Jeff In San Diego

I've been away so long...not sure its appropriate for me to be welcoming new members, but hey, here goes anyway. Anybody who would wake up this "best thread ever" is OK in my book. Welcome! And thanks so much for introducing me to this artist I had not met before: Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/tsuyoshi-yamamoto-trio-misty/id339920009 To you and everyone else...more like this????? Absolutely love small piano group jazz that is well recorded. (and I'm on that rarified fringe of folks here who can and do enjoy the best of what's available on iTunes. )

If your listening room is quite small then I think some room treatments to get rid of first reflections might be just the ticket. Unlike bass traps and other types of room treatments, absorption strategically located to dampen mid and high freqs bouncing off nearby walls and back to listening chair can be quite small and inexpensive. Maybe not as "sexy" of an upgrade as a new pair of speakers...but much less expensive.

...listening to music is NOT bad for you! I'm not sure I can name anything else with such a low potential for harm and high enjoyment. it doesn't harm the planet it doesn't make you fat it doesn't promote any social diseases that I know of the wars that it engenders are typically only words very few governments in the world attempt to prevent it ...yeah, I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm just saying!

Keep in mind that the depth you seek may not even exist in the recordings you're using. For example, any recording that was "close mic'ed" (such as microphones on each part of a drum kit and microphones stuffed down inside a piano, etc.)...there just isn't any depth information in the recording. The left-to-right "soundstage" that you hear on such a recording is "fake". It is concocted by the mixing engineer. Only a very "low tech" recording with a small number of microphones intelligently placed will have good authentic sound staging. Unfortunately, the percentage of properly recorded music is very tiny. The percentage goes down as you approach modern day. It also varies widely depending on your preferred type of music.

Well, I finally bested my previous cheapest way to improve the SQ of my "system" That previous way was with some incredibly ugly but very effective physical (i.e. not digital) room correction (and re-arrangement). That made more difference than thousands of dollars worth of new equipment would have. Well, I feel I have done that again...only this time it was even less expensive and made perhaps an even bigger difference. This time I focused on the very last part of the audio chain that I can improve...acoustical coupling between the air and the transducers. No, not THOSE transducers. I'm talking about the ones I got for free when I was born. My ears. For a couple of weeks I've been not even bothering to listen to my audio system because following a brief cold, my ears were stopped up and nothing I had tried (including patience and an entire box of q-tips -- ear buds to you Britts) had made any improvement at all. So I called up a few ear doctors and found that they all had several week wait lists to get an appointment. Drat! Then I googled it and discovered that an entire avenue of personal hygiene had completely escaped me for an entire half century. It turns out there is "stuff" out there that one can easily and cheaply acquire to quickly and thoroughly clean out ones own ears. Who knew? I went to the local drugstore and picked up some "Debrox". It is some oily stuff you put a few drops of in your ear. You wait a little while and then you "vigorously" use the supplied rubber squeeze-ball-syringe thing to dislodge the crud with warm water. Oh the humanity! The stuff that came out of there! Not for those with a weak constitution. By the end I was fully convinced there was gray matter coming out in the sink as there couldn't possibly have been room for that much earwax. At one point I pulled out an old sneaker that went missing a couple years back, and what looked like a small rodent out of the other one. Needless to say, my "old guy hearing" did not just improve to pre-cold levels. I still look like an old fart, but damn! I can hear now! And oh, the glorious improvement in the sound of my audio system. I HIGHLY recommend this. While I'm not properly equipped to test the theory, I suspect this one even has a very high WAF. I would welcome war stories of what others have dislodged when they've tried this. Spare no gory details! Also very interested to hear (pun intended, of course) of any other similarly priced things you've done to improve your listening enjoyment.

This has puzzled me as well. Not sure I'm right, but where my thoughts on the matter wound up was that if you are looking at the results of a graph that shows frequency response measured and plotted point for point for a large number of frequencies from a frequency sweep (as with most of the response curves shown in this thread), then white noise should read as flat. To put this another way, apply X volts to the inputs of the amplifier at 20 hz and measure the output from the microphone and graph it. Then apply X volts to the input at 21 hz and measure the output from the mic and graph that. Rinse and repeat. An alternative to this would be to apply white noise and measure the microphone output with a very high Q filter moving across the freq. spectrum. If on the other hand you are looking at one of the many apps that shows a bar for each 1/3 octave, where the bars dynamically change over time, constantly showing you the current average power for each 1/3 octave, then you should supply pink noise to the system to see a flat RTA curve. In this way, each 1/3 octave bar is being excited by an equal amount of energy. Of course this RTA assessment assumes that your app is applying a perfect 1/3 octave filter for each bar it displays. This idealized assumption may vary in accuracy across the frequency spectrum. Another measurement approach I've seen is to apply an impulse (one cycle of a square wave) to the system and then measure its response and calculate a theoretical frequency response based on this very short measurement. This method (perhaps inappropriately) tosses out interesting room effects like bass modes and comb filtering. It makes for a very "pretty" graph that makes one feel good about their alleged system response and can certainly aid in improving some of the aspects of a system's sound...but may lead one to an inaccurate assessment of their "room correction". (since as I understand it, it intentionally ignores some important aspects of the influence of the room itself) These are just my own thoughts based on the reading I've done. I would very much welcome being corrected by some of the many experts hiding in the folds of this forum.

Not too surprising that this thread has started out all about frequency response... ...but what about impulse response and phase response? I have often wondered what changes one might see in the time-based measurements of a system when digital "room correction" is applied to flatten the frequency response.

That's for bogarting my avatar!

Forgive me for straying from the topic and not commenting on religion...but I have a thought about marketing pages on sales websites. I rather think I would buy ALL of my gear from a company with the huevos and integrity to put an unmoderated comments section at the end of every page that has Marketing on it. If we could call BULL-S**T right there where it happens, then the company would be more likely to avoid BS. I would even be just fine with a company that had two sets of marketing pages...one like the above for us objective, propeller-headed nullifidians; and another one for you other people.

-- I'm carefully replying to the whole thread with this rather than any one comment so that we (myself included) can all be equally insulted by it... ...oh sweet irony...this thread is called "Civility"

Chis decided to close a recent "yet another cable thread". Those of us who posted to the thread can't help but wonder if it was our post that "put it over the edge". It would be easy to take the closure personally. As a former moderator of a huge RV related forum, I have some experience with just how thankless the job of moderator can be. I would say that for an area of interest that is so deeply steeped in "opinion", this place is remarkably civil. No doubt that is due in no small part to the excellent moderation. Thanks Chris. That said, I found myself surprised that this particular thread got closed when it it did. Seems to have touched a nerve for you Chris. While I fully support your decision to close it...I would invite some more explanation of what moved you to close it when you did. If those of us who post the most often know what crosses the line for you we can do our best to avoid pushing it too far. For me, a thread "jumps the shark" when it looses sight of the topic and moves over into "ad hominem" "arguments" that call into question the sanity or intelligence of the OP or another poster...rather than discussing the product or its company. What was the "last straw" for you on this one?

I would offer that "Magnetic Conduction" is highly effective...at selling cables to people who buy expensive cables. As such, it should not be viewed as "bullshit". It is marketing. Any attempt to conflate the output of a marketing department with reality should be strictly avoided. As an Engineer, it has been my "pleasure" to associate with many a marketing person over the course of 3 decades in a variety of different high-tech fields. As a group, they have a very strong grasp on reality...the reality that pseudo-science (i.e. fake science) sells much more effectively than real science.

Actually the confusion you are experiencing comes from trying to use your American parser on a different language (English). I suffered the same failure, but quickly realized that since he used the string "learnt" (which is a word in the English language, but not in the American language), he probably was using the phrase "lifetime spend" as it is used in the English language as a properly formed past-tense noun referring to the total money you spent over the course of your lifetime (American translation of his proper English prose). I won't fault him for his English...but I will fault him for making me feel like I'm at work (bunch of darned English speaking Indians there). Bloody good English, but annoying all the same. He also invited me to do some math (or maths in English). Thanks once again for making me feel like I'm at work. I don't do math at work, but I am frequently confronted with people who are inviting me to do math, which is almost as bad.

Love this. No doubt somebody will come back and say that you run the risk of getting to the end of your lifetime never really knowing whether or not you enjoyed the music.

To paraphrase a popular bumer-sticker...save a cow; eat an audiophile. Actually, I'm guilty of leaving mine on 24/7. I have two very good reasons for that... ...I'm lazy and impatient.