible to recreate this in our homes, we wouldn't want it that way. That's unfortunate, because things would be much easier if we would all live in "non-rooms" and all the ambience and atmosphere was just that captured in the recording ... but this concept doesn't work, either.
First of all, even those recordings made in natural sounding facilities like concert halls or similar environments are not mastered to be played back in anechoic chambers. Nobody in his right mind would go for that approach (because of the reasons named above). Even if producers would change their minds and separately sell an "anechoic version" of the artist's work (whatever his or her intention might have been), a stereo setup (and stereo recording) would be insufficient to recreate the original sound field.
What's that? Two ears, two speakers, two mics, right? No, wrong. Two channel stereo
is an illusion. It's a very good illusion, plenty good enough for me. But for it to work out, our hearing really does need some room information. The fun aspect is that it doesn't necessarily have to equal the room the recording was made in too closely. As long as there is some reasonable, consistent acoustic representation of a room (just lacking unpleasant and distracting things like unnatural early reflections, excessive bass boom, echos) our brain will happily fill in the gaps and disregard what our eyes add to the picture.
Getting back to the concept of room correction this is consistent with what Peter Lyngdorf, founder (or co-founder) of Lyngdorf Audio, Steinway Lyngdorf, HiFi Klubben, Dali, NAD and lots of other audio businesses is proposing: Don't waste thousends of bucks on room treatment. A good room correction system (which has to be RoomPerfect in his case, of course) will yield much better results at much lesser cost. I mostly agree with that (although a good thick rug and typical living room real world living room furniture, not shown in journals for interior design, will surely do some good).
- don't like that it's actually dressed-up Fosiyima
Looks like you didn't spend much time on what this product has to offer.
Years-long reliability under every-day usage would be kind of surprising.
It wouldn't surprise me at all. How did you come to this conclusion? Everything is made to a budget. In this case we have e.g. a mass market class D power chip introduced in 2016, a mass market audio processing SoC introduced in 2017, a mass market DAC introduced in 2021 (based on a 2014 design), a mass market ADC introduced in 2014 and so on. That's where costs have been cut, obviously. I do not foresee any reliability issues here.
No. It is equivalent to saying that it will not sound nice at all.
Since you obviously adopted the statement from
@martin900: That reasoning is nonsense and deserves to be called out as such. Your avatar might imply (but I don't really know) that everything dominated by massive amounts of 2nd order harmonic
will sound nice? Just asking.
