Classical listeners have a really big advantage in dialing in a system. Just about all classical music has been recorded  multiple upon multiple times by various  orchestras and various reproduction companies. You have the luxury of being able to start with the best recording of a piece to begin with. The human voice is also mostly removed from the equation...and that's a real biggie in my opinion. The piano seems to be a really difficult instrument to reproduce and that's not an issue.

Most modern pop recordings aren't offered in various formats and the band is the band. The lead vocalist is the lead vocalist. You are mostly stuck with whatever compromises the band, the studio and the sound engineer decides will sell more records from having been heard on the radio played through a car stereo.

Gordon wasn't shy about saying that unamplified classical music was the reference to use in determining the sound of a piece of equipment or assembled system. It was not only because he listened to classical music, but because he recognized the impossible task of using inconsistant source material that has been subjected to too much unnatural electronic manipulation as a starting point. If frequency equalization was the answer, we'd all buy equalizers and be done with it. If soundstaging was the answer, we'd all buy narrow baffle loudspeakers and subwoofers and be done with it.

There's no doubt in my mind that Gordon's approach is the only valid approach to capturing as much of the essence of what's real and live about sound. But, that's not to say that people shouldn't tune and tweak and do everything they want to tailor the sound more to their liking with the style and quality limitations of the source material they enjoy listening to. Just don't try to delude yourself into thinking it's not doing anything to any of the other aspects of natural sound. Or, at least understand that the degree of skepticism exists for a reason and is only heightened when the person making the claim has a financial interest in making the claim. That's certainly not to say that I don't appreciate someone's experience and knowledge and enthusiasm. I would never have believed that cables could make as much difference in sound as they do if I hadn't heard it for myself and attempted to understand why. Hundreds of hours of settling? Now that was laughable...until I heard it for myself. But, and this is the kicker, I also discovered that they can sound different without sounding better. There was always a trade being made and I had to decide if the trade was worthwhile for myself.

If I can easily tune my system to improve the sound of any recording with any of my playback front ends, I'm certainly interested!

 That's where I'm at Chris. The opinion wars mean very little to me. I'm about opening up and tuning in. Audiophiles will debate forever, never gonna change that, don't want to. Where I come from if you haven't been under the hood of your system you don't know how it really sounds anyway. It's just a pretty box out of tune.

michael green

MGA/RoomTune

From my take there seems to be huge debate on tuning vs setup. The thing that seems to be lost is that there is a correct sound to every recording. We may not know it, but if you went back the mixing room you would hear the harmonic textures of the instruments as well could measure what the decay times for those harmonics and know what the sound is supposed to be. Now with that said, we can't do that but at least we know there is an answer if we want to faithfully reproduce the sound.

Now there are a lot of variables that make this close to impossible to achieve in practice today, but my understanding has always been simple. try to create the most neutral room and setup that has the best chance of getting the musical harmonics correct. i.e. a room with flat frequency response and uniform decay times (and as anyone knows this can be a challenge). To me the hallmarks of a great system are one that is a window into the studio and sometimes there is greatness and sometimes there is failure on the other side of that window. I don't understand how you can make a bad recording sound good without destroying the balance need for a good recording to shine. (unless you wanted to move speakers all the time, which i don't think is a real option for most).

Also on the digital front. I have always understood that the real time audio decoding process (D/A conversion) is prone to errors and there are is not time for correction but I don't understand how vibrations can effect a data signal (i.e. info from a NAS to a PC). Now i have no doubt that the vibration changes in the signal but electronics have a threshold that will determine if it is a 0 or a 1 (voltage or no voltage). While I don't have direct knowledge in this, I have friends with PhD in signal analysis and they tell me that a lot needs to happen for this threshold not to register properly hence why distortion on digital cables doesn't make a difference because the tolerances are so wide to registering the signal. Also when a computer reads the NAS it is using network and computer protocols that should have time to correct an error?

Not trying to be argumentive here but are the results of your NAS test published anywhere, how many read errors did you find? Was there any hard data behind why the sound was different?

Audiophile2000

Thank you so much for your post! This is the type of posting I was hoping to see here. Not that the other posts were bad, but your post has real meat on the bones. So Again thank you.

The recording and audiophile world is so young and when I started finding these, I don't want to call them discoveries but I guess they are, I was the first one to say I was shocked. My listening/engineering/designing world turned upside down, or maybe right side up.

On the tuning vs setup. The two are a part of each other so I wouldn't say that it would be a "vs" thing. Tuning and setup work together.

As far as the acoustic and testing parts go, I think the best way is to  have a show and tell. I would be interested in setting up something and those who want to come listen and test can come and do their own thing. I say this because when you make something variable it literally will do what you want. The digital testing could be done again at the same time and Stereophile or who ever could do their own testing and publish the results. I'm not very interested in looking at charts and graphs but I'm sure others are. I would be very interested though in doing the tests cause I've done tons of them, and I enjoy that part. It's pretty shocking. I could describe the listening parts if anyone would like, but hearing is where it is at. The tests that I like are the signal tests, where you can do things like variably focus things in the soundstage. For example you would say make the drum so I can hear the skin but not the body, and I would variably tune that in. Or I could go the other way, first you would hear the skin, then the frame would fill in, then the body, then the halo, then the space around it, and finally the space of the room it was in. I'm not mentioning names here cause it's not my intent, but we setup some of the biggies and made them sound pretty good, everyone made notes, then I in the other room put on the tunable setup and would according to the listener tune it in to sound the same as what they were hearing with the high end piece. After that I would ask them to make a suggestion of what they would like changed, and I would do it for them. People came all the way from Japan to hear this. pretty cool

On the NAS tests I don't see any reason why you couldn't talk to the fella who was doing it if you and he wanted to. let me know

michael green

MGA/RoomTune

Hi Guys

I began a thread on soundstages so we can talk about them together if you would like. I thought I would do this so others and some on here don't feel I or anyone is going off topic.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/does-your-system-play-hall

michael green

MGA/RoomTune