Do YOU have a flat frequency response in your room?
The most basic truth of audio for the last 30 years is listeners prefer a flat frequency response. You achieve that through getting the right speakers, in the right position, in the right room, and then use room treatments and DSP to dial it in. If you are posting questions about what gear to buy and have NOT measured your room and dialed it in to achieve a flat frequency response FIRST you are blowing cash not investing cash IMO. Have you measured the frequency response in your room yet and posted it?
Your premise is potentially fallable. You assume engineering and production for best sound quality may have been the goal…which isn’t always the case. More than a few productions may have been mixed to optimize sound from a boombox …or an automobile system…or earbuds.
Ideally I would love to hear what the original intent was provided they each shared sound quality as a goal. But alas, no two do to the same level or degree of honesty. |
@retiredfarmer , that is a little harsh to dis the whole country because of one anechoic chamber |
@esarhaddon , you make a great point. Are you hearing what the engineer heard when they mixed it. That is called the "circle of confusion" and is one of the topics that paper attempts to address. Check out the diagram (Fig. 1) on the second page and then the author states: Significant uniformity throughout the process is needed if customers are to hear what the artists created. This is the “circle of confusion” shown in Fig. 1. For the system to function sensibly, mixing and mastering engineers need to experience sound that resembles what their customers will hear. Acknowledging that audio systems in widespread use are not necessarily very good, audio professionals in the music side of the business have often used “bad” loudspeakers to check their mixes. The problem is that loudspeakers can be “bad” in countless ways. The dominant characteristics of small low cost audio devices are a lack of bass and reduced sound output capability—a high-pass filter in the playback signal path is a practical way to simulate that. The author’s book [1] (chapters 2 and 18) illustrates the past and present situation in consumer and professional-monitor loudspeakers. Flat on-axis frequency response is clearly the engineering objective for most of these systems
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@esarhaddon , let me say I don’t know how to get the sound of live musicians in my room, I likely need to start all over with a purpose built studio and a generous budget to achieve that. However, I can share the most enjoyable way I have found to listen to live recordings. If you see my system you’ll notice a BIG screen in front. Plex now has about 10 live TV stations that play various types of concerts 24/7. I fire up one of those channels with content I enjoy and listen with an upmixer called Audyssey DSX. The emphasis today in multichannel listening seems to be height channels. For reproducing music wide channels are more important than height channels according to studies by Tomlinson Holman (THX). The wide channels seem to be an afterthought with Atmos and DTS-X. Read more about it here:
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