DSP vs New Cables ??

I’m not sure I understand the question. I have always kept my HT separate from my two channel system. My two channel system always takes priority over the Home theater. The impact of a small change (improvement) is always much greater in my two channel than in HT. After all most of your attention is on the screen… so while the some sound is really important in making the whole thing believable, nuances are not.

I would always spend $3K on my two channel system before fiddling with my HT… unless grossly deficient in some way.

AND… DSP is not getting anywhere near my two channel system dag nabit… you young whipper snappers.

Well depending on what you mean by DSP… I stream with a high end streamer and DAC.

DSP is used to help tailor the sound to your room, What device will you use for this purpose?

you just cannot generalize.

to me dsp would be an alternative to room treatments for 2 channel, not cables. consider maybe a product such as GIK treatments as an alternative to dsp for 2 channel.

https://www.gikacoustics.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhuDZoNCP-wIVdR19Ch2Pcg5rEAAYASAAEgKWD_D_BwE

the question would mostly be whether your issue is more in the bass or slap echo. dsp will not fix slap echo very much, it can smooth the bass. dsp is the poor step child to the proper room set-up. dsp will dumb down your 2 channel signal and take away life from the music to some degree.

some cables might reduce brightness from slap echo, but then it would also be costing you musical information and top end extension.

maybe if we saw pictures of your room then we could be more helpful.

personally i have a very extensively treated purpose built 2 channel room with a pure analog signal path, then a totally separate home theater with 9.3.6 speakers and a Trinnov Dolby Atmos dsp processer. my Home Theater has no room treatments as it’s in my house and my wife is against them. my 2 channel room is is in my barn and i can and do do anything i like. cables for my Home Theater room are quite basic, my 2 channel room has more exotic cables for the signal path..

Stepping back from the OP’s question of specifically DSP, I think there’s more to this. The issue really is that most listeners (queue the "not me" trolls) are most sensitive to frequency response variations. In this sense cables are on the low end of items that can cause these variations.

Speakers, room placement, tone controls, DSP, room treatment or lack of. All of these have the potential for very large variations in frequency response. How bad? Well I once measured a subwoofer with over 20 dB peaks and dips in the in-room response. That’s a factor of something like 20x more power at some notes!!

I see a lot of evidence of listeners being tricked by ragged mid/tweeter responses into believing they are hearing more detail, who don't realize what they are hearing is just a different tonal spectrum.  I also know some listeners can go to an audio show in terrible sounding rooms and seemingly ignore the room’s acoustics. So this rule isn’t always true, but I do feel, strongly, if you are training your brain’s neural net to hear speaker cables but not the room your perception is now heavily unbalanced.

@erik_squires +1,