@johnlnyc I choose to believe my ears for now. I may work on placement of speakers and room treatments sometime, to see what I get. What I hear will always take precedence over the graph. But, having said that, I have a tool to record how changes affect sound now. I may end up exactly where I started. Who knows?
Shouldn't This Sound Boomy?
I have recently purchased a mic and I’m running REW to test my room response. These are the resulting charts:
I hear nice tight bass when I play music. I hear a big improvement over my previous speakers. The mid range and treble sound great and again the bass sounds articulate and tight. I would think this would be boomy and muddled. Unfortunately, I did not have the ability to test my previous speakers. The room is treated with GIK panels, but I have no bass traps in the corners due to the spouse approval factor. Am I a horrible listener that can’t hear this, or am I missing something else?
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I hear you. This is what a lot of audiophiles suffer. I can’t tell you how many of the greatest recording engineers, mixers, mastering engineers and producers, agree on one thing. Rely on your ears not the gear. I recall a reviewer explaining that for optimum isolation, seat your turntable on a concrete pillar not touching any part of your home and driven into the ground. At some point, we have to just find a system we like, tweak it within reason and spend our time listening to music!
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@johnlnyc I'll second that, thank you! I would also add that our hearing perception does get in the way from time to time and, to keep music sounding fresh, we need new sounds, presented in new ways, to challenge us. This can be new music programme, an audio sabbatical, some changes to our system set up, or a multitude of other things, including personal wellbeing. As an example, I sometimes by-pass my pre amp and plug the XLR output of my DAC directly into my power amp. Providing DAC's have a very good volume control, this works well and only takes a couple of minutes to execute. The sound then becomes a little more "clinical" with slightly more dynamics, but the trade-off is a small loss in musical engagement. However, the "new" sound gets my attention. After a couple of days (maybe 4-6 hours of listening time) switching back to including the pre amp in my system, immediately delivers a more entertaining sound and my hearing perception is refreshed again. Even wetting my industrial scale grounding mat does the trick, sometimes. It is an advantage to all music lovers, to understand the perception of hearing and to consider that maybe our system is not a fault, but we may have become a little complacent with the sound and presentation it is producing. Only this morning did I have a wonderfully emotional listening experience, playing some music that I had not heard for maybe a year of more. I was astonished by how engaging and entertaining that 2 hour listening session was and, how different music production styles affected my enjoyment of the music to some degree. Kind regards, BP |
Yes, that begins to highlight the issues. I also had an article published in HiFi Critic Vol 12 No1 (pages 42-44) in 2018, where I started to scratch the surface of my layman's understanding of hearing perception and how it affected my ability to enjoy music reproduced through my system. Sorry that the article is copyrighted and cannot be publicly shared, but I have added a link, if anyone is minded to purchase. https://www.hificritic.com/store/p137/hificritic-vol12-no-1.html Maybe someone has a copy they can share with anyone interested?
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