Originally posted by chef
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A typical domestic room has hard brick or concrete parallel walls and floor resulting in a lot of reflected sound and prominent standing waves at frequencies that correspond to the dimensions of the room. The end result is that detail is masked by other acoustic energy bouncing around the room in the form of reverb. Normally this can be heard as uneven bass response (play a scale on a bass and some notes will be much louder than others) and a sort of ringing "flutter echo" at higher frequencies. Clap your hands in a particularly bad room and the echo will sound like a sort of springy "boing" sound. There isn't a great deal you can do about LF room modes in a domestic environment but carpet, rugs, soft furnishings, heavy curtains and strategically positioned bookshelves will all have an effect on reducing the amount of reflected energy at higher frequencies.
Another factor is speaker placement. Depending on how they are set up you are likely listening to them off-axis, which will affect the sound and stereo imaging greatly, and another factor often overlooked is how close they are to you. This affects the ratio of direct to reflected sound that you are listening to, the more reflected sound you have the more clouded the sound will be. Think about the limiting case, i.e. having the speakers in another room altogether, it won't sound great.
As regards components, it will all make a difference.
The source is obviously important. Low bitrate mp3s are less than ideal, lossless formats are the way to go if possible (of course if you only have an mp3 then keep it like that, transcoding will never bring back what has been thrown away).
The next important link in the chain is the Digital-Analogue converter (i.e. PC soundcard). To build a good one takes a bit of attention to details such as clocking and grounding, you can definitely improve on the one on your motherboard. You probably won't notice the difference between a good DAC and very good DAC though, the good ones are better than most people's ears these days. Some links to drool over:
DA-2 Home Page
Weiss :: DAC1 & DAC1-MK2
Lavry Engineering - Unsurpassed Excellence - the DA11 is supposed to be very good
DAC1 HDR | Benchmark Media
MYTEK DIGITAL USA
Personally I don't agree with the audiophile assertion that less electrical components are automatically better. Any recorded music has already been through hundreds or thousands of them before it hit the shops. By all means avoid equalizers and other things that are designed to purposely alter the sound but when they start on about the negative feedback in amps ruining the sound they are in fruitloop territory. I've built single transistor pure class A amplifiers and they do not sound good!
Valve amps have a distinctive "warm" sound, this is often attributed to differences in the character of the distortion they introduce (i.e. 2nd harmonic rather than 3rd, more biased towards low harmonics). It is entirely possible to build a tulip one, also to build one with effectively inaudible distortion. I have no doubt the good ones sound very good indeed but don't know much about them, for reasons that will become clear.
Personally I am a great believer in active loudspeakers, which use an active line level crossover before the amp and separate power amps for each frequency band. The crossover and power amps are usually matched to the speakers and built into the cabinets. There is a reason why an awful lot of professional audio monitoring systems take this approach i.e. from an engineering perspective it's a better solution that avoids a lot of problems e.g.
- the sorts of components you need to use to build a passive crossover that can handle high power have inherently poor tolerances which means to do a good job you need to spend a lot of effort matching components. Even then, the end product will almost certainly perform less well than £10 worth of op-amps and low power high tolerance resistors and caps.
- the electrolytic capacitors will degrade over time.
- the passive crossover will have a freaky variation of impedance with frequency that will cause all sorts of strange interactions with you amp (this is IMO the main reason hifi buffs like to fanny about trying different combos of amp + speakers)
- it's a lot easier to build a good enough amp when you don't have to drive a complex load like a passive crossover
That's not to say you can't build a good passive loudspeaker, just that you are going to spend a lot of money on it. I hear these guys do a pretty good job though.
That is my techy answer
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