Grateful Dead

There are many things that can be done to get your system set up correctly that often can facilitate noticeable performance improvements equal too or greater than any electronics! Best part, they cost little or nothing!

SPEAKER PHASING: one of the most notorious mistakes that makes a huge noticeable difference and is super easy.
Make sure your positive amp/receiver terminal is connected to the positive of the speaker, ON BOTH speakers!!
So positive to positive, negative to negative etc. on both speakers.
If one is wired opposite of the other, your speakers are out of phase which means their working against each other instead of with each other. Speakers move back and forth, or in and out. If one is wired out of phase that means one speaker is pushing air out while the other speaker is pulling back in, thus effecting bass coupling dramatically! So what you say? You will likely laugh or gasp at how much better your speakers sound (bass enhancement) when you hear them in phase after getting used to them being out!

SPEAKER HEIGHT: the tweeter should always be placed at ear height. So if using stand speakers, measure so stand places the speakers tweeter exactly at listening position ear height. In conekids case he’s a little higher, which might effect his main position, but since he’s trying to cover 2 zones IR areas it’s a trade off. This is an example of how the situation may dictate slight tweaks, but you should at least start following these rules then tweek.

SPEAKER PLACEMENT: optimally should form an equilateral triangle: same distance from listening position to each speaker, and same distance between speakers. This can be tweaked depending on several variables.
Spread them out too far and you lose acoustic coupling and stereo imaging etc., too close together and your sound field collapses and you lose stereo effect etc. This is something you can play with and doesn’t cost anything.
Obviously you should try to avoid placing objects in front of speakers…
They should be placed along a wall, but out from the wall. Too close to the wall causes boundary issues that make bass bloated and unnaturally loud etc. Too far out from the wall and they can sound too thin (not enough bass).
Again, depending on your speakers and other factors you can play with this until you get it right.
Same with listening position: if you sit too close to any wall, but especially the back wall you’ll again suffer from boundary issues that unnaturally bloat/muddy bass.
Really you should never put speakers or listening position next to a wall!

RULE OF THIRDS: look it up. Though using the third dimension is usually not practical, the rule of fifths is and works perhaps better. What’s that you say? Divide your room into fifths. Place the speakers one fifth of the way in from the side walls, leaving three fifths between them. So a 20’ room would have the center of each speaker 4’ from the side walls with 12’ between speaker center points. Then, to form the equilateral triangle, measure 12’ from the center of each speaker to your ear position at your listening sweet spot! Depending on your speakers you may want to toe them in slightly versus having them point directly forward. Again, play around and tweek. Tweeting should be done vary slightly, sometimes an inch or two can make a big difference! Be slow and methodological.

SUB WOOFERS: I’m not a fan of subs for 2 channel stereo, but they can be a necessity for small bookshelf speakers etc.
Subs suffer even more from boundary issues described above! Corners are usually the worst place to put a sub woofer!
Here’s a trick. Place your sub in your listening position and put on some bass active music you know well. Now crawl around on the floor and listen. When you find the place the bass sounds best, put your sub there. This is a cheap down and dirty way to deal with room modes, one of the biggest negative factors in music enjoyment. (Look them up).
I have a fairly large above average system in a dedicated room, but my room is too narrow for my system so I often have horrible bass bloat issues because of these room modes etc. (funny but it’s mostly only a problem with old Dead when Phil was still playing Alembic lol). Usually I can just roll off a little of my 30 hertz eq nob on my C 40 pre amp. I have a DSP room unit that uses excellent Dirac SW, but haven’t gotten around to it (slacker).
There are many solutions and sometimes DSP can help (but that won’t do pure analog folks much good) but often the best way to deal with many of these issues is to follow these fairly simple rules and play around with things.

Oh, lastly. You can help smooth out your room by dampening first reflection points. There’s diffusion and absorption and more. But to keep it simple. We’ll just look at some basics.
Have someone with a mirror move along the side wall with the mirror. The place where you can see the speaker in the mirror while being seated in the listening position is the first reflection point. Put something (all kinds of things both diy and professional) in that spot along the wall (and ceiling if you want to go the extra distance) that will absorb the sound, so that your hearing the direct sound from the speaker without the phase issues and coloration of the reflected sound off the wall. This is another simple but big improvement.
You can experiment with placing adsorption in other obvious places like directly back from the speakers on the opposite wall. If you have a big room, perhaps look at second reflection points.

NOTE: this is not sound proofing! That is a whole other field above and behind this tutorial. Save your money! Putting egg crates, foam, or most of the items for sale on line DO NOT WORK! They will not stop bass from passing through walls and structure! Some of these products may help the sound in the room, but will do nothing for stopping it’s transmission out of the room!

SPEAKER ISOLATORS: another thing you just have to try. Using the pointy spikes or not for speaker feet. Sometimes they help other times you may want to isolate your speakers from the floor to eliminate too much bass and our help with transference to another room or dwelling.
Oh, use a heavy carpet on the floor at least between the speakers and listening position if not bigger. Put this is yet another situational thing that you may have to play with.

Remember folks: the situation is the boss!
Hope this helps!

HDCD: if everything is set up and functioning properly you can hear a difference. How noticeable or if noticeable will depend on your equipment, set up and ears. If you have a nice system and actually play discs, you might find some improvements but for many you might not really hear a difference, certainly not a huge difference so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Following the above mentioned rules as much as possible will!

Oh, ps, the above assumes best case practices. As no room is perfect, and some are just plain awful, and many of us need to live with our significant others, ahem, obviously not everyone will be able to follow all of these.

Cnkd - It never occurred to me at the time that I could have asked for a brand new replacement. The replacement from the shop floor is better - the first one used to skip tracks out - with this one it's just the delay in registering which track is playing by about a second that's a bit odd. It plays to perfection apart from that. And really sounds good.

Good talk.

More important to system?

Listening!!!

When I bought my system the guy told me, you will not hear what this system does, while doing the dishes, while cleaning, while doing anything else. You have to sit and listen.

It's true.

Sound systems and people are a funny thing. I think MOST people listen to the radio and only own a handful of cd's/albums, usually the stuff they listen to in high school or college,,,, after that they stop buying. Kids today seem to live off spot-e-fied and own nothing. I have found the largest genre in people's collection is christmas albums (go figure!)

I think this group of people are the exception to that.

What'd ya think?

For people who are listening on HDCD players, what sort of improvement can you hear in the audio? I would think there is some discernable improvement.

I think I've listened to these shows 10x each. Moved on to others in the time period. Doing Dick's Picks 4 at the moment. I was not hardcore into the Dead when it was released. I imagine people were reacting even more positively into it than even this Dave's Picks, due to the Fillmore legend of the Feb 13 & 14 shows when it came out. Was there a discussion board up at the time to spread the enthusiasm?

Vguy - good to see the red dice and green felt has returned - it's positively you.

Nitecat - also digging TC's contributions on these shows. When he was "on" and audible, he really filled out their sound nicely.

Wow, Daverock that’s a pricey player to be malfunctioning, and then be replaced by a floor model (which apparently has the same defect). They should have given you a new one from the factory.

I thought that my new Cambridge Audio CD player was defective but then realized that my Vizio TV remote interferes with it. I had the TV on and was going through the menu adjusting settings but every time I hit a button on the TV remote the CD player would jump tracks or stop playing. Was relieved to find that the CD player was fine.

Nick, go with what sounds best to you.

Last night spun the Anthem of the Sun CD that I bought in 1989 (it’s the 1971 remix) and it sounded pretty dull.
Then put in Steppin’ Out CD3 and started at Truckin’. Sounded better, but not that great.
DaP43 sounds far superior to those older CD’s.

To me, the best sounding recordings I ever heard were the first ones I got, between 1971 and about 1978. They were records, and what made them great was the magic ingredient. It had nothing to do with what I played them on. If your system captures that-you've got it. For me you can no more improve on that than you can The Grand Canyon

Nick1234 - having said that, I got a Rega Saturn-R cd player about 3 years ago. And it sounds great - but the first one I bought had to go back to the shop after about 9 months, as some cds wouldn't play-and others jumped to the 3rd or 4th track when I wanted to hear the 1st one. They eventually replaced it with a display model from the shop floor. That is great - although I have noticed that half way through a cd...when the music for track 4 starts, the display unit still shows track 3 for a few seconds - it is slightly behind the music. But the sound quality is top notch. As for the magic ingredient....

I joke, but my wife has put up with my idiosyncrasies and such for 30 years, 36 if you count the time we were together before getting married. She deserves a medal, 'cause I am aware that I can be a difficult person to live with sometimes.

The speakers have a clear pretty clear path to spread the sound around the space and the actual speakers are at the upper two thirds of about a 43 inch high tower, so a bit above the ground, and built to tilt ever so slightly to direct the sound slightly upward and fill the space nicely, so I exaggerate about the impediments, or more accurate to say I just get a little obsessive about the impediments to the sound.

For tonight's classic '70s movie I went with the Godfather, the first one. I've watched it several times before but it never disappoints, I love that movie every time. A near perfect movie, weirdly gratifying.

While we're on the subject can I ask for a bit of advice? I'm in the market for a new system and at the moment I'm thinking of a Naim Supernait 3 amp and B&W 702 S2 speakers. I can audition these at my local hifi dealer. What CD player to accompany these? I'm not going for a turntable at the moment. I have 5 weeks to audition anything at my local shop before I move to the Shetland Islands and there's no hifi dealer there that I'm aware of so it's now or never. I'd sort of like to support Rega as their factory is about a mile from my current house but at these prices I'll go for the best fit for my ears.

....that at concerts, they raise the stacks on cables for maximum efficiency.

Point out to your wife that at concerts they don’t put the speakers on the floor, that would block the sound.

My kitchen and living room are connected end-to-end, about 12 feet wide, so not a huge area to fill with sound. The speakers in the air project the sound into the kitchen perfectly, with the sweet spot from the front of the couch back to the island in the kitchen. Can also see the TV on the wall from the kitchen.
It’s just me and my dog, so I can turn the volume up as loud as I want.

I’ve had this new CD player for 2 weeks and have also been playing non-GD CD’s to see how they sound. The Cambridge Audio dealer that I got it from said that it needed about 100 hours of use to get broken in so I’ve been spinning CD’s instead of using my iBasso music player.
Once the CD player is broken in I might then run it into the DAC via stereo RCA cables which I did at first, and it boosts the signal by about 20 dB according to having to turn down the volume, but I wanted to break it in sending the signal to the receiver.

Spinning Rush - Exit Stage Left currently.
This morning was Floyd - More and then Piper.
I’m thinking next the Anthem of the Sun CD I bought in 1989, want to see if that sounds good or if it’s a victim of crappy 80’s mastering.

The iBasso music players come with a burn-in adapter which simulates the electrical resistance of being plugged into a stereo system. You plug that in and put a show on loop and just let it run for about 50 hours, and then it’s supposed to be broken in.