Hi everyone,
A huge thank you to Magnus and everyone here that has contributed to this wonderful thread. I can only encourage anyone reading this thread that is on the fence to take the dive and give this a try.
I am not blessed with high-end equipment and I feel that in the world of mid-Fi is where this can be of most benefit. I purchased Roon Lifetime two months ago, still somewhat staggered that I did so and somewhat nervousness to have made such a financial commitment. That was until I purchased the UMIK and experiment as so many have done above.
I actually prefer to enter the bands manually within the Parametric EQ in Roon rather than export multiple convolution files. Maybe I simply like the pretty graph in Roon…
I am listening now in my office to an ancient Marantz 2225 and some (what should be awful) Goodmans M100’s. Yes I have a crazy 11 Peak adjustment bands activated. My main take-away from all of this is not to suck the life out of a speaker and take away any character, but to give the drivers an opportunity to perform and display what they are capable of by dealing with limitations that are present in your setup.
In my case these limitations that I’m addressing are 1) the speakers are on my desk, close to the wall, 2) the likely very poor speaker crossover that may not be allowing for smooth mid to treble transition, 3) native undesirable driver characteristics of the drivers themselves, and 4) my seemingly unwillingness to use sub woofers (somehow I can’t get my brain to accept sounds that I know are not being presented by the primary speakers I am listening to).
With the limitations above, largely any EQ adjustment boils down to compensating for room and speaker placement, speaker cabinet resonances, and bottom-end adjustment to achieve a flat response down to 50Hz.
Audiophile talk time? Nah. All I’ll say is that it has made my speakers ‘disappear’. The only thing I’ve changed from the original REW results is making the high frequency fall a bit stepper at 1.0db/octave, instead of the original 0.5db.
Now, regarding the $699 cost of Roon and the $75 UMIK. Such is the enjoyment I am now experiencing with my existing equipment in my office, I will be performing the same exercise in my living room. This means that I’m 90% sure I’ll be streaming only from now on via Roon, selling all of my vinyl, CD’s and associated equipment. I am going to be thousands of dollars better off. I’m tired of trying all of the equipment to get the sound I like and am so happy to have this digital adjustment come to the fore and be the revelation that it is. I like many others was concerned about the ‘true to source’ issues with applying conversion to the original file/stream. It must add some noise along the way, but my god, the benefits absolutely stomp on any (inaudible) quality concerns.
What’s the opposite of a rant? Like a positive rant. A ramble I guess. Apologies for this ramble, and the messy room. Yes that old ThinkCentre is my Core - I’ll move it to the garage soon.
Have a great day and enjoy the gear you have.
Mike