Jump to content
Why become a member? ×

Any hi-fi buffs/audiophiles able to give advice on receiver/amp replacement?


Mornats
 Share

Recommended Posts

1 minute ago, HowieBass said:

This?

I think for the money I'd still go with something from KEF!

No.

They were tall and curvy but they'd dominate an average room.  In the blindfold test it was still possible to tell which was the live singer and which was the recording though.

I'm happy enough with my set-up now but it's always interesting to see what's up and coming.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ahhh maybe you mean the Muon, the speaker that birthed the Blade...

EDIT: Ah hang on, yes I do remember that episode but I can't remember the product at the moment... (gets thinking cap back on)

Edited by HowieBass
Subsequent comment
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, HowieBass said:

Ahhh maybe you mean the Muon, the speaker that birthed the Blade...

<SNIP>

EDIT: Ah hang on, yes I do remember that episode but I can't remember the product at the moment... (gets thinking cap back on)

I have to say that I didn't watch the Muon clip because I can't stand Jason Bradbury's face.

image.png.ccc090c394082d36b3bc963f2c0af3ab.png

That's killed this conversation for me.  I hope you're happy with yourself!

Heeheehee

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting question as I'm finding that I can mix better on my Cambridge Audio SR20 + Tannoy E11s than I can with my Yamaha HS7s. Could be to do with the placement in the room but I can't do anything meaningful under 200hz with my Yamahas and I miss details on them that I can hear perfectly well on my Audio Technica M50x headphones. It could also be that I listen to other music far more on the CA and AT than I do with the Yamahas.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/18/2018 at 18:19, Mornats said:

If I move out of my flat I'm going to reassess my hi-fi placement and maybe have it more central in a living room with speakers on proper stands. In an ideal world I'd have a nice music room like Skol's too :D

It’s a slippery slope mate! And a whole new world of GAS :D

Quick tip on speaker placement that I’ve learnt very recently (taking advice from acoustic gurus on another forum...). And that is: place them as close to the wall as possible.

I’d always assumed this was a bad idea - leading to ‘excited room modes’ and too much bass response. Turns out that advice has been proved wrong in everything but the most spacious listening rooms. In 99% of typical home-sized rooms, you want the speakers tight up against the front wall to reduce the nulls caused by surface boundary reflections. Useful page here for anyone interested:

http://arqen.com/acoustics-101/speaker-placement-boundary-interference/

I’ve since moved my monitors much closer to the wall and it’s helped to even out the frequency response in my room. Definitely worthwhile if you have the opportunity: whether for mixing or leisurely listening.

PS: you can attenuate the resulting bass boost very easily with EQ; but you can’t fix nulls caused by room modes and reflections with EQ.

That is all. As you were.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Skol303 said:

It’s a slippery slope mate! And a whole new world of GAS :D

Quick tip on speaker placement that I’ve learnt very recently (taking advice from acoustic gurus on another forum...). And that is: place them as close to the wall as possible.

I’d always assumed this was a bad idea - leading to ‘excited room modes’ and too much bass response. Turns out that advice has been proved wrong in everything but the most spacious listening rooms. In 99% of typical home-sized rooms, you want the speakers tight up against the front wall to reduce the nulls caused by surface boundary reflections. Useful page here for anyone interested:

http://arqen.com/acoustics-101/speaker-placement-boundary-interference/

I’ve since moved my monitors much closer to the wall and it’s helped to even out the frequency response in my room. Definitely worthwhile if you have the opportunity: whether for mixing or leisurely listening.

PS: you can attenuate the resulting bass boost very easily with EQ; but you can’t fix nulls caused by room modes and reflections with EQ.

That is all. As you were.

 

I used to buy some of the Hi-Fi magazines of the seventies and eighties.  I even took some of the magazine covers off and put them up as posters in my bedroom so that I could drool over the turntables and tape decks that were beautifully photographed and displayed on thick glossy paper.

I think you need to identify which type of speaker enclosures you have before you decide on placement as the reflex (ported) types can be tricky.  Infinite baffle (sealed cab) type enclosures are a little less fussy about placement.

One of the tips from back then that I tend to use on a set up is to not follow the shape of the room by squaring up to the corners, especially on multi speaker systems.  Instead, I skew the footprint by a few degrees within the room and get less hot and cold spots.  My latest living room amp did its own eq set-up with the speakers in this position and I rarely find a problem.  Sometimes I need to tweak the eq for older media because there were vast differences in how the recordings were made but I always come back to the setting that the Denon has stored in memory for the room.

Yes.  Domestic audio is definitely another fuel source for GAS.  You might have noticed that I was resisting @HowieBass's invitation to get exited about flagship speakers.

@ all the older members;  Does anyone else have a problem with how Hi-Def is sometimes seen as Hi-Fi?

It's a slight thread departure but I don't believe that Hi-Def is always faithful to the original sound.  Most of the time it is fine but every now and again you get a harsh reminder that micro-processors are behind the sound.

For instance; why can't many disc players cope with tracks on audio discs that are intended to run into each other?  Why can't there be the smooth transition that was intended?  Sudden stalls and occasional aliasing are commonplace too but no-one else seems to find them as annoying as I do.  Meh!  My turntable might need the fluff cleaning from its needle occasionally but I can hear that it needs cleaning before it skips or distorts too badly and it gets cleaned before the build up of surface crap around the tip of the needle is even visible.  Unless there is surface damage on a vinyl disc my music is NEVER interrupted.

Sorry, the red mist was beginning to descend upon me.  I'll go and have a cold shower.  Heeheehee

Edited by SpondonBassed
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, SpondonBassed said:

I think you need to identify which type of speaker enclosures you have before you decide on placement as the reflex (ported) types can be tricky.  Infinite baffle (sealed cab) type enclosures are a little less fussy about placement.

One of the tips from back then that I tend to use on a set up is to not follow the shape of the room by squaring up to the corners, especially on multi speaker systems.  Instead, I skew the footprint by a few degrees within the room and get less hot and cold spots. 

Good point. My speakers are sealed which perhaps makes them a little easier to place in relation to the wall. I guess rear-ported units would be a little more tricky, but even then the consensus amongst acoustic treatment people is that any issues caused by wall proximity are much easier to fix than issues caused by SBIR. Useful advice here from the folks ate Genelic:

"To avoid the cancellation, push the monitor close enough to the wall. Typically the distance of the monitor front to the wall should be less than 0.6 meters. This ensures that the low frequency output is not reduced. The monitor needs a minimum clearance of 0.05 m to the wall to ensure full output from the rear bass re ex port."

Bear in mind I'm coming at this from the point of view of creating a mix room with a flat(ish) frequency response; rather than from a hifi perspective. Although I'd assume that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so to speak :) 

Interesting tip about adjusting the angle of the setup, so it's not square with the room. Makes very good sense. My own space is a converted garage (5.3 x 2.1 x 2.7 L/W/H) and with narrow walls this might not be so applicable, but I can see how it would work well in a room with more regular proportions.

Edited by Skol303
Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, Skol303 said:

...I'm coming at this from the point of view of creating a mix room with a flat(ish) frequency response; rather than from a hifi perspective...

The two are synonymous in my mind.

The only thing about the skewed footprint is to avoid direct reflections from opposing walls in case of resonance.  You could equally say that it is a bad thing to skew a square of speakers by 45 degrees to the (square) room because of unpredictable corner effects.  I still have one area in the room where the bass is exaggerated but only the one.  My house mate usually sits there and he loves it so - smiles all around.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Skol303 said:

a minimum clearance of 0.05 m to the wall to ensure full output from the rear bass re ex port."

If you put my Ditton 66 series 2s. With 12" rear passive radiator this close to a wall there'd be either

a) so much bass you'd have to fill the room with treatment products to "tame" it.

Or

b) a perfect hole for a kitchen extractor fan...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Leonard Smalls said:

If you put my Ditton 66 series 2s. With 12" rear passive radiator this close to a wall there'd be either

a) so much bass you'd have to fill the room with treatment products to "tame" it.

Or

b) a perfect hole for a kitchen extractor fan...

Haha! Indeed :D 

Yes, I think it goes without saying that all such advice needs to be applied in context and with a good dollop of common sense. The key point I suppose is that for years the advice from the acoustic (and hifi) communities was to leave a healthy distance between speakers and the wall behind them to avoid room mode issues. More recently the thinking (and also the design/manufacture) has switched towards placing speakers close to the wall, avoiding the Grand Canyon of a null that typically forms in most domestic rooms due to rear wall reflection (60-100Hz bass 'suck out').

Needless to say the best option of all is of course mounting speakers inside the wall so they're flush with the surface, but I don't suppose many of us have the flexibility at home to do just that (although I have been thinking about some DIY soffit mounting...).

But anyway. It is certainly another whole world of GAS and geekery.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Leonard Smalls said:

If you put my Ditton 66 series 2s. With 12" rear passive radiator this close to a wall there'd be either

a) so much bass you'd have to fill the room with treatment products to "tame" it.

Quick addition to say that this is actually the current thinking for treating small mix rooms. Bass trap the bejesus out of them; literally do everything you can to annihilate the low end with trapping (and in doing so aim to flatten the low-Hz room modes at your listing spot); and then dial in the missing low end using a subwoofer positioned elsewhere in the room.

Ok, I'll shut up now :) 

Edited by Skol303
Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, Skol303 said:

Quick addition to say that this is actually the current thinking for treating small mix rooms

Aye - by folks trying to sell traps and treatment products!

DSP sellers would no doubt have a different take... I suspect the bestway is to get best position and isolation then traps and dsp...

Luckily my Dittons were one of the speakers often used in the 70s as main monitors - being about 1.2m high means small mix rooms are out!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, aitkenaudio said:

Take your amp in for a service

Not sure how much of the thread you managed to get through but I ended up replacing it. I'd had it for 27 years and felt it was time to retire it. I'd gambled that upping my budget a bit from what it was back then, plus the advances made in audio over that time would mean I'd get a better sounding amp. It paid off :)

Interesting to read about positioning speakers against walls. Here's a pic where you can see one of each of my white Yamaha monitors and my black Tannoy hi-fi speakers. Both sets of speakers are 4 inches from the wall. The bass sounds fine from my Tannoys but if you recall my previous comments about them they were sealed by the Tannoy rep I bought them from. So that explains why the bass is better I guess?

So in terms of having my Yamahas up against the wall, these are 4 inches from the wall, measured from the centre of the speaker and they're turned away from the wall at an angle - 35 to 40 degrees. Would that be considered up against the wall? 

image.thumb.png.1fbd22e71eca475d89632e5748a11c68.png

Edited by Mornats
Numpty forgot to add the photo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, SpondonBassed said:

Is it though?

Yes.

Edge diffraction is eliminated.

As is cancellation reflection from the wall behind the monitor.

Acoustical loading is increased so the monitor doesn’t have to work as hard at lower frequencies.

There’s good reason why every professional mixing studio uses soffit mounting for its main monitors :) 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, Leonard Smalls said:

Aye - by folks trying to sell traps and treatment products!

DSP sellers would no doubt have a different take... I suspect the bestway is to get best position and isolation then traps and dsp..

Acoustic treatment works. No snake oil there; just physics ;) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Skol303 said:

Yes.

Edge diffraction is eliminated.

As is cancellation reflection from the wall behind the monitor.

Acoustical loading is increased so the monitor doesn’t have to work as hard at lower frequencies.

There’s good reason why every professional mixing studio uses soffit mounting for its main monitors :) 

Thank you.  That is as concise an answer as I could hope for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Skol303 said:

Yes.

Edge diffraction is eliminated.

As is cancellation reflection from the wall behind the monitor.

Acoustical loading is increased so the monitor doesn’t have to work as hard at lower frequencies.

There’s good reason why every professional mixing studio uses soffit mounting for its main monitors :) 

Any idea whether they're mostly sealed box design or front ported?

Note: This wandering a way off @Mornats original question but I'm enjoying the discussion all the same!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, HowieBass said:

Any idea whether they're mostly sealed box design or front ported?

I’m generalizing but most pro studio main monitors are sealed boxes.

Bass reflex ports are typically used on smaller nearfield monitors that struggle to put out low frequency information; but again I’m generalising as there are some very high end ported speakers on the market.

But yeah, the main monitors found in pro studios - the speakers they use to make their clients’ trousers flap! - are nearly always sealed because they’re large units that don’t require ports to bolster the bass.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...