7 ms·

Well, I'll take that guy's system over mine for sure. However....! For those unfamiliar with the hobby I'd like to mention something, however: you can have an

Well, I'll take that guy's system over mine for sure. However....! For those unfamiliar with the hobby I'd like to mention something, however: you can have an objectively very good system for not too much money. The research of (among others) Dr. Floyd Toole (formerly of Harman International) makes a very persuasive case that the "best" audio system is simply one that reproduces the input signal accurately, both on- and off-axis. There's no secret sauce, really. It's all in the measurements. This can be achieved rather affordably. Monitors from JBL (a Harman company) and Kali (former Harman engineers) such as the JBL 305/306/308 and competing models from Kali were built around these principles and accomplish this starting at prices of several hundred $USD. While formerly "audiophiles" were associated with snake oil and unlimited budgets, there are growing legions of those who subscribe to a more objectivist take on the hobby. https://www.audiosciencereview.com https://www.audiosciencereview.com (I have no affiliation) is one place to find such reviews and discussions. I'm not an expert but have been in the hobby for a while and would be happy to answer questions if anybody's had interest in the hobby but hasn't known where/how to get started.

smackeyacky 5y ago
The snake oil victims really turned me off conversing with other hi fi hobbyists. Pseudo-science about cables, ethernet hubs for audio, utter nonsense about jitter. Endless arguments about blind testing and the "your ears aren't good enough to appreciate the sound that I can hear" sniffery and veiled snobbery. The insufferable Stereophile magazine and the nonsense it continues to peddle. Horrifying.
- Dave_Rosenthal 5y ago
  Yeah, I've always loved music and good audio, but I pretty much gave up on the hobby for a decade or two because the main sources of information (i.e. industry magazines) were so absurdly pseudo-science. But, as the grandparent of this post points out, there has been a real renaissance of information and discussion on the internet that isn't bought and paid for by snake oil salesmen and it's the best time ever to get a great audio system for little money. A bunch of Chinese companies (Topping, etc.) have actually jumped on the objectivist bandwagon are cranking out (relatively) inexpensive DACs, amps, etc. that are world-leading in measured performance (at any price). Like everything internet, the 'objectivist' audiophile world can be a bit of an echo chamber, but real progress is being made towards non-trivial questions like how one should measure the performance of headphones and speakers, what the ideal actually is, and what deviations from that ideal make the most difference.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Yeah it's a real golden era for the hobby, if you ask me. By my reckoning one can have an objectively excellent system for a small/medium residential room for well under $700. The primary difference between that a more capable system would be the horsepower required to achieve the desired SPL levels in larger spaces and/or reproduce recorded material with a large dynamic range. Even casual consumer gear is getting better these days. A lot of these little home speakers (HomePod mini, etc) put out some pretty reasonable sound: tonally correct, low distortion, etc. The objectivist approach is trickling up as well as down. but real progress is being made towards non-trivial questions like how one should measure the performance of headphones and speakers, what the ideal actually is, and what deviations from that ideal make the most difference. Amen. If anything, the objectivist community might actually veer too far into objectivity at this point, lol. Lots of nitpicking over small differences that show up in measurements but are certainly inaudible. I think the next frontier is a stronger correlation between measurements and listener preference/audibility. We know that better-measuring gear sounds better. But the correlation between better measurements and listener preference is far from linear.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > the main sources of information (i.e. industry magazines) were so absurdly pseudo-science. This is true of almost any industry magazine that does reviews. It's all trash, gamed, manipulated, paid for. The bike magazines are utter trash, with everyone mocking phrases like "horizontally compliant, vertically stiff" which used to be a given for carbon frame bike reviews, and keep shouting about efficiency in "power transfer." I wish I were joking when i say these idiots used to claim that the soles of your cycling shoes were not "transferring" power "efficiently." It's now easy to buy a bike that weighs less than the bikes run in the TdF (which has a minimum weight limit for safety/reliability.) PC hardware, especially cooling stuff? Trash. Reviews will claim x degrees temperature reduction but not tell you the room temperature or humidity, or even noise level. Reviews are heavily, heavily 'paid for' in that companies just send hardware free to reviewers and if they don't say nice things, they stop getting hardware for free which kills them off pretty rapidly. Photography magazines, same thing. They don't tell you that all their reviews are all based off gear provided to them that has been likely hand-assembled very carefully, and extensively tweaked and calibrated for the press circuit. The $500 lens you buy off the shelf a year later? Nowhere near the QA went into it than did the lens that was shipped to Photography Wank Magazine. Not a single photography magazine blind-purchases their gear retail. Not a single one looks at more than one sample. Car reviews? It's all a focus on performance and looks, and nothing to little about repairability, reliability, depreciation. They wax poetic about all sorts of subjective bullshit about a brand or model. I'm a car guy. It's a bunch of steel and rubber and aluminum, made to a price for a particular market segment. Car manufactures have been caught specifically setting up cars for particular auto reviewers; most famously, Top Gear caught Ferrari specifically modifying their cars for Top Gear's test track and putting much stickier, expensive tires on. Ferrari responded by refusing to provide review cars to Top Gear, and when TG found private owners to loan them cars...prohibiting owners from allowing any Top Gear staff to use their car for a review. If you were found out, Ferrari would ban you from buying a Ferrari, or just not give you the normal priority for new models. Tech companies are now getting caught cheapening their hardware right after reviews come out and early retail sales. Most commonly with SSDs; they make a really sweet SSD model with a great controller/DRAM/flash chips and then a month or two later quietly switch out the controller, use less/no DRAM, use lower grade flash, etc. The bullshit generation has shifted to "creators" - people who make videos telling a 'story' about the 'experience' and kinda sorta reviewing the product, but they have little or no qualification to objectively review the item in question. So you have guys who are tech youtubers reviewing electric cars but they don't know shit about cars, tech reviewers reviewing bicycles and bicycle products they don't know shit about, etc. PR firms specifically seek out reviewers who aren't experts in a particular product category or industry because they don't know what to look for or how something compares to what else is on the market. Not even stuff from supposedly reputable reviewers is trustworthy anymore. Wirecutter, now bought by the NY Times? Every time I've trusted their reviews, the product I ended up with turned out to have glaringly obvious flaws the somehow expert panel of reviewers didn't notice or mention. They're also in the habit of comparing very old products they've owned and used for ages against new stuff, and recommending buying the old product. For example: their vacuum cleaner review recommends a Miele vacuum they've had for years. If you read the Amazon reviews, you see plain as day comments talking about how the model is no longer made in country X but country Y to a much lower cost, and the new models are junk that fall apart/fail like crazy. Another example: I bought a set of sheets recommended by Wirecutter. They were garbage, fell apart rapidly. Reading the comments later on the store website, I see drumroll please they clearly changed the sheets - people saying the manufacturer had clearly changed suppliers or something. Another example: a set of bluetooth earbuds. The Wirecutter review neglected to mention that the proprietary charge connector adapter hadn't been available for over a year, which meant your $150 headphones were "totalled" by losing a $20 piece of plastic. It also neglected to mention that powering them up played a booming theme song, and any event triggered a voice actor shouting things like "HEADPHONES CONNECTED!" or "BATTERY LOW!" in your ears, genuinely startling if you're listening to some quiet meditative music. The volume of these effects did not match the set volume for the headset and if you looked in the forums - people had been BEGGING the company to do something about it for YEARS. Which they did not, despite bragging about how their smartphone app should be installed because it could do firmware updates.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Same here. It's why I avoided the hobby for years and years. Those magazines like Stereophile were caught in an unavoidable spiral. They were reliant on advertising dollars from the snake-oil peddlers. The good news is, you would not be alone in the hobby these days - there's a really robust segment of the hobby who holds that snake oil stuff in utter contempt. AudioScienceReview is a good objectivist community; NYT/Wirecutter's audio coverage is commendably reality-based, and so on.
- stef25 5y ago
  They have to balance things like audio being delivered by streaming mp3s from phones to a tv's built in speakers. Something I encountered at a party, equally horrifying. Too many people measure the quality of their audio by how much bass comes out of their oddly shaped bluetooth speakers and are excited about the built-in light show it provides.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    It's understandable that people want wireless control. When most software is proprietary/web-based, the easiest local solution is streaming mp3s via bluetooth.
js2 5y ago
Harman regularly runs sales on the Studio 5 series and Infinity Reference series at practically give-away prices. And there has been almost no shortage during the pandemic either. They must've built thousands of these and have them all in a huge warehouse in Kentucky. I mean it's ridiculous. I purchased these for $700/pair earlier this year and now they are on sale for $600/pair: https://www.jbl.com/loudspeakers/STUDIO+580.html https://www.jbl.com/loudspeakers/STUDIO+580.html They just had the R253 on sale for $300/pair last week but they sold through them all (for now): https://www.harmanaudio.com/loudspeakers/REFERENCE+253.html https://www.harmanaudio.com/loudspeakers/REFERENCE+253.html The Spinorama data from ASR and other sources is online here: https://pierreaubert.github.io/spinorama/ https://pierreaubert.github.io/spinorama/ Another site that collects these charts: https://speakerdata2034.blogspot.com/ https://speakerdata2034.blogspot.com/ Finally, measuring subwoofers is a separate endeavor: https://audioxpress.com/article/cta-2010-a-better-way-to-measure-subwoofers https://audioxpress.com/article/cta-2010-a-better-way-to-mea... Collected in this Google Sheet: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/subwoofer-comparison.20494/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  $100 off a $700 pair of speakers is not "practically give-away prices."
  - js2 5y ago
    Normal price on the Studio 580 is $700 each. They are a very good value at $700/pair and an even more exceptional value at $600/pair. Free shipping. Try in your home for 30 days and send them back to Harman on their dime if you don’t like them. The R253 at $300/pair is an even crazier value. When Harman has these lines of speakers on sale at 50-62% off you simply won’t find a nicer speaker at that price, especially once you factor in that Harman allows for 30-day in-home evals and free returns.
- rektide 5y ago
  this has been a priceless set of reads/links tyvm
IgorPartola 5y ago
As it happens, tonight j was researching upgrades to my motorcycle’s audio system and learning things about frequency response, crossover, headroom, etc. Here are the questions I have yet to answer: 1. Will using a higher power amp with higher power and somewhat higher quality speakers give me more clarity of sound? I don’t care for loud as much as being able to hear the music. 2. Is there any point in installing a subwoofer on a motorcycle? The reason I ask is that it seems as though in order to properly install and integrate a sub you need a housing for it that won’t resonate with it or make any sounds of movement, creaking, etc. That seems rather impossible where you might normally install it: fiberglass saddlebags or the trunk/tour pack. Also, won’t the engine and exhaust noise simply drown out the bass? 3. If no sub, then how long should frequencies on a 2 component speaker go? I have a choice of 60-80Hz as the lower limit. 4. Can non-marine grade speakers be made waterproof on the output side? 5. The amp I have says it strongly prefers RCA/line input over speaker level high input. Why is that? Also, my stock radio doesn’t have line level output. Should I get an external high level to line level adapter or try the one built into the amp? Will any of this compare to my Bose QC35s?
- chucksta 5y ago
  1) it will give you clarity at a louder level 2) thats kinda personal, I would say no. Subs also benefit from the enclosed car. I guess anything is possible though. Plus your on a motorcycle, its going to travel a lot more. 3) you're overthinking it, you're on a motorcycle 4) not that i'm aware of, but I don't really know, i'm sure it's possible. 5) Hi level is more prone to pick up interference. I don't quite understand the second part, hi level is radio output to the speaker. Don't really understand that part either 6?) sound quality? No you're on a motorcycle. Wearing them instead? I feel like there are other reasons you shouldn't
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Thanks! What I meant in 5: my receiver can output to speakers only. My amp can accept line level or speaker level input, but says it prefers line level. Would I get better results by connecting the speaker level receiver output directly to the amp or is it better to instead get a separate preamp to bring receiver output to line level then connect that to the amp. I think I will try the former first.
stef25 5y ago
> JBL 305 You mean LSR305? Have those sitting on my desk.
- js2 5y ago
  305P Mk ii, its current iteration (LSR305 was discontinued a few years back): https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jbl-lsr305p-mkii-and-control-1-pro-monitors-review.10811/ https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jbl-l...
  - stef25 5y ago
    Nice. With speakers that cheap being so good you wonder why you need more.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      I have the 306P from the newer mk2 lineup and I agree. You only need/want more if you want deep bass or big output/dynamics.
      - justinclift 5y ago
        As a data point, I've recently hooked up the LSR310S (subwoofer) to my LSR305P mk2's. It definitely makes for a very positive difference when listening to music and watching movies. (setting up a much cheaper 7.1 system using these as the foundation components now :>)
    - buescher 5y ago
      I have a pair. They are indeed really nice. The built-in amplifier is pretty wimpy though - they don't get very loud at all.
deeblering4 5y ago
Yeah the JBL 305 is a kickass powered monitor, esp for the price. Pair that with a preamp and some rca -> trs cables and you’ve got a seriously good sounding setup.
enaaem 5y ago
I have a question. Do amps matter? As long as it is not clipping and it is designed to not color the sound.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Yes and no. A competently designed and implemented amp should be indistinguishable from any other competently designed and implemented amp in their operating ranges. Not all amps are competently designed and implemented. Price is not a good indication; there are very cheap well-made amps and very expensive lousy amps, and vice-versa. Here's a fairly recent comparison of two amps specifically chosen to highlight differences: https://archimago.blogspot.com/2021/08/summer-musings-no-not-all-amplifiers.html https://archimago.blogspot.com/2021/08/summer-musings-no-not... The frequency response delta graph shows differences of 5dB at many different ranges; an average person can reliably hear 3dB differences without training. That said, the vast majority of speakers have frequency responses with much larger swings than many amps, and much higher distortion.
  - enaaem 5y ago
    Thank you. Interesting read.

smackeyacky 5y ago

The snake oil victims really turned me off conversing with other hi fi hobbyists. Pseudo-science about cables, ethernet hubs for audio, utter nonsense about jitter. Endless arguments about blind testing and the "your ears aren't good enough to appreciate the sound that I can hear" sniffery and veiled snobbery. The insufferable Stereophile magazine and the nonsense it continues to peddle. Horrifying.

Dave_Rosenthal 5y ago
Yeah, I've always loved music and good audio, but I pretty much gave up on the hobby for a decade or two because the main sources of information (i.e. industry magazines) were so absurdly pseudo-science. But, as the grandparent of this post points out, there has been a real renaissance of information and discussion on the internet that isn't bought and paid for by snake oil salesmen and it's the best time ever to get a great audio system for little money. A bunch of Chinese companies (Topping, etc.) have actually jumped on the objectivist bandwagon are cranking out (relatively) inexpensive DACs, amps, etc. that are world-leading in measured performance (at any price). Like everything internet, the 'objectivist' audiophile world can be a bit of an echo chamber, but real progress is being made towards non-trivial questions like how one should measure the performance of headphones and speakers, what the ideal actually is, and what deviations from that ideal make the most difference.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah it's a real golden era for the hobby, if you ask me. By my reckoning one can have an objectively excellent system for a small/medium residential room for well under $700. The primary difference between that a more capable system would be the horsepower required to achieve the desired SPL levels in larger spaces and/or reproduce recorded material with a large dynamic range. Even casual consumer gear is getting better these days. A lot of these little home speakers (HomePod mini, etc) put out some pretty reasonable sound: tonally correct, low distortion, etc. The objectivist approach is trickling up as well as down. but real progress is being made towards non-trivial questions like how one should measure the performance of headphones and speakers, what the ideal actually is, and what deviations from that ideal make the most difference. Amen. If anything, the objectivist community might actually veer too far into objectivity at this point, lol. Lots of nitpicking over small differences that show up in measurements but are certainly inaudible. I think the next frontier is a stronger correlation between measurements and listener preference/audibility. We know that better-measuring gear sounds better. But the correlation between better measurements and listener preference is far from linear.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > the main sources of information (i.e. industry magazines) were so absurdly pseudo-science. This is true of almost any industry magazine that does reviews. It's all trash, gamed, manipulated, paid for. The bike magazines are utter trash, with everyone mocking phrases like "horizontally compliant, vertically stiff" which used to be a given for carbon frame bike reviews, and keep shouting about efficiency in "power transfer." I wish I were joking when i say these idiots used to claim that the soles of your cycling shoes were not "transferring" power "efficiently." It's now easy to buy a bike that weighs less than the bikes run in the TdF (which has a minimum weight limit for safety/reliability.) PC hardware, especially cooling stuff? Trash. Reviews will claim x degrees temperature reduction but not tell you the room temperature or humidity, or even noise level. Reviews are heavily, heavily 'paid for' in that companies just send hardware free to reviewers and if they don't say nice things, they stop getting hardware for free which kills them off pretty rapidly. Photography magazines, same thing. They don't tell you that all their reviews are all based off gear provided to them that has been likely hand-assembled very carefully, and extensively tweaked and calibrated for the press circuit. The $500 lens you buy off the shelf a year later? Nowhere near the QA went into it than did the lens that was shipped to Photography Wank Magazine. Not a single photography magazine blind-purchases their gear retail. Not a single one looks at more than one sample. Car reviews? It's all a focus on performance and looks, and nothing to little about repairability, reliability, depreciation. They wax poetic about all sorts of subjective bullshit about a brand or model. I'm a car guy. It's a bunch of steel and rubber and aluminum, made to a price for a particular market segment. Car manufactures have been caught specifically setting up cars for particular auto reviewers; most famously, Top Gear caught Ferrari specifically modifying their cars for Top Gear's test track and putting much stickier, expensive tires on. Ferrari responded by refusing to provide review cars to Top Gear, and when TG found private owners to loan them cars...prohibiting owners from allowing any Top Gear staff to use their car for a review. If you were found out, Ferrari would ban you from buying a Ferrari, or just not give you the normal priority for new models. Tech companies are now getting caught cheapening their hardware right after reviews come out and early retail sales. Most commonly with SSDs; they make a really sweet SSD model with a great controller/DRAM/flash chips and then a month or two later quietly switch out the controller, use less/no DRAM, use lower grade flash, etc. The bullshit generation has shifted to "creators" - people who make videos telling a 'story' about the 'experience' and kinda sorta reviewing the product, but they have little or no qualification to objectively review the item in question. So you have guys who are tech youtubers reviewing electric cars but they don't know shit about cars, tech reviewers reviewing bicycles and bicycle products they don't know shit about, etc. PR firms specifically seek out reviewers who aren't experts in a particular product category or industry because they don't know what to look for or how something compares to what else is on the market. Not even stuff from supposedly reputable reviewers is trustworthy anymore. Wirecutter, now bought by the NY Times? Every time I've trusted their reviews, the product I ended up with turned out to have glaringly obvious flaws the somehow expert panel of reviewers didn't notice or mention. They're also in the habit of comparing very old products they've owned and used for ages against new stuff, and recommending buying the old product. For example: their vacuum cleaner review recommends a Miele vacuum they've had for years. If you read the Amazon reviews, you see plain as day comments talking about how the model is no longer made in country X but country Y to a much lower cost, and the new models are junk that fall apart/fail like crazy. Another example: I bought a set of sheets recommended by Wirecutter. They were garbage, fell apart rapidly. Reading the comments later on the store website, I see drumroll please they clearly changed the sheets - people saying the manufacturer had clearly changed suppliers or something. Another example: a set of bluetooth earbuds. The Wirecutter review neglected to mention that the proprietary charge connector adapter hadn't been available for over a year, which meant your $150 headphones were "totalled" by losing a $20 piece of plastic. It also neglected to mention that powering them up played a booming theme song, and any event triggered a voice actor shouting things like "HEADPHONES CONNECTED!" or "BATTERY LOW!" in your ears, genuinely startling if you're listening to some quiet meditative music. The volume of these effects did not match the set volume for the headset and if you looked in the forums - people had been BEGGING the company to do something about it for YEARS. Which they did not, despite bragging about how their smartphone app should be installed because it could do firmware updates.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Same here. It's why I avoided the hobby for years and years. Those magazines like Stereophile were caught in an unavoidable spiral. They were reliant on advertising dollars from the snake-oil peddlers. The good news is, you would not be alone in the hobby these days - there's a really robust segment of the hobby who holds that snake oil stuff in utter contempt. AudioScienceReview is a good objectivist community; NYT/Wirecutter's audio coverage is commendably reality-based, and so on.
stef25 5y ago
They have to balance things like audio being delivered by streaming mp3s from phones to a tv's built in speakers. Something I encountered at a party, equally horrifying. Too many people measure the quality of their audio by how much bass comes out of their oddly shaped bluetooth speakers and are excited about the built-in light show it provides.
- HKH2 5y ago
  It's understandable that people want wireless control. When most software is proprietary/web-based, the easiest local solution is streaming mp3s via bluetooth.

js2 5y ago

Harman regularly runs sales on the Studio 5 series and Infinity Reference series at practically give-away prices. And there has been almost no shortage during the pandemic either. They must've built thousands of these and have them all in a huge warehouse in Kentucky. I mean it's ridiculous. I purchased these for $700/pair earlier this year and now they are on sale for $600/pair: https://www.jbl.com/loudspeakers/STUDIO+580.html https://www.jbl.com/loudspeakers/STUDIO+580.html They just had the R253 on sale for $300/pair last week but they sold through them all (for now): https://www.harmanaudio.com/loudspeakers/REFERENCE+253.html https://www.harmanaudio.com/loudspeakers/REFERENCE+253.html The Spinorama data from ASR and other sources is online here: https://pierreaubert.github.io/spinorama/ https://pierreaubert.github.io/spinorama/ Another site that collects these charts: https://speakerdata2034.blogspot.com/ https://speakerdata2034.blogspot.com/ Finally, measuring subwoofers is a separate endeavor: https://audioxpress.com/article/cta-2010-a-better-way-to-measure-subwoofers https://audioxpress.com/article/cta-2010-a-better-way-to-mea... Collected in this Google Sheet: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/subwoofer-comparison.20494/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...

KennyBlanken 5y ago
$100 off a $700 pair of speakers is not "practically give-away prices."
- js2 5y ago
  Normal price on the Studio 580 is $700 each. They are a very good value at $700/pair and an even more exceptional value at $600/pair. Free shipping. Try in your home for 30 days and send them back to Harman on their dime if you don’t like them. The R253 at $300/pair is an even crazier value. When Harman has these lines of speakers on sale at 50-62% off you simply won’t find a nicer speaker at that price, especially once you factor in that Harman allows for 30-day in-home evals and free returns.
rektide 5y ago
this has been a priceless set of reads/links tyvm

IgorPartola 5y ago

As it happens, tonight j was researching upgrades to my motorcycle’s audio system and learning things about frequency response, crossover, headroom, etc. Here are the questions I have yet to answer: 1. Will using a higher power amp with higher power and somewhat higher quality speakers give me more clarity of sound? I don’t care for loud as much as being able to hear the music. 2. Is there any point in installing a subwoofer on a motorcycle? The reason I ask is that it seems as though in order to properly install and integrate a sub you need a housing for it that won’t resonate with it or make any sounds of movement, creaking, etc. That seems rather impossible where you might normally install it: fiberglass saddlebags or the trunk/tour pack. Also, won’t the engine and exhaust noise simply drown out the bass? 3. If no sub, then how long should frequencies on a 2 component speaker go? I have a choice of 60-80Hz as the lower limit. 4. Can non-marine grade speakers be made waterproof on the output side? 5. The amp I have says it strongly prefers RCA/line input over speaker level high input. Why is that? Also, my stock radio doesn’t have line level output. Should I get an external high level to line level adapter or try the one built into the amp? Will any of this compare to my Bose QC35s?

chucksta 5y ago
1) it will give you clarity at a louder level 2) thats kinda personal, I would say no. Subs also benefit from the enclosed car. I guess anything is possible though. Plus your on a motorcycle, its going to travel a lot more. 3) you're overthinking it, you're on a motorcycle 4) not that i'm aware of, but I don't really know, i'm sure it's possible. 5) Hi level is more prone to pick up interference. I don't quite understand the second part, hi level is radio output to the speaker. Don't really understand that part either 6?) sound quality? No you're on a motorcycle. Wearing them instead? I feel like there are other reasons you shouldn't
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  Thanks! What I meant in 5: my receiver can output to speakers only. My amp can accept line level or speaker level input, but says it prefers line level. Would I get better results by connecting the speaker level receiver output directly to the amp or is it better to instead get a separate preamp to bring receiver output to line level then connect that to the amp. I think I will try the former first.

stef25 5y ago

> JBL 305 You mean LSR305? Have those sitting on my desk.

js2 5y ago
305P Mk ii, its current iteration (LSR305 was discontinued a few years back): https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jbl-lsr305p-mkii-and-control-1-pro-monitors-review.10811/ https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jbl-l...
- stef25 5y ago
  Nice. With speakers that cheap being so good you wonder why you need more.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    I have the 306P from the newer mk2 lineup and I agree. You only need/want more if you want deep bass or big output/dynamics.
    - justinclift 5y ago
      As a data point, I've recently hooked up the LSR310S (subwoofer) to my LSR305P mk2's. It definitely makes for a very positive difference when listening to music and watching movies. (setting up a much cheaper 7.1 system using these as the foundation components now :>)
  - buescher 5y ago
    I have a pair. They are indeed really nice. The built-in amplifier is pretty wimpy though - they don't get very loud at all.

deeblering4 5y ago

Yeah the JBL 305 is a kickass powered monitor, esp for the price. Pair that with a preamp and some rca -> trs cables and you’ve got a seriously good sounding setup.

enaaem 5y ago

I have a question. Do amps matter? As long as it is not clipping and it is designed to not color the sound.

dsr_ 5y ago
Yes and no. A competently designed and implemented amp should be indistinguishable from any other competently designed and implemented amp in their operating ranges. Not all amps are competently designed and implemented. Price is not a good indication; there are very cheap well-made amps and very expensive lousy amps, and vice-versa. Here's a fairly recent comparison of two amps specifically chosen to highlight differences: https://archimago.blogspot.com/2021/08/summer-musings-no-not-all-amplifiers.html https://archimago.blogspot.com/2021/08/summer-musings-no-not... The frequency response delta graph shows differences of 5dB at many different ranges; an average person can reliably hear 3dB differences without training. That said, the vast majority of speakers have frequency responses with much larger swings than many amps, and much higher distortion.
- enaaem 5y ago
  Thank you. Interesting read.