A stupid question for which there's no sensible answer.

I can see that one consensus is that the room and room treatment are vital. I haven't worked on this since I feel a bit hopeless that my very complex, difficult common area (where the speakers have to be) isn't salvageable. And I'm not actually unhappy with the current sound-- just curious as to how to make it even better someday.

There's nowhere for baffles or panels, there are uneven angles all over the place, doorways, arches, a wall of picture windows, a stairway, various furniture, uneven slanted high ceilings, carpeting, etc. Can science really tame this beast?

buncha stuff goin’ on. none of it labelled with eyeball oriented signage for clear delineation.

Meander through ..it banging around... sensing the possible shape of walls and barriers and whatnot.

wandering down a unknown hallway, almost completely blinded, with an unknown destination that is nebulous, where you don’t know the length of the hallway, or even if it is a floor you are standing on, or where the hallway is located, exactly.

Retreat to a Descartesian mean. I exist, therefore I am. And take it from there.

Is the recording neutral?

Do i I have a large quantity of source material that is considered to be neutral and well delineated in detail?

And, in that media, do I have a playback mechanism for the info proper, that allows it to come out unencumbered of coloration (cartridge arm/wire, set up, etc) , either in fuzzing or smearing or leaving the fine bits out (dark smeared), or is that device clean and natural as can be, is it perfect as is possible?

To understand that the best which is possible.... is something slightly darker and slower coming out, than going in.

That is how electronics work, when done as best as is possible. Insanely key and important point. None more important.manufacturers know that people seek more detail, more info, and then the crappy equipment that screeches a bit, get the revealing ratings, and sells well. but only to the people building skewed systems, to some degree. The 90’s high end audio boom was full of this awful sounding nightmarish scenario. Lots of big advertisers. 300 page stereophiles issued with a gazillion full page adverts.

And if it, the next stage of devices... if it reveals more hf detail than is indicated in the balanced levels in the recording, then it is false detail that is obscuring fine sound stage information. falsified and edgy, and on the next stage, it can move to screeching it out.

Note that a system set up with all revealing bits (each part stated as ’revealing’) , is the most horrifying sound to be heard outside of nails on a blackboard being done by tortured children. Pain. Just pain.

Thus.. the next core mistake, is to cover up the coming screech from the over cooked detail presentation of one component, via ’dark’ cables or ’dark preamps, or dark integrateds, or dark speakers.

Big mistake, backwards motion right there. A compression of dynamics with mud on one end and muted screech on the other.

This takes you to the cerwin vega part of the ’thump-screech..thump screech!!’ end of the pool.

One is always searching for clarity, yet to not be wooed by ’hearing something new’, when it is actually dangerously close to being noise, complex micro distortions... which are on the verge of being a problem. Pay close attention here. this is the point of self manipulation on the subject of detail presentation.

A well sorted system along those line is dynamic at ANY and ALL volume levels, and has ’plosives’ to spare, coming out the wazoo.

it has ZERO screech and at the same time is extremely harmonically rich and complex, with huge dynamics and insane transients, and micro detail. Where you can focus on any part of it, just like you can with live instruments in the real world.

It can rip your face off in total comfort, just like live acoustic instruments. No stress, no pressuring, no ear overload... just pure musical bliss, at either 75db, or 110db. No tonal changes in the volume levels shifts/changes, nothing. The damn thing sounds live and never has any presentation problems that bother you.

This is how Teo builds it’s systems, analyzing things individually and in the whole, down to the circuit boards, the solder, the mechanics of it all, the parts, the arrangement on the boards, the entire package, the speaker design, the room design, build and the acoustics, and the last thing we did but published FIRST...the cables.

It is why every time Teo is involved in a room at a show, the room gets the best reviews and is, overall, on the record, about 90% of the time, considered as or one of best of show by the audio press.

When companies start not having us share room with them, they invariably lose that best of show rating on their next outings.
so, in the end, now that some might have an idea of where I'm coming from, and the idea and embodiment of perfection in all of it (Making components, parts, materials, systems, rooms, etc), and huge dynamic swings at the same time and that it has to start with the source as perfected as possible, ..well..how about that under-priced hand built MM cartridge out there? What might be the thinking and execution behind-  and in it?

@m669326 The Alpha USB is made by Berkley. It clocks the USB output of a computer so you can plug it into any digital input. Your DAC has it's own USB input. Mine does not. Eventually, all DACs will have USB inputs because so many of us use our computer as a source component. Computers are much more powerful than streamers especially if your system does theater duty. Some people are under the illusion that dedicated streamer's sound better. This may be true in some cases but I have not heard a streamer better the combination of an Apple computer with channel D's pure music program.

I'm more of a "I don't exist. Therefore I'm not."( Buddhist-style).

It's great to hear a professional room-fixer's point of view.

Thanks.

I’m more Buddhist than anything else. very much in the same camp on the subject of ’reality’.

Probably why my attempts at being egotistically oriented enough for audio sales, just don’t seem to work. The idea of being slick enough to slip past people’s innate defenses and unrealized tracks of internal incursion and grab their cash, is not something I can do ethically and morally.

I sell through truth as I can best understand it, the only door available, in my thinking. Which people tend to write off as overamped ego, as that is what some amount/percentage of the audio world tends to give them.

Part of why Teo is not a big company in the world of audio. We won’t screw people over at any step and thus can’t use most of the advantages that some others have.

The best salesmen are very careful about how they integrate with the given ego package in front of them at the given sale moment. I sell with the truth as I know it (so I never have to remember and recall patterns in lies) which can take the buyer out of the positive safe correct feeling ’purchase mode’.... and back to questioning the world, where the Buddhist in me desires to naturally help them exist as. And I lose the sale.

If you look at my posts, any one in over 20 years, every single one of them smells like that, to one degree or another, almost entirely without exception. Which grates people and creates the crackpot analogies. Too bad, but I did mange to punch them in the thinker, their retorts state it explicitly. Terrible for sales, though. But I get to keep my compass.

Listening to: I knew happiness once (that complex heady mixture of simultaneous enlightenment/joy.. and loss)