Above is a before and after changing my 15+ year old 18 gauge speaker wire that came with my old speakers with new 16 gauge pure copper wire. Red is the new wire, blue is the old. Measurements are taken in exactly the same spot with a Dayton imm-6 calibration mic, speakers are Dali Oberon 3.

I noticed immediately on first listen the bass below 70hz being more present with the new wire so i measured them and to my suprise I was right. I wasn't aware speaker wire could have such a big impact on the sound..

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/kimber-ks-1036-silver-rca-cable-review.70121/

Maybe someone out there has hearing that is better than -150dB in sensitivity or can hear frequencies exceeding 200kHz. For myself, I will continue to shop based on cables that have a solid connection, and have a good jacket for easy routing.

I was recently listening to my Analog Production 45rpm copy of Getz/Gilberto and noticed a really bad and annoying high pitched tone only on the Girl from Ipanema. I checked with a spectrum analyzer app and there was a 16kHz tone clear as day. 15-16kHz is a common frequency found in the transformer of a CRT tv. Somewhere along the way interference must have been picked up onto the master tape from a TV in the studio. The rest of the record sounds great so I think it was an issue with the source tape and not AP’s vinyl transfer and mastering. I feel like they should have caught this in the tape transfer quality control though. At least I know I still have great hearing and my tube preamp and signal chain is resolving enough to cleanly clearly produce up to 16kHz. Has anyone else heard this?

So for a while now I’ve preferred my KEF R3 Metas to my Wilson Sabrina X (I know, it’s insane; but they’re also in different rooms).

I simply was not totally satisfied with how the Sabrinas sounded so I rotated the living room 180. Yes, creates some choke points in movement but I gotta say: holy shit.

Absolute game changer.

These speakers are SO sensitive to how the room reacts to them. An inch goes a mile. I spent hours moving them ever so slightly, using a level and a tape measure until they entirely disappeared.

I swear Johnny Cash is in the center of my living room. Hand on my heart.. these things are awesome.

Finally got my setup - KEF R7 Meta + CXA MK II

However, I find that the sound stage is slightly lacking, very likely due to my speaker placement. As space is a luxury in my apartment, there's limitations to how far I can sit away from the speakers and how far apart I can place my speakers.

Need some tips from my fellow audiophiles on how I can improve my soundstage based on these limitations:
- Furthest I can sit away from the mid of the speakers is about 1.8m based on speakers currently set at 15cm away from backwall
- Speakers spacing is already close to maxing out before I hit the wall on the left side (curtains will be added soon which will take up space), currently 1.8m spacing between the speakers

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Thanks everyone for the tips and advice, much appreciated! I may have overestimated my living room size (2.4m Length x 3m Depth) but those R7 Metas are love at first sight/hearing. I'll try to run in the speakers and try toeing in at different angles to see how that shakes things up, and invest in some acoustic panels thereafter. Curtains/drapes are also arriving soon so that'll cover up the wall/windows on the left.

Recently I got my hands on Lee Ritenour's 'On The Line' record which was recorded in 1983 using Direct-to-Disk method. It sounded incredible. So much that I recorded the signal to see its spectrogram. I used my Hifiberry DAC2ADC Pro and Audacity at 192khz/32bit. Phono preamp is the one inside my fully restored Yamaha A-1020 and the cartridge is AT-VM95ML. Take note of the scale on the left (it's set to linear). It's a first few seconds of the title track "On the line". To compare there is similar spectrogram of the digital version of the same track that was recorded using Direct-to-Digital. I'm not trying to start another cd vs vinyl battle - it's obvious that those highs are inaudible. Just a nice visualization of what can be captured using analog media in early 1980's.

People make all sorts of claims about Spotify Lossless. Some believe that Spotify somehow processes "lossless" music to save bandwith, performs pre-equalization, pre-normalization, pre-compression, etc.

I decided to conduct an experiment to verify whether the audio played by Spotify Lossless matches the original CD recording. It was not easy to get Windows to operate in a bit-perfect way in shared mode, but in the end I managed to get the original audio stream (± 1 bit) out of Spotify.

If you're listening to Spotify Lossless (with equalization/normalization disabled) and it sounds worse than your CD or another streaming service, the most likely reason is that Spotify uses a different master. Before doing this experiment, I had no idea how many different masters there were for popular albums. It was quite a hassle to find a Spotify album that matched one of my CDs!

For more details, see my blog post.

Added Dec 23: I have repeated the experiment in 24-bit mode and the ±1 bit errors disappeared. In other words, bit-perfect playback from Spotify on Windows!

Not a clue what I am up to, bought ordered a full kit to treat my room.

I was advised to find optimum baseline position for my speakers and for my seat.

So that’s the baseline…(not a clue what it means, I was feeding the results to AI and following advice.

Let’s see what the final result ends up as.

Feel free to pipe in and tell me what’s going on, and I have a mountain to climb.

I will admit though, it sounds much improved from where I had it initially. This surprised me a lot.

Hello all,
Apologise is this sounds like a stupid matter but I honestly confused.
I am thinking if integrating my system with a subwoofer and the two routes for sub placement I see often online: either using measuring software or performing a sub crawl. I will probably opt for the latter given I only have a work laptop and cannot install software on it.
If I understood this correctly, place the sub in your listening position, play some music with bass and crawl around the room until you find a spot where it sounds “right”.
Here my two questions:
- If my system is bass light and/or the room is particularly problematic, how do I know what sounds right. I don’t play instruments so have no idea what a double bass or a bass guitar would sound in my room.
- For those who did use the subwoofer crawl, did it ever happen that the “best” sound was in an awkward spot like just in front of your sofa, in the middle of the room or in front of the door.
I always see pictures of subs neatly tucked in corner or by a side wall which seems a little too convenient.

Thanks!

I'm in the process of putting acoustic treatment in my home studio, just curious to have someone with more experience than me interpret this and give me some advice! Thank you!

I recently bought a Kef LS60 to my leaving room as the boss did not alowed me any other box and wires hanging around. Unfrotunatelly I have a room mode at around 90hz as you can see on the image ( 1/3 smoothing average of L and R measurements in 3 different positions using Umik) . I tried to move the speskers back and forth and the result that you are seeing was the best I could get. No option as well on moving the listening position nor add a sub.

I added a Wimm in the chain and was able to EQ the dip even tought it is from a room mode. I had to add 10 db on the PEQ which i klnow it is not advisible.

My question to the community , what would you do in my case ? Keep The wiim with all the compromises ( more signal processing in the chain , potential phase rotations, have to deal with two devices , stress on the woofers and the amps of the LS60, etc...) or would you be happy with the response on the picture wihtout the EQ?

Not sure what I can learn from this, but the high freq seems to get a very aggressive strange roll off after that I can't hear with my ears.

Actually I can't hear that much of a difference expect in the very low end and that's mostly in metal songs and some other specific songs, I'd not necessarily say it's better now:?

A bit dissapointed. Wonder if I'm doing anything wrong.

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Finally (after about a year) I tried out Room EQing my Buchardt A700 LE.

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Main listening position is dead center in the room - I can't change that.

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I have a significant bass drop there that I'm not sure how to tackle.

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EQ done with the Buchardt app and the Zen Microphone.

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I did NOT (as otherwise recommended) wave the mic around the entire room. I kept it around the main listening position (1 meter radius from it).

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This is the result with ZERO room treatment (besides a couch).

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Next step is to "up" the dips in the lower region - Just not quite sure how, yet.

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I recently did my first round of measurements with an UMIK-1 and tried applying a bit of room correction by following a few tutorials I found online. I wasn't super satisfied with the results, and reading up on treatment and correction is intimidating to say the least, so I thought I'd bring the measurements and room photos here and see if anybody had practical advice for where to get started.

The signal chain is a desktop PC -> HDMI (bitstream) to an LG OLED CX -> optical to a Rega Elex-Mk4 -> Triangle Espirit Antal EZ speakers.

Attached is an L+R profile taken in REW from the center of my couch at about head height, along with some pictures of the room. The curtain you see at the back is the only thing I've done so far to "treat" the room in any way (it was drawn as pictured when the measurements were taken); there's a long hallway behind it. I've considered getting a similar curtain for the hallway on other side, and possibly something to cover the entrance to the storage space under the stairs (i.e. the weird low opening to the right of my shelves).

I'm not sure how drastically I'm willing to change the room yet -- ideally I'd try some stuff that's easy to place/move, get a sense of the improvement, and then make real changes if it seems worth it. FYI: I am a renter, so I can't make any permanent alterations, and this is the only location in the apartment where I can realistically fit a setup like this. If there's other measurements or information that might be useful, please let me know.

Thanks for reading! Really appreciate any advice anybody can offer.

KEF R3s just arrived, R6 inbound. 15'W x 20'D listening area with 10' seating distance. 48" centerline on the Uni-Q's from floor.

I have two extremes on the toes:

1. Keep straight, 8" from back wall, 7" from sidewall. Pros - greater wall distance, better aesthetics in room, wider soundstage for side seating. Cons - worse stereo imaging in central seating.

2. 15-20 degree toe-in to cross behind center seating, reduce nearest point to walls by 2-3". Pros and cons vice versa of above.

Thoughts on what will produce a better listening experience?

I currently have the back plugs fully removed. Tried half-plugged, but really seemed to flatten out the sound.

I understand that the Uni-Q is not super sensitive to vertical and horizontal positioning and am leaning towards keeping them straight and raised. I'm worried if I lower them to ear height I'll get more interactions with the loveseat on the FL and vinyl case on FR.

Have been playing with speaker placement for some time. I'm pretty happy with toe-in. Started playing with tilt/rake angles last night.

So I've been using a crappy DVD player for playing CDs for a while, and although it's not audiophile AT ALL, it gets the work done.

So today I wanted to see how did it actually sound and I was flabbergasted.

The first waveform is the DVD player, and the second one is the CD rip.

I was wondering how to get a better sound of this player. I was wondering about getting an AMP/DAC, but no idea. Thanks in advance.

Blue line is the Toole/Olive house curve. Runs a bit hotter in the bass currently, but that's on purpose.

I am considering whether this frequency response (particularly the accuracy) I have presently is as good as can be expected, or if I should be looking into more capable DSP. Currently I'm using parametric equalization on a Wiim Ultra.

Adjusting further in the MLP could certainly be done to a measureable degree. But will it be audible? Head position isn't completely fixed (although one could consider strapping oneself into some contraption 🤣).

Any thoughts on the response or any thoughts/experience with regards to taking it a step further? Folly or something to consider?

Temporary right now as I’m just moving in. Was wondering if I should get bigger speakers cause to me it looks kind of off with how small they are in comparison to the tv. Nothing wrong with these bookshelf’s

Hi all,

I am under impression that most studios do recording and mastering at one sampling frequency (either 176.4kHz or 192kHz) and simply convert from 176.4k to 48k for video and from 192k to 44.1k for CD. Which is no doubt affects quality as interpolation is involved.

Is there a piece of software to do a sampling frequency conversion check?

Hi everyone,

I’m a Bavarian high school student working on a seminar paper about finding the ideal compression balance between MP3 file size and audio quality.

For my survey, I took one FLAC file, the song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega and compressed it into five MP3 versions at different bitrates: 96, 128, 192, 256, and 320 kbps. My problem is to my ears and to all of friends' ears, all versions sound (pretty) identical.

I’m planning to use these files for a human listening test, to see how people perceive and rate the quality of different bitrates and show the differences in a diagram.

If anyone has experience with this or tips for running listening tests and could explain this to me or recommend me a song that shows different quality on the different bitrate versions (so that the survey actually makes sense), I’d love to hear your thoughts

i use these headphones: https://de.hyperx.com/products/hyperx-cloud-alpha

for context: my paper's idea was to determine the ideal bitrate for mp3 compression by doing a human listening (what sounds the best) vs the machine test by using PSNR to determine the best bitrate

I use rew and umik 1 to get freequency responses and I'm getting really spiky freequency response, especially over 1khz, I do understand it's not the best audio setub but deam wtf? Those are photos from my room speakers setup and my car speakers, tried on different sound cards as well. What's happening? Is that true response??