NickMDal

Hi Rando. Well... as you just said, speaker placement, base traps and diffusers. With all the hanging clothes, it took 30 minutes to move them around like curtains to find a sweet, balanced sound. After flipping speakers on and off repeatedly and playing with fade, 4 definitely sounded better than 2. I tested with the finale of the second concerto, ASIN B000025TEZ. So nice now. Thank you!!! For all its disadvantages, a small room has one good one. Its very easy to quickly rearrange and test. Now I see how I messed the sound up. Thank you for pointing me in the needed direction!

I think this undersized listening room may not be hugely horrible. The walls are already mostly covered with hanging clothes, so there isn't much bounce going on. I've rearranged the 4 speakers a bunch of times and have had better almost reasonable sound in the past. Thinking the first problem might be to reconsider 4 speakers. Here is an argument against them. http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/do-you-recommend-hooking-up-4-speakers-in-a-two-channel-stereo.262276/#post-6936073"] Does this sound right? We have nice sounding 5.1 in a large room so I thought 4 (double 2-channel) in the music room would be better than 2.

Okay I got it now. Had no idea this sort of program (REW) existed but it sounds perfect. It brings Onkyo's Audacy to mind, which is all I know of in this area. I apologize for my response to the first suggestion. Maybe it had something to do with base phase cancellation? Okay, I'd better stop guessing. I really don't know much about this stuff. Off to read the article and maybe order the app. Thanks!!!

I really don't understand this. Does it have anything to do with audio? We and friends that visit cram into the room and listen to Beethoven under the stars. Seriously, what does "(ahem) speaker optimization" mean? It sounds like an innuendo.

Hi. My wife and I have a (maybe unique) listening room. There is a small problem, but first to share what we have and that we love it! THE ROOM We had an unused 7'x9' closet. If you are feeling creative, imagine this space. Completely light sealed. Add a silent ceiling PC cooling fan to attic and a couple of strategically located ventilation openings the floor edge molding level. One queen sized futon mattress with a memory topper under its cover. An XVR star ceiling 9 feet up with 12" flat black wall border added to absorb light. 712 stars of 11 different levels of intensity. Lossless audio goes to 4 PC speakers via cell phone 3.5mm (Neutron lossless app) PC SPEAKERS Front: Sony Z623 (2 desktop speakers and a sub) Back: Creative Gigaworks T20, Series II QUESTION Recently I rewired to eliminate a ground loop. I also lowered the speakers to a foot above ground since we are lying down looking up at the stars. There seems to be some kind of audio loss. As the volume goes up, the sound seems to cancel in ways I do not understand. Its not just the base. The sound is clean but some seems to disappear or at best, parts do not scale well with the volume. I don't think the setup can be out of phase since these speakers to not have separate + - connections. Is there some way to optimize positioning of the speakers based on the size of the room and where we are in it?

Look here: MusiCHI Suite Overview : Player : Ripper : Library Manager : Tagger : MusiCHI Clean Tags for all the major formats are imbedded as I understand. Maybe some additional tags are created per format. It had no problem embedding into .wma files, which are no where as flexible as FLAC and others. Lossless comparison - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase Not sure how other players read tags or organize by tag category. I really recommend just using Musichi player. What can't it do - at least on a PC? The software quality is exceedingly high - in a class by itself. Okay I'm just and enduser and haven't even paid the fee to get out of trial mode yet :-)

Not sure how to advise on custom tags. Just starting with that. Anything seems possible with Tagger. Date and venue are natural for your collection. My initial organization is composer/album-artist/track. Haven't yet figured out how to add an artist(s) list so that the one to many ratio is correct regarding album/composer/ensemble name/orchestra name to: artist list. I have ripped using Windows Media Player versions 10-12 to lossless .wma. This format allows excellent metadata control and produces very high quality. Check out the article on Musichi about pros/cons of the digital formats when using their system. Not finding the link at the moment. Just started with the Musichi Player - retiring WMP at last. Importantly, the player is tied in perfectly with the Musichi suite. It supports asio and wasapi. I think it is a vast improvement over WMP or anything else I've tried. If you're using Musichi, I think it only makes sense to use their player. The suite includes a library app that uses a local database (all major suite functions are isolated into separate apps - great idea!). A little confusing at first but ever so worth figuring out. Note use of library manager is not necessary since all metadata including art is stored in the audio files. The library has an excellent cover art manager, among other benefits. There is a network limitation with the library manager. The library file (uses firebird database) must store its database file locally. Network read of db file is not permitted so mapped drive or offline files won't work for library. My install is on a wired network and so I use syncing software (Second copy) to keep this single firebird db file consistent. Don't use a true NAS. All audio files are stored in a shared folder on an extra hard drive installed in the Windows server. The ethernet is GB and so it works very well. A non-OS hard drive is perfect when there is a wired network. Good luck :-)

Hi Alpina. I had a pretty large collection (lots of Beethoven) that was losslessly ripped. Previously relying on Win7, Media Player 12. Struggled to find an alternate organizer for ages -install/give up/uninstall... and the just the other day discovered Musicchi. I have finally achieved true classical music happiness! The software runs perfectly on an old version of Windows small business server. It was so, so easy to correct all of the messed up metadata, with the results imbedded. If you like sorting and categories (I do), the app shows the music any way you like with a perfectly designed interface. Ridiculously easy to customize. So far I've only used Tagger (magnificent app) and the Player. Suddenly its really easy to sort out which pieces are great and which aren't. Previously I wasn't even sure what we had on the hard drive versus the CD collection. Now it mirrors perfectly and gives full control. What can I say? Went from hating PC/music interfaces to simply cueing up and enjoying, enjoying, enjoying!