Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac. I have Dirac receivers in two rooms that are absolutely terrible listening areas, and running the full Dirac calibration on the room creates a soundstage where you don’t hear individual speakers anymore.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
I would advise against systems that apply complex EQ curves on the outputs to compensate for distortions caused by the room. These systems can only optimize for a single listening position in the room (the sweet spot).
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
Dirac won't be able to fully solve the room issues AKA it's not a replacement for proper room treatment, but at least it can reliably make the sound in the room not terrible.
Yes. In my experience, hi-fi enthusiasts almost entirely overlook the importance of addressing acoustic issues caused by the room. The ones that do, often do too little and in ways that are ineffectual.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
I don’t question that audiophiles hear different things on expensive equipment, but I think it’s all placebo. “If I spend a stupid amount of money on this, my brain will gin up the sound to satisfy my expectations.”
I still bemoan selling the first couple of years of issues to someone on ebay. I needed to get the stuff out of the basement, but feels like I should have kept them just for the technology history lessons.
I'm still looking for the very early Wired issue that has an ad that goes something like "they laughed at you when you were growing up because you were different. now they wear a uniform with their name on it. and you don't."
Yep. The low hanging fruit principle in action. You can’t make anything completely secure so you put up more obstacles than your neighbor so the attackers go visit the neighbor instead.
Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.
I'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure:
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
Although there are a number of charging stations designed for IOS devices that have bright blue LEDs that you can't turn off. Some good number of these devices are going on someone's nightstand where a bright blue LED is exactly what most buyers don't want.
It would be interesting to know the who and how of the fiber cut. We're a tiny company in the heartland and have seen two separate fiber cuts in different parts of the state. Both tickets indicated that they were believed to be malicious, intentional cuts. In one case, fiber was cut in two places many hundreds of meters apart.
What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.
In my neck of the woods, we have mostly aerial fiber and not a lot of redundancy, so I hear about a lot of of fiber cuts. In the past several years we've had a lot of wires downed by trees, a couple by cars running into poles, several cuts that seem like intentional cuts --- usually attributed to people cutting lines to try to steal copper, a couple times people shooting down cables cause shooting things is fun; and then we also have tree trimmers that trim the fiber instead, and we also had an underwater cable taken out by someone driving a piling in the wrong place (I've seen a report saying the place not to disturb was clearly marked).
Outside plant is basically indefensible, so if you can't trust humans not to destroy it, you've got problems.
Mid 1980s, I worked at an record store that was also heavy into stereos and other audio / visual equipment. We were fortunate enough to have not only a huge 40" Sony set (which weighed about 300lbs) but also a 36" Fisher console set that I think weighed close to 400lbs. So, so much heavy glass.
There were lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to buy one of these behemoths at the time (cost, weight, heat) but maybe the most significant was how bad NTSC video looked when you spread it across a 40" screen. I recently pulled out an old laserdisc player and connected it to a 65" OLED set and it looks absolutely terrible.
One does not do it like that. There needs to be a hardware video signal upscaler in between. Of which many different versions at different capability and price points exist.
My first job out of uni in the mid 2000s was working on line doubling and film mode detection for Imagination Technologies (makers of the graphics chip in the Dreamcast). Faroudja was our benchmark!
Felt like a real baller with a giant HDTV on my desk, but less fun was watching test scenes from Titanic at 1FPS over and over.
Wow :) I got a 18 inch office-display by Fujitsu-Siemens with S-PVA panel, long ago.
Broke down after a long time. Repaired it by resoldering some simple capacitors.
During the repair I had a look at the chips. One (or two?)had that Faroudja label on it.
At the time I didn't know about that, and just wondered WTF is that? Searched the net and "got it". They meanwhile got bought up by someone, Wiki as of now says STMicroelectronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroudja
That display is still working but mostly gathering dust, some 8800 km away from me, atop a 4x kvm, managing some old stuff, also gathering dust :)
Laserdisc will output 480i rather than 240p (it's just an encoding of the NTSC signal) and lag isn't really an issue, and the linked page doesn't really cover the other advantages. I can imagine that a TV's scaler isn't optimised for composite signals (or even ingesting and filtering the composite signals in the first place), but also laserdisc is just going to look kind of bad compared to modern formats even under the best of circumstances. Even back in the 90s, when encoders were at their worst, DVD was considered a meaningful step up from laserdisc.
My link has a link to 240p, which also goes into 480i.
That aside, all that stuff was made for CRT technology, with dot/slit masks, and phospors with varying intensity of afterglow. Bigger computer CRT screens worked similar in principle, just not interlaced(mostly), and higher resolutions.
What they both have in common is resolution independency within their technical limits.
Flat displays of today don't have that, no matter which panel technology they are based on.
Their internal upscalers may compensate for the resolution, but not for the effects of phosphor, and it's afterglow, after the beam raced over them, until its hitting them again, through the mask.
There is a reason that hardware stuff exists, more so than much so called 'audiophile' stuff, though it's still 'niche'. Once you have seen it in direct comparison, with, or without, you'll know.
Or you've been lucky, and have a really good screen.
Or bad eyesight/perception, not noticing the difference.
^^^^ Not meant to be condescending, but I've seen that IRL.
When my dad's old Sony KV-25XBR bit the dust, he replaced it with a 32" Toshiba flat-screen CRT. That thing was a chunk indeed.
In my opinion, even though it was really quite a good set, you're absolutely right about NTSC looking horrible on big screens. From day one I noticed that the scan lines very much made it look like watching through very fine Venetian blinds.
Upscaling NTSC and putting it on a big flat panel isn't really so great either.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm
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