3 ms·

this is really well summarized. I'm in the same camp as you, I've got way more in my setup than the average person, but its mid-fi at best, and mostly on the h

this is really well summarized. I'm in the same camp as you, I've got way more in my setup than the average person, but its mid-fi at best, and mostly on the headphone side. I like music, and I have headphones on for 5-8 hours a day, I'd like to optimize that experience. The good news is the average pair of headphones today is SO so much better than it used to be, and in a weird way some of the overpriced stuff from Apple/Sony/etc... is actually getting better sound to people that hadn't experienced it before. I really wish there was more emphasis on the transparent + objective measurement side of things industry wide. There is in some places, but at the end of the day entire companies are built around not having objectively perfect sound reproduction, because there is a following of people that like the house-sound they engineer in to their speaker/headphones. And there is value there, its just hard to quantify. About 12 years ago I built a pair of large (relatively) full-range bookshelf speakers for near-field studio monitor type use at my desk with a wild 3 chamber porting setup. No traditional physical filter-network whatsoever, I borrowed a decent mic, measured the response, generated an inverse impulse filter that I could use to preprocess the signal going to the amp to arrive at a "perfectly" flat frequency response. Guess what? it sounded ok at best. Audio is hard. Your ears are weird.

fatnoah 4y ago
> Audio is hard. Your ears are weird. Basically this. In the interest of disclosure, for my senior project in college (a full-year capstone project), I was on a team of students that built an analysis rig for a company that made club/venue/stadium sized speakers. Our rig reduced analysis time from 3 days to about an hour or so. However, that was just one piece of the puzzle, as the "room" also had a massive impact on sound. That company's "demo room" was amazing. It was the first floor of an old mill building with speakers on one end of the room, and furniture at the other. At least 100-200ft if distance. It was acoustically treated, but not overmuch since one of the goals was to demonstrate the room adjustment capability. Several 5000W amps powered the whole thing, and the audio quality was amazing. It felt and sounded like listening to headphones at a moderately high volume, but when you tried to speak to the person next to you, you could barely hear your own voice.
- jdc0589 4y ago
  Very cool. room correction actually has seen lots of improvement in the past decade luckily. A lot more AV receivers come with a mic and calibration process now. I'm not sure what the story for all the sonos/whatever stuff is like, but I imagine there's something. Thats not a cure-all, but its something. 15 years ago that was only for the nerdiest of the audiophile nerds, and its available to any moderately enthusiastic consumer now.
Tsiklon 4y ago
The fun thing is that generally, people do not like perfectly flat audio. From a subjective perspective, I think that perfectly flat feels like something is missing. I think perhaps this comes from our own hearing not being objectively flat in it’s sensitivity. Personally I don’t want to analyse my music (or my equipment) too hard, I want to enjoy it and the emotional response it invokes in me.

fatnoah 4y ago

> Audio is hard. Your ears are weird. Basically this. In the interest of disclosure, for my senior project in college (a full-year capstone project), I was on a team of students that built an analysis rig for a company that made club/venue/stadium sized speakers. Our rig reduced analysis time from 3 days to about an hour or so. However, that was just one piece of the puzzle, as the "room" also had a massive impact on sound. That company's "demo room" was amazing. It was the first floor of an old mill building with speakers on one end of the room, and furniture at the other. At least 100-200ft if distance. It was acoustically treated, but not overmuch since one of the goals was to demonstrate the room adjustment capability. Several 5000W amps powered the whole thing, and the audio quality was amazing. It felt and sounded like listening to headphones at a moderately high volume, but when you tried to speak to the person next to you, you could barely hear your own voice.

jdc0589 4y ago
Very cool. room correction actually has seen lots of improvement in the past decade luckily. A lot more AV receivers come with a mic and calibration process now. I'm not sure what the story for all the sonos/whatever stuff is like, but I imagine there's something. Thats not a cure-all, but its something. 15 years ago that was only for the nerdiest of the audiophile nerds, and its available to any moderately enthusiastic consumer now.

Tsiklon 4y ago

The fun thing is that generally, people do not like perfectly flat audio. From a subjective perspective, I think that perfectly flat feels like something is missing. I think perhaps this comes from our own hearing not being objectively flat in it’s sensitivity. Personally I don’t want to analyse my music (or my equipment) too hard, I want to enjoy it and the emotional response it invokes in me.