(It seems I had nothing else worthwhile to do today, so I decided to submit this novel I had originally written for publication. I haven’t proof read it yet, it’s just too damn long for me. ;>)
I can understand why no one here might fully have reason to understand the nature of the original problem given the unique perspective that I’ve been able to glimpse at it over the last several years. I don’t pretend to know everything on the topic, but I’ve been seeing it from a different angle somewhat.
First, the underlying problem, as I see it, is really bandwidth.
We may pay for our equipment and speakers and we tend to think of them as they’re spec’ed. But their frequency response measurements are usually not measured in-room. Speakers may seem to us to be something of an exception since they’re measured with a mic, but the frequency measurements are usually anechoic. IOW, those measurements most closely reflect only what the gear is capable of, in mathematical terms, under the best of conditions, frequency-wise, and those particular measurements certainly are not taking your room into account.
But, none of these specs in the real world will end up having much of a direct correlation to what we hear and what we measure in-room...the measurements are typically way off from what is spec’d. This tends to cause us audiophiles to sort of go off in all directions and start looking for anything and everything that may influence the problem. Room treatments of countless flavors, EQ/auto correction, speaker placement, vibration control, etc...
At this point anyone who may be only half seeing what I usually post about will likely be annoyed and thoroughly unsurprised when I mention Alan Maher Designs, whose electronic noise reduction devices I’ve been buying for the last 7 yrs now...to the tune of, now, about $10k. That’s $10k’s worth being thrown at a $6k system...(yes, I know, I’m certifiable, but all that is another novel I will bore you with some other time).
But, in the course of steadily improving the sound and presentation (in all regards) in-room over that time, I began to notice that, yes, the frequency response in-room was becoming more extended at both ends and all that, but what made me pay attention was that it was Flattening the overall response as well. This is one of the things AMD gear is touted to do, but until I’d seen it in action under my own roof, it hadn’t fully dawned on me yet what this actually represented.
Alan’s claim all along was that if you flatten in-room response with this approach, then you’re reducing frequency peaks and actually filling in the nulls...without EQ...just by getting rid of noise. IOW, room effects can (to a very large degree - surprisingly large) be thought of in terms of the audible effects of electrical noise. To restate it: what we’ve been audibly attributing to room effects all along (what we are hearing and measuring in our rooms) may actually be more correctly thought of as the audible impact on our systems of ordinary amounts of electrical noise (yes, everybody has it, so don’t think that it somehow won’t apply to you). To put another way: by assuming that in-room bandwidth irregularities are directly resolved by the whole room-treatments/EQ/placement concept only, and that there was no other real factor involved, then we all may have been barking up the wrong tree. Not that room modes don’t exist, they do. It’s just that the majority of what we are hearing may actually be a rather extreme exacerbation of that problem due to nothing more than electrical noise. Remove enough noise and maybe 90% of the audible effects of the room mode problem go away - IF you go far enough to take the AMD approach to a logical conclusion that is, as I have already.
But, as I became more and more convinced that this approach actually works well in the real world (through adding purchases, primarily for other sound improvements, though they all contribute to an overall improvement to the sound), I steadily realized how much less and less dependent I was becoming on EQ and room treatments...these days, a modest EQ boost of no more than 3.5 dB in the low bass (15" woofers), another, more narrow, 3.5 dB boost at 13 kHz and no EQ at all in between...despite OB speakers that are 5ft out from the front wall in an open room...yet I get perfectly sounding lower mids (and, with the EQ’d extremes, everything else so far). (I haven’t measured yet, but I must say that currently I’ve no audibly discernible reason to at the moment).
But, then I realized that that meant there were now a multitude of methods that could be brought to bear on the problem - room treatments, EQ, and now electrical noise reduction (like conditioning here, but without adding any sonic ill effects). But, when I considered all that, I began to see that starting from the room itself first and trying to work backward to the electronics was possibly getting the cart in front of the horse. It all seemed to make more sense to do all the electrical noise reduction first, then whatever minimal EQ was necessary and, lastly, whatever room treatments would then be called for...also, by that point, presumably minimal.
Room treatments are a great thing, but I think its application presumes that all your system ducks are in a row before you start. Change anything: your gear, placement, EQ, noise levels, and theoretically you’re potentially calling for a revised room treatment scenario...one that may even have you starting over from scratch with it if you were to do it right. But, the directional approach starting from ENR, to EQ and then to (hopefully) a less involved room treatment array might make the whole thing a little more doable than if we start with the room first and then try to head upstream.
The takeaway here is that, fundamentally, the best way to resolve the bandwidth problem is to try and resolve it Before it reaches the speakers. Once it becomes audible, then technically it becomes much harder to correct with accuracy.
Buying equipment with better specs is not the answer. The specs only show us what the gear would be capable of IF it were operating at spec. Unfortunately for anyone concerned, I’ve discovered that that is Never the case and that it can’t be without solid ENR - there’s just too much of it in our everyday lives, no matter what our circumstance. I have AMD for all that and it works really well, but, along these lines and many others with AMD performance, it did not begin to start sinking in just How well all the AMD pieces were working together until I was into it for at least a couple thousand bucks or so. But, at the $10k level, my gear is now all operating at several times above spec and the audible improvements have continued to be dramatic in every respect.
EQ is great, too, but the only problem with it is that it can be compromised from normal amounts of electrical noise, as I have discovered. The 2 biggest problem areas for it are the colorations in the lower mids within the "mud" frequencies and the grit/grain/glare in the upper "hash" frequencies. With the noise removal here, I’ve been able to squelch the effects of both, so in my case there are no more ’best compromise’ settings between tone and noise.
Hopefully at some point more audiophiles will discover the relevance of the link between electrical noise, measured in-room response and room modes...and, by discovering AMD, or something like it, will realize that something effective can be actually done about it.
Regards, John
And, yep (you guessed it), all that’s yet one more reason why I like AMD...(this was reason #4217). My apologies once again for the long post. Carry on.
I can understand why no one here might fully have reason to understand the nature of the original problem given the unique perspective that I’ve been able to glimpse at it over the last several years. I don’t pretend to know everything on the topic, but I’ve been seeing it from a different angle somewhat.
First, the underlying problem, as I see it, is really bandwidth.
We may pay for our equipment and speakers and we tend to think of them as they’re spec’ed. But their frequency response measurements are usually not measured in-room. Speakers may seem to us to be something of an exception since they’re measured with a mic, but the frequency measurements are usually anechoic. IOW, those measurements most closely reflect only what the gear is capable of, in mathematical terms, under the best of conditions, frequency-wise, and those particular measurements certainly are not taking your room into account.
But, none of these specs in the real world will end up having much of a direct correlation to what we hear and what we measure in-room...the measurements are typically way off from what is spec’d. This tends to cause us audiophiles to sort of go off in all directions and start looking for anything and everything that may influence the problem. Room treatments of countless flavors, EQ/auto correction, speaker placement, vibration control, etc...
At this point anyone who may be only half seeing what I usually post about will likely be annoyed and thoroughly unsurprised when I mention Alan Maher Designs, whose electronic noise reduction devices I’ve been buying for the last 7 yrs now...to the tune of, now, about $10k. That’s $10k’s worth being thrown at a $6k system...(yes, I know, I’m certifiable, but all that is another novel I will bore you with some other time).
But, in the course of steadily improving the sound and presentation (in all regards) in-room over that time, I began to notice that, yes, the frequency response in-room was becoming more extended at both ends and all that, but what made me pay attention was that it was Flattening the overall response as well. This is one of the things AMD gear is touted to do, but until I’d seen it in action under my own roof, it hadn’t fully dawned on me yet what this actually represented.
Alan’s claim all along was that if you flatten in-room response with this approach, then you’re reducing frequency peaks and actually filling in the nulls...without EQ...just by getting rid of noise. IOW, room effects can (to a very large degree - surprisingly large) be thought of in terms of the audible effects of electrical noise. To restate it: what we’ve been audibly attributing to room effects all along (what we are hearing and measuring in our rooms) may actually be more correctly thought of as the audible impact on our systems of ordinary amounts of electrical noise (yes, everybody has it, so don’t think that it somehow won’t apply to you). To put another way: by assuming that in-room bandwidth irregularities are directly resolved by the whole room-treatments/EQ/placement concept only, and that there was no other real factor involved, then we all may have been barking up the wrong tree. Not that room modes don’t exist, they do. It’s just that the majority of what we are hearing may actually be a rather extreme exacerbation of that problem due to nothing more than electrical noise. Remove enough noise and maybe 90% of the audible effects of the room mode problem go away - IF you go far enough to take the AMD approach to a logical conclusion that is, as I have already.
But, as I became more and more convinced that this approach actually works well in the real world (through adding purchases, primarily for other sound improvements, though they all contribute to an overall improvement to the sound), I steadily realized how much less and less dependent I was becoming on EQ and room treatments...these days, a modest EQ boost of no more than 3.5 dB in the low bass (15" woofers), another, more narrow, 3.5 dB boost at 13 kHz and no EQ at all in between...despite OB speakers that are 5ft out from the front wall in an open room...yet I get perfectly sounding lower mids (and, with the EQ’d extremes, everything else so far). (I haven’t measured yet, but I must say that currently I’ve no audibly discernible reason to at the moment).
But, then I realized that that meant there were now a multitude of methods that could be brought to bear on the problem - room treatments, EQ, and now electrical noise reduction (like conditioning here, but without adding any sonic ill effects). But, when I considered all that, I began to see that starting from the room itself first and trying to work backward to the electronics was possibly getting the cart in front of the horse. It all seemed to make more sense to do all the electrical noise reduction first, then whatever minimal EQ was necessary and, lastly, whatever room treatments would then be called for...also, by that point, presumably minimal.
Room treatments are a great thing, but I think its application presumes that all your system ducks are in a row before you start. Change anything: your gear, placement, EQ, noise levels, and theoretically you’re potentially calling for a revised room treatment scenario...one that may even have you starting over from scratch with it if you were to do it right. But, the directional approach starting from ENR, to EQ and then to (hopefully) a less involved room treatment array might make the whole thing a little more doable than if we start with the room first and then try to head upstream.
The takeaway here is that, fundamentally, the best way to resolve the bandwidth problem is to try and resolve it Before it reaches the speakers. Once it becomes audible, then technically it becomes much harder to correct with accuracy.
Buying equipment with better specs is not the answer. The specs only show us what the gear would be capable of IF it were operating at spec. Unfortunately for anyone concerned, I’ve discovered that that is Never the case and that it can’t be without solid ENR - there’s just too much of it in our everyday lives, no matter what our circumstance. I have AMD for all that and it works really well, but, along these lines and many others with AMD performance, it did not begin to start sinking in just How well all the AMD pieces were working together until I was into it for at least a couple thousand bucks or so. But, at the $10k level, my gear is now all operating at several times above spec and the audible improvements have continued to be dramatic in every respect.
EQ is great, too, but the only problem with it is that it can be compromised from normal amounts of electrical noise, as I have discovered. The 2 biggest problem areas for it are the colorations in the lower mids within the "mud" frequencies and the grit/grain/glare in the upper "hash" frequencies. With the noise removal here, I’ve been able to squelch the effects of both, so in my case there are no more ’best compromise’ settings between tone and noise.
Hopefully at some point more audiophiles will discover the relevance of the link between electrical noise, measured in-room response and room modes...and, by discovering AMD, or something like it, will realize that something effective can be actually done about it.
Regards, John
And, yep (you guessed it), all that’s yet one more reason why I like AMD...(this was reason #4217). My apologies once again for the long post. Carry on.