I was out on my push bike ride, a good time for the mind to wander, and I started to think about all of those times in my HiFi life when I was surprised; when I challenged my prejudices and ended up with a better system
Here are a few from my history:
CD - I stuck with LPs for years, digital was nasty - until I found that I couldn’t afford the LP front end that could keep up with the rapid improvements in CD
Interconnects - Wire?! Couldn’t possibly make a difference - until I stumped up GBP80.00 (a lot of money for me back in the '80s) on a pair of Chords, sale or return - I didn’t return them
PC audio - far too noisy for audio - until I found my PC was actually better than my Mark Levinson Reference Transport/DAC - and I sold it
Room Correction - all that messing with the signal, can only make it sound distorted, unnatural - until I got my TacT 2.2x. Blimey!
Power cables - that is just insane - Oh…
Streaming - it’s simply not possible for it to sound as good as my local SSD - ah, wrong again
That’s quite an evolution of thought. Perhaps I should get a push bike.
The arc of my audio history is similar to yours, although with a generally lower budget. Biggest surprise for me was what happens to a system after room treatments bring the RT60 down to ~300ms. Why did I wait decades to do this??!
The screen grabs remind me very much of the TacT (pre Lyngdorf) system, late noughties. 2008/09 I bought one (I still use it on my work-PC rig). That was run on a PC; with a cable going to the 2.2x. The PC produced the multi-tonal sweeps and then you could see the room profile on the PC.
There were then pre-defined curves you could apply - or you could create your own curve, adding and removing points (a bit like [Edit Points] in ppt).
Even a pretty grunty PC used to take several minutes to calculate the correction profile which was then downloaded to the pre-Amp
It was very tailorable; you could create all sorts of free-form curves, saving 9 in the amp, I think - but invariably (and perhaps unsurprisingly) the standard curves were the best overall.
It was great fun, and worked a treat.
The Lyngdorf Room Perfect system is now integrated and has become much faster, but it’s lost the tweeking factor - beyond a few ‘voice’ options e.g. ‘Normal’, ‘Bass’ or ‘Music’
Yeah, modern digital is absolutely wonderful. It can be abused by the mixing/mastering engineer, but when done right, is absolutely stunning. Transparent beyond my hearing capabilities .
Oh yeah, the dogma we kept hearing about keeping the signal as “pure” as possible. Well, you can keep the signal pure, only to have the speaker + room acoustics mess it up, or as you & I have discovered, apply a bit of room correction to clean things up!
I just spent several days going back to basics; very carefully getting my Quads, seating position and diffusers right, no room correction, no bass speakers. Masking tape on the floor; move, listen, change, sleep on it (repeat)
It was sounding great and without the RP option I would have lived with it, I even thought maybe I should consider going to a normal DAC/Amp - but applying correction suddenly snapped everything into focus
I was re-stunned - like the mullet I was the first time
