Burn out - and finding the joy in Quad again

[jimfisheye]

There are a number of professional quality audio interfaces on the market with pro quality ADCs. This gear isn't "$1000 a channel or nothing" anymore. Stay away from the HDMI and rca connector stuff on Amazon. This is ratty cheap stuff. There's nothing wrong with rca connectors for unbalanced audio, mind you. There's everything wrong with the Amazon products in question! MOTU, Focusrite, & Tascam interfaces are all very pro quality and will better most AVR products. RME if you want to spend a bit more.

You can make the interface the center hub of the sound system and have the ability to do AD transfers at full studio quality. (As best as any of your analog gear delivers at any rate.)

Heck, this Behringer/Midas UMC1820 USB interface is on sale at Sweetwater right now for $279. 8 Midas mic pres (which you might not need) but they double as 8 line inputs (combo jacks). 10 analog output channels (balanced or unbalanced). Good to go up to 7.1.2 or 5.1.4 or anything up to 10 channels.
You'd patch in unbalanced 1/4" from old school analog line out gear. If some of that has rca connectors, grab some rca to 1/4" cables to patch it in.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...rface?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organicpla

 

[ssully]

For most rooms I fail to see the need for EQ DSP. I like the sound of my rooms just fine the way they are! I don't think that DSP can do much with an overly reverberant room. Soft furnishings or sound deadening panels could help in that case. Likewise I don't think that time delay is necessary, you set it up for your sweet spot but make it worse everywhere else! I do like to digitize my collection but more for convenience and so that I don't wear out my albums as I often did in the past. Of coarse it's different when you have thousands of albums compared to say fifty, obviously any particular album does not get played nearly as often!

Room correction isn't for fixing reverberation, things like flutter echo. It's for correcting room-induced distortions of the recorded EQ* at the listening position and can operate across the spectrum, particularly the bass, where soundpanels and furniture won't help. It can also, of course, be correcting for loudspeakers that don't have a flat response to begin with. But modern room EQ can be limited to bass frequencies if messing with the treble bother you.

If your listening position sounds great to you as is, that's fortunate, but you probably shouldn't ever measure then...you might be shocked at what the actual frequency response looks like there.


*setting correct delays and levels is also critical, but that's usually considered part of calibration rather than room EQ per se. As to your idea about setting delay makes it worse for everywhere else ....for what system choice *isn't* that true? (The only actual exception is, ironically enough, room EQ -- where DSP actually tries to reduce sound variance across seats). Also, do you place your speakers haphazardly? Of course not, you probably already place them to try to be equidistant from your listening position...as your speaker manufacturer undoubtedly recommends. That's all delay is ensuring too...and usually better. (Note that often center speakers aren't placed correctly, people tend to place their front face in the same plane as the front left and right speaker faces, which makes the center acoustically *closer* than the L/R to the listener. Delay setting correct this too).

Sounds arriving at notably different times from different channels, when they weren't intentionally mixed to do so, is certainly not 'high fidelity'.

 

[ssully]

There are a number of professional quality audio interfaces on the market with pro quality ADCs. This gear isn't "$1000 a channel or nothing" anymore. Stay away from the HDMI and rca connector stuff on Amazon. This is ratty cheap stuff. There's nothing wrong with rca connectors for unbalanced audio, mind you. There's everything wrong with the Amazon products in question! MOTU, Focusrite, & Tascam interfaces are all very pro quality and will better most AVR products. RME if you want to spend a bit more.

You can make the interface the center hub of the sound system and have the ability to do AD transfers at full studio quality. (As best as any of your analog gear delivers at any rate.)

Heck, this Behringer/Midas UMC1820 USB interface is on sale at Sweetwater right now for $279. 8 Midas mic pres (which you might not need) but they double as 8 line inputs (combo jacks). 10 analog output channels (balanced or unbalanced). Good to go up to 7.1.2 or 5.1.4 or anything up to 10 channels.
You'd patch in unbalanced 1/4" from old school analog line out gear. If some of that has rca connectors, grab some rca to 1/4" cables to patch it in.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...rface?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organicpla

But to use an AVR's DSP features, with all the modern convenience that brings, you need to get a multichannel signal into it via a digital connection. That's HDMI for all intents and purposes.

I'm kinda losing track on what is trying to be achieved here.

 

[tonyE]

There are a number of professional quality audio interfaces on the market with pro quality ADCs. This gear isn't "$1000 a channel or nothing" anymore. Stay away from the HDMI and rca connector stuff on Amazon. This is ratty cheap stuff. There's nothing wrong with rca connectors for unbalanced audio, mind you. There's everything wrong with the Amazon products in question! MOTU, Focusrite, & Tascam interfaces are all very pro quality and will better most AVR products. RME if you want to spend a bit more.

You can make the interface the center hub of the sound system and have the ability to do AD transfers at full studio quality. (As best as any of your analog gear delivers at any rate.)

Heck, this Behringer/Midas UMC1820 USB interface is on sale at Sweetwater right now for $279. 8 Midas mic pres (which you might not need) but they double as 8 line inputs (combo jacks). 10 analog output channels (balanced or unbalanced). Good to go up to 7.1.2 or 5.1.4 or anything up to 10 channels.
You'd patch in unbalanced 1/4" from old school analog line out gear. If some of that has rca connectors, grab some rca to 1/4" cables to patch it in.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...rface?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organicpla

I got quite a few DACs.... and a three AD/DACs.

Last year I got an RME ADI2 Pro FS R... this replaces the M-Audio Profire 610. Both hooked up as "digital tape decks" on my preamp.

Never looking back! The money is well spent, even as I barely use the features of the RME, it's AD and DA converters are worth the price of admission.

Now, for the AD... it works fantastic... Eons ago I found out that 24/96 is the entry level for a reasonable facsimile of my LPs. As my turntable/preamp got better and as the AD converters got better, the bar kept being raised.. except for one little thing:

Everytime I tweak the turntable... well, time to re-record everything?

So, pretty much, I've decided that I might play with some LPs. The rest, kept cleaned with a VPI HW16.5, good LP hygiene and not playing them twice within 24 hours seem to be keep my LPs in very fine shape.. many are over 40 years old by now.

For DACs... I got a NuForce DDA100 and DDA120. Those are interesting little beasts. You can get them reasonably cheap on the Internet. I drive them off the USB.. 50 watts of PWM amplification. Very interesting and extremely good sounding.

 

[jimfisheye]

Careful with the room correction eq and all that too. You might discover that some coloring from the room isn't that bad vs the eq processing. Wrong distances and then correcting with delays? Don't. You might get the sweet spot sort of dialed in but now everything else is even further out.

 

[par4ken]

Room correction isn't for fixing reverberation, things like flutter echo. It's for correcting room-induced distortions of the recorded EQ* at the listening position and can operate across the spectrum, particularly the bass, where soundpanels and furniture won't help. It can also, of course, be correcting for loudspeakers that don't have a flat response to begin with. But modern room EQ can be limited to bass frequencies if messing with the treble bother you.

If your listening position sounds great to you as is, that's fortunate, but you probably shouldn't ever measure then...you might be shocked at what the actual frequency response looks like there.


*setting correct delays and levels is also critical, but that's usually considered part of calibration rather than room EQ per se. As to your idea about setting delay makes it worse for everywhere else ....for what system choice *isn't* that true? (The only actual exception is, ironically enough, room EQ -- where DSP actually tries to smooth out the difference between seats). Also, do you place your speakers haphazardly? Of course not, you probably already place them to try to be equidistant from your listening position...as your speaker manufacturer undoubtedly recommends. That's all delay is ensuring too...and usually better. (Note that often center speakers aren't placed correctly, people tend to place their front face in the same plane as the front left and right speaker faces, which makes the center acoustically *closer* than the L/R to the listener. Delay setting correct this too).

Sounds arriving at notably different times from different channels, when they weren't intentionally mixed to do so, is certainly not 'high fidelity'.

I don't like nor use a centre speaker. Considering that the music that I like to listen to was mostly made from multi track masters with the different tracks recorded at different times, correcting time delays is a moot point. Often I don't sit in the sweet spot but the sound is great nonetheless! In short your DSP room correction might be right for you but is a complete waste of time (for myself) as far as I'm concerned!

 

[ssully]

Careful with the room correction eq and all that too. You might discover that some coloring from the room isn't that bad vs the eq processing. Wrong distances and then correcting with delays? Don't. You might get the sweet spot sort of dialed in but now everything else is even further out.

How is 'everything else' not further out too if your self-chosen distances (which sets 'delay') are off?

And again distance measurement -- and adjusting delays accordingly -- isn't room EQ. It's preparatory to that, and simply doing more accurately what listeners usually try to do anyway. You can do such calibration WITHOUT employing room EQ after, because it is fundamentally useful.

 

[ssully]

I don't like nor use a centre speaker. Considering that the music that I like to listen to was mostly made from multi track masters with the different tracks recorded at different times, correcting time delays is a moot point.

Hardly. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, but I'm not going to bother.

Often I don't sit in the sweet spot but the sound is great nonetheless! In short your DSP room correction might be right for you but is a complete waste of time (for myself) as far as I'm concerned!

Yeah, I know, there is a lot of, uh, variety in how people set up and use their systems on this board.

 

[Soundfield]

Careful with the room correction eq and all that too. You might discover that some coloring from the room isn't that bad vs the eq processing. Wrong distances and then correcting with delays? Don't. You might get the sweet spot sort of dialed in but now everything else is even further out.

Agreed. I always thought that in a domestic setting room EQ was pretty much a con. However much you modify the signal to the loudspeakers, the characteristic behaviour of the room of course actually remains unchanged. Establishing a flat EQ curve only makes sense if you are playing back a recording also made in flat acoustic. Otherwise you should be attempting to produce the inverse of the curve of the environment for each recording. But of course no one knows what that was. It’s a bit like applying heavy makeup – sure it smooths everything out – but does it make you look more real? No, just more artificial.

 

[ssully]

Agreed. I always thought that in a domestic setting room EQ was pretty much a con. However much you modify the signal to the loudspeakers, the characteristic behaviour of the room of course actually remains unchanged. Establishing a flat EQ curve only makes sense if you are playing back a recording also made in flat acoustic. Otherwise you should be attempting to produce the inverse of the curve of the environment for each recording.

er...no. Just no.

But of course no one knows what that was. It’s a bit like applying heavy makeup – sure it smooths everything out – but does it make you look more real? No, just more artificial.

Le sigh.

 

[Sonik Wiz]

In short your DSP room correction might be right for you but is a complete waste of time (for myself) as far as I'm concerned!

I've seen my son in laws set up a couple of new AVR systems each, and a friend with his snazzy new Anthem receiver. They un-box it, hook up speakers, and launch into automated speaker/EQ/ delay set up. My biggest concern about this is the user doesn't have any idea what the listening set up really sounds like. There might be bigger things to listen for & fix before letting auto-correct put a band aid on it.

When I was young & had lesser equipment & not great speakers I had a few multi-band equalizers that I thought improved the sound. By that I mean I added more boom & tizz. Eventually my goal was to get quality 'tronics, good speakers, and carefully set up the rooms so that I didn't need EQ trickery. I have done that a good long time ago. In my Anthem I can use SPDIF in to avail myself of all the bass/treble/decode modes that it offers. But from my Oppo that I use for FLAC files, or SACD, or DVD-A it goes into the pure analog inputs on the Anthem. No tone control or digital stuff. It allows me overall volume control & balance adjustments all in the analog domain. I am very happy with it & feel I am missing out on nothing that home theater AVR's offer.

Now then, I don't play Q8's or other sub-optimal sources. Maybe an analog Laserdisc sometimes. Then I just have to mentally adjust and listen through the noise.

 

[kap'n krunch]

AOQ,
DON'T LET IT BRING YOU DOWN!!!!
I was watching a space program series "Why we left Earth" in which one of the astronauts stated the main philosophy about being an astronaut..."You don't become an astronaut to play it SAFE!"... ¡olé!

We all know vintage equipment is going to be problematic... and we forge on!
I have my beloved Technics linear tracking TT which I ADORE..
It has given me headaches but I don't care cause the thing is 40 years old!

 

[timothyemerson]

Agreed. I always thought that in a domestic setting room EQ was pretty much a con. However much you modify the signal to the loudspeakers, the characteristic behaviour of the room of course actually remains unchanged. Establishing a flat EQ curve only makes sense if you are playing back a recording also made in flat acoustic. Otherwise you should be attempting to produce the inverse of the curve of the environment for each recording. But of course no one knows what that was. It’s a bit like applying heavy makeup – sure it smooths everything out – but does it make you look more real? No, just more artificial.

For what it's worth, I was a Pure-Direct-guy-with-a-bit-of-bass-boost and VERY skeptical of what room correction (Audyssey in my case) could possibly do but one day, decided to run it and it made a significant improvement in terms of integrating the low frequencies with everything else.

Most of the time now, the sub is no longer "noticeable" (i.e., I can't hear the lows coming from the front left corner anymore). It's more "all-around", filling the room + hits low and hard which is what I want. I don't know how they does it, and Audyssey ain't gon' tell us EXACTLY what it's doing but in my room, by golly, it works.

I say "most of the time" because there's sometimes a combination of sounds (e.g., something high like a violin or female voice together with something low like a bowed double-bass or synth and nothing in between) where you can localise the sub. My guess is that the lows are either mixed to the LFE channel or bass management is sending them there. Either way, in those instances, I can pin-point the lows as coming from the front left corner. Doesn't happen much but it does happen.

I'm sure more could be done to improve things in my room (e.g., REW + Mini DSP / another sub) but that all makes for thousands of extra dollars and at the moment, I just think, "nah".

I ain't sayin' room correction is for every room /everyone but if you've got some spare time, it might be worth trying it out. You can always disable it if you don't like the result.

 

[mandrix]

AOQ only needs 4 inputs. Where did you find a quad RCA-to-HDMI converter?

I didn't. Where did I say that?

 

[~dave~~wave~]

A New Yorker Cartoon

 

[tonyE]

View attachment 76036

A New Yorker Cartoon

I AM NOT STUBBORN

I still have a Sony and a Pioneer LD and about 100 Laserdiscs.

There.

If you upset me any more I will throw the Discwasher at you!

 

[Dingo]

Gear chasing is a ' hobby '. Exploring the joys and richness of music past and present is a passion.

 

[madscot]

Thanks guys for allowing me to read your forum, I havent understood a word anyone says, I wish I could speak your language LOL

In case anyone wonders what i’m on about i’m a noobie and only use modern gear

 

[Beefalo]

Thanks guys for allowing me to read your forum, I havent understood a word anyone says, I wish I could speak your language LOL

In case anyone wonders what i’m on about i’m a noobie and only use modern gear

You aren't alone my friend

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Wow. So many misconceptions about room EQ in this thread. In this sea of audiophile hype I've waded through over the decades, room EQ is the one of the true advances in the hobby. FWIW, I too was once in denial about it as well, until I got serious with it and took the time to dial it in. By far it has made the biggest improvement in anything I have done, especially in the low end. It's on par with upgrading ones speakers.