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AUDIO PRICE INSANITY PRICE VS. PERFORMANCE WORTH IT?

What do you y’all think? I have 30k into my system and I recently attended AXPONA 2018. I compared what I heard to what I have. I felt my system compared to the 80 to 100k systems quite well. Matching is important. Also your reference point. Any thoughts yall?  
calvinj
enginedr1960
173 posts
 

Building a great sounding room and system can be done for less if one does his or hers home work . There are many great products used and new available that don’t need a mortgage . In my quest to achieve this goal I feel the low frequency response in the room is very important to get a emotional connection to the music .I use a multiple sub woofers with great success in my room . The other thing that helped was having a good reference . I found this by making a pilgrimage to the home of Jim Smith the author of Get Better Sound . My system to me sounded good but after listening at Jims I went home and made some room tuning changers . Now there are very few rooms that I prefer to my own .


calvinj OP
2,419 posts
 
Room is so important. People forget. The room is the start 
michaelgreenaudio's avatar
michaelgreenaudio
1,019 posts
 

Thank You :)

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

amg56's avatar
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amg56
887 posts
 

The room can only be sorted once you are happy with your system. Once the acoustics are right, invariably you don't like the sound created by a component or cable (if you believe cables make a difference), then you change the sound, so you need to adjust the acoustics and round and round we go.

Being an audiophile is like owning a boat. Its a big money pit. But do you love music? Oh yeah.

folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak
1,349 posts
 
@amg56
the room can only be sorted once you are happy with your system

I suspect this is just about 100% the wrong way to approach things. Every system will interact with the room but changing the system to address room interactions, rather than address them at source is a recipe for disaster. For example you may have a mid bass room mode bump so you could look for some speakers with a suck out in that area but why would adding obviously colored speakers help anything? Likewise at the other frequency extreme you could have a lot of reflecting surfaces and find too much treble so seek laid back speakers, it could work but two wrongs don’t make a right.

In other words if you think your system sounds good in an untreated room and then begin to treat the room and it sounds worse it may be that you are now uncovering the colorations that had before been compensating for room interactions. If we (as I believe we should) want a system that is less colored, and more true to the original recording, then the treated room is more accurate, even if your system now sounds worse. Obviously gross mismatches (typically speakers too large for the room with too much bass that cannot be controlled) may be the exception.

The good news is that working on the room will make your system sound more honest. My advice is to take the time to understand how your system interacts with the room, address basic room issues (first reflection points and so on) and then spend time further optimizing how your system then works the room. A well treated room will reveal everything your system is capable of, for better or worse
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