For home audio, you can add an equalizer and use it on or off and get any color you want for a lot less hustle.
How do you add color?
For those of you who are adherents of straight wire, ruler flat frequency response, accurate and neutral sound, artists’ true intentions, etc. ... please stop reading now. You’ve been warned. If you continue to read, you might get heartburn and since I’m a nice guy, I don’t want to do that to you.
Now, for those who are not opposed to adding a bit of color and flavor to tune/tweak the sound to their liking, what is your preferred method of madness? Speakers, amps, preamps, DACs, cables? I know many who like the combination of solid state amps with tube preamps. Lately, a lot of upmarket DACs are using tubes (Lampizator) or R2R to add a sort of tube-like flavoring. Let’s say you’re happy with your solid state amp but want to add a bit of tube magic to the chain, would you get there by way of tube preamps or tube DACs? Or both -- which might be too much of a good thing perhaps?
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Equalizer mechanical or electronic one are tools not the solution... i used the two types ... As building a house ask for many tools used in some balance way and in some order, you must use many tools and tweaks to reach a specific balance ratio for each system/room which will not be nor colored nor neutral but will display his specific "hue" ... Synergy between components is the first factor, to create an ideal balance ask for more work and for some tools and embeddings controls ... if we dont have synergy to begin with the rest of work will not be easy and inj many cases even doable...No amount of equalization will replace synergy in many cases or a component which pair not well with another one... if you dac is too harsh coupling it with an analytical amplifier sound will not result in an optimal balance even if equalization will decrease the harshness or the fatigue a bit...And if the room is to echoing or not set for this case it will be more disastrous.. Reaching balance is a complex problems in all working embeddings dimensions and begin with the right or wrong synergy... It is not easy to figure it out, it was not for me... |
In hindsight, perhaps the choice of the term ’color’ was a wrong one to start with. The term might imply some sort of artificial sweetness or making the sound unnatural. That was not what I was aiming for. I started to write my response but then I read @hilde45 ’s last message. He pretty much summed up my thoughts, albeit, in a vastly eloquent manner :) I wholeheartedly agree with everything he said. My intent was to discuss how to shape the sound signature to something you enjoy but without taking away from the intrinsic nature of the original recording. This does not imply bad synergy or other weaknesses in the chain. I’m sure this is not a novel idea. There’s a reason many audiophiles combine SS amps with tube preamps. or use a hybrid amp, and are happy with the results. Obviously there is more than one way to skin the cat. I never understood why some audiophiles are so dogmatic (my way is the only right way) about these things. Relax, it’s a hobby that’s supposed to make you happy -- whichever path you choose to take. Early on in my audio journey, I too was enamored by tweaking the sound by introducing a tube dac in the chain. I tried a couple of tube dacs but overtime I concluded that it was not always the best strategy, at least for me. Nowadays, I prefer my DAC to pass on the information as accurately as possible without altering the signal. But that’s just my preference. I’m sure there are many on this forum who are digging the sound of a tube dac as we speak. That being said, I never tried higher end tube dacs from, say, Lampizator’s upper models. I might try this route in the future. For now, I’m thinking of trying a tube preamp with my SS amp. I want to point out that I’m perfectly happy, in fact more than happy, with how my system sounds right now. It has all the tonality, texture, presence, etc. that I had always desired. So the urge to try a tube preamp is purely an experiment in the realm of ’what-if’. Just to push the envelope a bit more. It might not work out in the end. I guess there’s only one way to find out. |
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