Interesting situation! Do we need this....
I had a very interesting and unsettling experience that brings this hobby all together...or rips it apart. Recently, I bought a pair of Fluence SX6 speakers, on sale at Amazon for $120 pair. A small, black, two way bookshelf speaker. Highly-positively reviewed. My plan was to pull the drivers to use in another project. I couldn't buy drivers and crossovers like this for $120(More on this later)...Anyways, I was listening to my new kit amplifier, AKITIKA Z4 that I recently built...Streaming Quobuz...The Fluance speakers were set up next to the KEF LS50 Metas as I had used them previously to test yet another kit amplifier, Nelson Pass' ACA Mini.....For six hours I was simply amazed at how great the AKITIKA kit amp sounded. Massive sound stage, tight, well defined bass, some of the best vocals I've heard, the "AIR" around jazz instruments was fantastic!.....a system to behold...playing through my KEF LS50 Metas....Six hours later, after all types of music, it was time to call it a night (or early morning)....As I go to shut down the system, I realize that all night I was listening to the Fluance speakers!!! They were placed side by side with the KEFs. Do we really need any of this high end equipment to really enjoy the music!
Once again, you simply don't get the jist of the post. It has nothing to do whether the speakers sound good or bad or ARE good or bad.....It is all about the fact that I enjoyed 6 hours of listening to very inexpensive speakers.......They fulfilled my need that night for an evening of music enjoyment. The point is, how "good" do speakers need to be to enjoy them..... |
I think what is interesting about the situation is that the op inadvertently listened blind, and was surprised by the enjoyment. I’ve been through this myself many times, discovering that my ability to discern sound quality is much higher than my need for it for optimal musical enjoyment. At a certain point it’s just a curiosity, a freakish thing that a sound system can be so accurate and capable down to the finest minutia, but I get bored with that aspect of it. In building my own speakers, attempting to get to a higher level of performance is a lot of fun. It’s an attempt to pull of a stunt and I’m happy when I do it, but then I need to find something new to do, so I try something new and then people say "Won’t you ever find the system you’re truly happy to listen to and enjoy music with?" My answer is that’s way too easy. I’ve had dozens of those systems. Another thing I will say about this is that the pursuit of ultra high end sound quality for the sake of musical enjoyment has a certain self defeating quality to it for me. It never sounds quite like live musicians. There are too many complications for that to happen. So no matter what it’s a compromised presentation. But that’s ok because it doesn’t have to be perfect. So if it’s not going to be perfect because it can’t be, it’ fine if it’s imperfect in a number of different ways about equally. If it’s got certain things uncannily accurate while it still suffers from built in issues with the way recordings are made and the limited number of speakers, inter aural crosstalk, all that, then it actually can become distracting. To my ear the electronics and speaker quality pretty quickly can get way out ahead of the quality limitations inherent in a 2 channel recording played into both ears at the same time in a room that is invariably coloring the sound. If I’m going to work on something I’m going to be looking for new and novel ways to present the sound differently - a more holistic approach rather than squinting at minutia like the sound differences of dacs or speaker cables. To me it’s case of straining at gnats while swallowing camels. But to each his own! One person’s camel may be another’s gnat. I’ll bring up another point that’s similar to me - perfect blacks on OLED TVs. I went with a mini LED even though I can see the blooming. It’s no big deal to me because I don’t typically watch in a perfectly dark room, and a lot of the content that I enjoy has a lot of brightness all over the screen. So the overall persistent brightness limit is more of a big deal to me than the perfect blacks, which I have trouble seeing most of the time because of the lighting in the room and my own eyes and glasses causing glare. The biggest thing I notice, especially in outdoor daylight scenes, is that clouds and glare on water and stuff like that are much, much brighter than TVs can currently produce. I don’t see a lot of perfect blacks anywhere in my world. |
I’ll bring up another point that’s similar to me - perfect blacks on OLED TVs.
Unless everything else is "perfect" too, tis just another example of chasing the wrong thing. Perhaps the real problem is in our genes? We men especially have evolved over countless millennia as hunters. Looking around it's not too hard to see aspects of this in much of present day male behaviours. |
@rbertalotto - Is the question how good speakers need to be to be enjoyed or how good the audiophile expects them to be? I think your experience is partly a result of expectation bias because you expected that the new amplifier would be an improvement with the more expensive speakers. This is human nature and what makes me trust results that are counterintuitive the most. I have found more than once that I’ll make a change and then convince myself that the original setup sound difference in some way, but when I swap back it’s far more similar (maybe close to indistinguishable) from the new setup. My most recent change was to try a new set of speaker cables. In this case it was an actual relief when I switched back. In this case my listening muscle memory didn’t deceive me. |
