Comments please on: NAD M23 vs c298 vs. other newer Class D

Where do we listen to our systems, right?

LIVING ROOM GUY HERE:

I’m nowhere near where members are here with dedicated and treated rooms. By choice I keep my main system where we are the majority of the time, and there is dedicated listening time and what I call "walk-around-listening time" too while we are doing other things and yet letting the system play for 4-8 hour stretches on weekends, etc. Like it was growing up in the 70s for me, part of the enjoyment.

All of my listening and testing goes on in my main family room, with various items to the sides, furniture we sit in out front, as any normal family room has.  

My final main speakers were designed, built, tested, and tweaked using this family room as my final test bed. Unless I go and listen to gear in a room similar to mine and with my sources and such, its really a nice thing to go look at  to get a "general idea", but I KNOW 100% I won’t know what its actually going to sound like until I get it home, broken in, and warmed up over a few weeks time - at least. For sure.

+1

My final main speakers were designed, built, tested, and tweaked using this family room as my final test bed.

That’s a key point. You *built* your speakers for that room. That’s a kind of "treatment" in my opinion, though I am not sure how you built it for the room other than back and forth trial and error. That's a good method but it helps to also have information about nodes, reflections, etc. by measuring. But if you haven’t measured and it sounds good to you, that’s important. Could it sound better? Quite likely, but if that can't happen, well it's best to find a practical life-balance. It's not "audiophile-ideal" but it is "life-ideal."

For me, getting into the audiophile hobby has meant playing around with tubes, gear, cables, isolation platforms to see what changes they make. But I get extra confidence in playing around with those minor changes knowing that the largest factor, the room, is dialed in. I’d compare it to tasting different wines -- I prefer to judge the differences between a merlot and a cabernet without having a strong breath mint in my mouth at the same time. I can tell some differences between the wines with a breath mint in my mouth, but I would prefer not to make distinctions with additional distractors in the comparison.

@hilde45 ... I’d compare it to tasting different wines -- I prefer to judge the differences between a merlot and a cabernet without having a strong breath mint in my mouth at the same time. I can tell some differences between the wines with a breath mint in my mouth, but I would prefer not to make distinctions with additional distractors in the comparison.

What measuring equipment are you using to measure the taste of the wine?  

Tongue and Taste = Ears and Hearing, LOL. :) 

@decooney LOL. Yes, the simpler the analogy, the more perfect the correspondence! Actually, I like to compare gear while running an electric train set in the background! After all, I'm still using ears and hearing, so what's the difference? ;-)