Tekton Double Impacts

@teajay @grannyring  - Preparing for the purchase of some room treatments has me studying up on room acoustics. This youtube video addressed the role electronics, speakers and acoustics play in the sound we perceive. I found it informative. Yes, still a relative noob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bbmWd00HYM

Long story short - Acoustics play the major role, followed by speakers then electronics. Bad acoustics can totally destroy the detail and resolution you were hoping to get out of that expensive dac. "All the recording engineers, whose music we are listening to, are listening to speakers that were carefully placed in a room and equalized. Good enough for them who do this for a living, should be good enough for you, as long as you use a good quality equalizer."-Anthony Grimani, MSR Acoustics, President

Personally, I've never heard room correction not improve a room, but that was with sparsely treated rooms. What I've never heard is a well treated room, with full tube electronics compared with and without room correction. 

The new sound I got from the Raven Blackhawk came through my Gallo 3.1s beautifully. No class D like digital nasties or listening fatigue, and far greater texture and tone all while running correction. I'm still open to the existence of artifacts of correction, especially when there are 30dB untreated room mode swings. A crazy looking wideband filter to perfectly counter untreated room effects requires unlimited taps and digital filter coefficients. Think infinite fourier series. In addition the cost function balances phase and magnitude response (digital mixed phase FIR filter from Live Dirac ), so phase corrections can still come at a price of frequency response ripple or vice versa. 

I read somewhere that room corrected tone/timbre, presence and the overall naturallness of sound dramatically improves once treatments were employed. This makes sense to me given the limited resolution of even the best room correction. Fixing the number of coefficients allowed, a transfer function curve fit is orders of magnitude more accurate if the target curve is smoother or better behaved (treated room).  

Live Dirac only cost $400, makes the most dramatic positive changes of any one component I've experienced. I'll turn it off if ever I don't like it.

Anyone see a reason not to use GIK?

Like others here I learn much from the discussions here and find listeners disagreements regarding components sound quite enlightening as it helps me to fully understand my listening preferences and how to achieve the sound I prefer.  I would hope ones dislike of a product wouldn't be taken personally, it's just ones preference......just like I wouldn't take it personally if someone didn't like the lime green shirt I'm wearing ( no matter how hideous it most like is!). As long as I like it's all good!

This audio journey is quite interesting. I can't tell you how many times I thought I had the most amazing piece of equipment only to hear something else that put it to shame. Charles' Frankensteins certainly come to mind, I didn't realize the sound I had could be improved so much. Now I enjoy what I have to the fullest while keeping an open mind as to how to possibly improve it. Having said that I hope my upcoming purchases of a new cd transport, DAC and amp will suit me for quite a while, my pocketbook needs a break! :)

brotw, you may consider yourself a noob but IMO you're well ahead of the curve by addressing the rooms acoustics. Jim Smiths book "Getting Better Sound" helped me understand the importance of proper room treatment. I'm still learning how to properly treat my room but can confidently say that building a dedicated listening room with bass traps, quadratic diffusers and absorption treatments was the best audio investment I've ever made. When I had the the DI's in my living room they sounded great to me but I heard much more of what they are really capable of when properly positioning them into my dedicated listening room......of course it's much easier placing room treatments in a room the wife doesn't care about ;)

thanks to all for your contributions here,
Tom

ps......welcome Aric. Can't wait to place your amp in my system and look forward to you insights here. 

@kdude66

You,I and possibly others may be a little crazy for loving our old technology SET and SEP amps but here is my take on this.

Kenny, we are definitely not crazy, but I do like to self-deprecate so I can make my point in a less a offensive way.

One way to begin a non offensive post, but still make your point.

Step 1: "It’s not you, it’s me...open with some non threatening self-deprecation."
ie: "Maybe I’m mistaken, wrong, and clearly insane, but I believe I’m right about XYZ"

Now that’s just step 1, there are more steps, but I don’t like giving out trade secrets or boring people with diatribes as I get older, but step one is like getting your foot in the door of a person’s mind and tends to keep it open. Comedians self-deprecate to woo their audience all the time. LOL

the distortion spectra of triodes is favorable, with a rapid fall-off of the upper harmonics.

(This is less true for beam tetrodes, pentodes, or solid-state devices, which are intrinsically less linear and have higher-order distortion curves.)

Ditto, couldn’t say it better if I wanted to.

This performance is with a Set amp running in their sweet spot of output which is 20 to 30% of that particular amps output pwr as a general rule for the very best sound.

This is were the best purity of sound "May" come from for folks that like these kind of Amps.

Again, spot on.

Again this is a highly personal and subjective subject and there is no right or wrong just different flavors of that coffee available to us Individually for our enjoyment of music,that we love,playback in our homes.

This^ is the final step in my guide of how to write non offensive posts and still have an opinion. LOL

I call it Final Step: "Opinions are like assholes, so acknowledge other people’s if you want them to acknowledge yours!" LOL

Looks like you’re playing with a full deck to me, definitely not crazy at all. I will only add that when I learned that amplifying the entire sine wave continuously in class A without decimating the signal and introducing cross-over distortion via the use of a phase splitter in a push-pull topology was like an "Ah Hah" moment for me being very interested in the simplicity and purity of the SET circuit design.

I equivocate it to my "Humpty Dumpty" analogy. Sure you can separate phase and antiphase, but putting it back together again isn’t without some degradation or the introduction of crossover distortion. In other words Humpty Dumpty can be glued back together again, but ends up looking like a mosaic puzzle with cracks and fractures and is now nothing more than a
shell of his former self. (+5 Word Play Points).

@teajay , @david_ten , @grannyring , @kdude66 , @mikirob , @jcarcopo, @grey9hound : Thank you for your valuable posts! Can you please post pictures of your systems in Audiogon’s Virtual System pages? ..... "A picture is worth a thousand words"

@charles1dad , @mac48025: Thanks for posting pictures of your systems. I can almost "hear" what your systems sound like by looking at your gear, your room and how you have it set-up.

Kdude,
very interested in your take on the Lyngdorf. Everything I have read points to it being a pretty amazing piece. If I could get rid of a big stack of components and replace with a 20lb integrated with no loss of sound quality and the benefit of room correction that would be the cats ass!