The components of your system are like a Ferrari, but you are using a team of horses (the TACT) to power it. Yes, you have a lot invested in horses, you have used them a long time. It is time to let them go and get an engine suitable for your components. You have several members here who have already praised their own DSP (trinnov, room perfect, ARC, Audyssey Pro, DSPeaker, etc) and NOBODY is using TACT. It is a horse in the era of cars, time to get an "engine" more in line with your components. That system is from 2008 and if it was an amp or a pair of speakers, fine. For a digital component? No. A $100 DAC from today will blow a $5000 DAC from 2008 out of the water. "Digital Signal Processing" software that old is not even a consideration. If you need advice start a new thread and I am sure you can accelerate the transition, NP.
Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused
17 of 23 speakers in my studio and home theater systems are internally powered. My studio system is all Genelec and sounds very accurate. I know the best new concert and studio speakers are internally powered there are great technical reasons to design a speaker and an amp synergistically, this concept is much more important to sound quality than the vibration systems we often buy. How can an audiophile justify a vibration system of any sort with this in mind.
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I finely used Room Perfect on my ProTools system, It came out much better than I ever expected, those new Genelec speakers are much better than I ever expected, nice when that happens. When you set up your system then run acoustic programs that fix the room to show a perfectly flat graph don’t think your room is perfect or even good sounding that’s not the goal in fact if your room is flat your room will not sound good, as I said earlier a famous acoustic designer and studio architect John Storyk said it’s very easy to make a flat studio but they sound bad. When the goal of most acoustic room fixing programs is to give you a flat line well logically that gives you a room that sounds bad, any other line gives you an argument for what may sound great but a flat line is the only one that you know for sure sounds bad. Room perfect by Lyngdorf is the only one that I know of that doesn’t conform the speaker to create a flat room. Small room acoustics are not hard to do correctly but impossible, sound is 3D the materials it bounces off of are all different and change with angle of the sound hitting the material and the absorption of the particular frequency hitting that boundary, and the amplitude of that sound hitting that boundary material. Acoustics and fluid dynamics are cousins in mathematics and both are done never in real world environments but in theoretical perfect boundaries and environments only hoping to get an average. DSP is great for surround sound systems but only adds latency for 2 channel systems, if you want your system to sound the same loud and quiet your brain will not understand, the Fetcher Munsen curve has been there all your life, it’s also different for everyone and especially different between men and women, how do they get low level loudness right, they can’t. |
Also, I’ve only seen sound a couple of times both in about 2000 seat rooms for indoor concerts, a little to small for big systems but you have to set them up anyway because that’s what is in the trucks. When you have this situation sound checks are very dangerous the mixer comes in and has a 500hp engine in a Volkswagen bug and lets it rip. When this happens and you are looking at the lights on the mixing console you see the density waves go through your vision it looks just like a mirage on a hot day. All this to say hard lens diffusion is obviously wrong it gives you phasing by adding an accordion of smaller out of phase waves that falsely smooth out the problem wave. Sound doesn’t come as verticals sign waves it comes as horizontal pressure waves. Understanding sound in terms of frequency (length) and amplitude (density) makes you realize most of acoustics is psychological not physical. |
The new digital amp boards from Elegant Audio Solutions (like the old TACT and Lyngdorf but more modern and using GaNs on the output).....allow inexpensive active multiamping using an external digital xover such as the inexpensive Minidsp units. For an OEM the boards also have DSP functions built in.....but even the board with just digital inputs can be used with amazing results. Peachtree has the GaN 1 amp now and there will be soon an amp with 400 watts a channel. You could use two of these $1500 digital amps (one per channel) and the $600 Minidsp Flex digital and you can biamp any drivers......full eq. room correction, time alignment (delay), whatever......Of course, you can use more amps and tri and quad amp. I am sure there will be 8 channel amps out within a year or so.....integrated amps as well. A digital amp allows you to use NO DACs, NO ADCs.....no preamps.....and no normal amps, no analog cables......and of course, no distorting passive xover parts. This is a revolution. Why buy speakers when you can make your own open baffle speakers in one weekend that will sound better than anything you have ever heard. http://tweakaudio.com/EVS-2/The_Audio_Revolution_has_begun.html Happy Holidays! Peace and Love and Joy and Beauty for Everyone! |
@kota1 @mijostyn ’s main speakers are floor to ceiling line sources. He does not need to worry much about floor and ceiling for them and side wall reflections are likely to be a bit lower. Still have floor/ceiling and side walls for bass as the subs are omnidirectional at those frequencies. @donavabdear since no one final masters in a perfectly flat room and mixing highly nearfield is the only thing that comes close why would you want to playback flat? This brings us back to the original topic. You do want the direct sound perfectly flat if you can. Active speakers do that better than anything. That gives you a great starting point. From there do your room acoustics and subs to get close to your target non flat in room curve. Finally DSP to soften anything really off. Room correction has to make the on axis non flat to correct the room. Modern processors try to understand what is direct /reflect so they don’t over correct but it is not easy. @ricevs we have had direct digital amps for quite some time. It sounds simple but is not. A DAC does not need feedback. Amplifiers generally do. Direct digital and DAC/AMP each have their advantages and disadvantages. Direct digital amps are single bit so far. DACs are multibit. The math in a multibit implementation allows more tolerance for the engineers to do their stuff. Does it matter? No, both can be transparent. Same with silicon and GaN. Silicon can already be transparent. GaN could make for nicer but meaningless specs. For us we like the reduced packaging/heat sink requirements GaN may offer.
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