DSP is used to help tailor the sound to your room, What device will you use for this purpose?
DSP vs New Cables ??
For two channel listening DSP can be a bit unnerving for the die hard listener who wants pure sound. However, of late, the Technology has improved and DSP impact to address room issues can be really quite nice. You will very likely notice an impact. When you get new cables you may notice something but it may not be dramatic enough to impress you vs DSP.
Home theater DSP much easier if you have a good processor or receiver. And this can have a meaningful impact and cables may have a lesser impact.
So my executive decision of the day is to defer buying new cables (was planning to spend 3K for some interconnects, transparent or silteck). So I'll revisit dsp for home theater. Two channel Will require new stuff and I'm a bit Leary to introduced more stuff along the signal path but I hear it's not that bad and won't really restrict the path, hard to tell.
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you just cannot generalize. to me dsp would be an alternative to room treatments for 2 channel, not cables. consider maybe a product such as GIK treatments as an alternative to dsp for 2 channel. https://www.gikacoustics.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhuDZoNCP-wIVdR19Ch2Pcg5rEAAYASAAEgKWD_D_BwE the question would mostly be whether your issue is more in the bass or slap echo. dsp will not fix slap echo very much, it can smooth the bass. dsp is the poor step child to the proper room set-up. dsp will dumb down your 2 channel signal and take away life from the music to some degree. some cables might reduce brightness from slap echo, but then it would also be costing you musical information and top end extension. maybe if we saw pictures of your room then we could be more helpful. personally i have a very extensively treated purpose built 2 channel room with a pure analog signal path, then a totally separate home theater with 9.3.6 speakers and a Trinnov Dolby Atmos dsp processer. my Home Theater has no room treatments as it’s in my house and my wife is against them. my 2 channel room is is in my barn and i can and do do anything i like. cables for my Home Theater room are quite basic, my 2 channel room has more exotic cables for the signal path.. |
Stepping back from the OP’s question of specifically DSP, I think there’s more to this. The issue really is that most listeners (queue the "not me" trolls) are most sensitive to frequency response variations. In this sense cables are on the low end of items that can cause these variations. Speakers, room placement, tone controls, DSP, room treatment or lack of. All of these have the potential for very large variations in frequency response. How bad? Well I once measured a subwoofer with over 20 dB peaks and dips in the in-room response. That’s a factor of something like 20x more power at some notes!! I see a lot of evidence of listeners being tricked by ragged mid/tweeter responses into believing they are hearing more detail, who don't realize what they are hearing is just a different tonal spectrum. I also know some listeners can go to an audio show in terrible sounding rooms and seemingly ignore the room’s acoustics. So this rule isn’t always true, but I do feel, strongly, if you are training your brain’s neural net to hear speaker cables but not the room your perception is now heavily unbalanced. |
@erik_squires +1, |
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