Huh, Is this correct? Processor is far more important than Amplifier?

heiney9

Fatigue has been gone from my rig for a long time, no matter what type of recording is played. You have some gear or room issues to work on if you are finding things fatiguing.

H9

Serendipity

heiney9 wrote: »

Fatigue has been gone from my rig for a long time, no matter what type of recording is played. You have some gear or room issues to work on if you are finding things fatiguing.

H9

I found the PolkFest rigs to all be fatiguing, and said that while I was there.

You can PM doctor r or George Daniel because this was quite a long conversation at PolkFest and too long to post.

Serendipity

For the record, I come out of every hi-fi show (whether it be the Home Entertainment Show 2005 in NYC or the high-end audio at the Venetian at CES or even PolkFest) felling too much high-end "glare" and fatigue from the sound. Obviously what everyone hears is different, so a rig that is fatiguing to some may be completely listenable to another.

F1nut

pearsall001 wrote: »

And Jesse my man, throw some MIT cables on your HT rig & you'll know what I'm talking about. And as far as sitting off to the right...that's the beauty of having an exceptional sounding room, It doesn't matter where I sit. If you have to sit in a "sweet spot" then your room needs a whole lot of work.

The HT rig runs MIT cables and I still don't know what you're talking about.

I found the best sound from your rig was when I sat in the sweet spot, on the coffee table.

cstmar01

Serendipity wrote: »

I agree, that's why I still haven't purchased the Bose 901's yet. Although I did like the "sameness" in the sound, it's just different from my DefTechs, not really sure how to explain it. Lots of times in the Bose store the salesman would demo a modern track (anything from Shania Twain to OutKast), and I'm like "wow, these are really listenable and remove the digital fatigue I usually get".However, I have come to the conclusion that I simply have a more revealing system and fully admit that my system doesn't sound good on certain recordings.

I like to listen to all speakers with an open mind and IMO, if you are running super-detailed speakers (like FocalJMLab Grand Utopia with Be tweeters) and have very detailed, revealing gear, many pop hits which are usually over-compressed are hard to listen to.
Certain gear (such as pin-point accurate DACs, Parasound pre/pros, and amps such as the Bryston 4B-SST seem very revealing to me and therefore, I have a hard time listening to on certain source material).

But for the majority of what I listen to, it's not much of a problem. Again, YMMV.

Well for one the Bose Store is designed to showcase their stuff by going thru a lot of work in terms of placement, room design, etc to make their stuff sound a certain way.

You need to demo them in your own house. I work with a guy who used to be a manager of a Bose store. He said as well that they would not set up their own stuff but the company would send them people to come in and set up everything to a certain way so that it would have the best sound performance. Also their theater room was treated beyond belief. Also they had preselected tracks that were only allowed and you couldn't put anything else into the system. If you tried you were told to leave.

Also IMO music is and issue as well. If you listen to highly compressed pop music it sounds like it. Very easy to tell when something is running hot or is highly compressed as your whole sound stage is gone.

IMO a high end AVR is still lacking to me the feel of a good pre amp for 2 channel.

heiney9

If everything in your rig sounds the same (like serendipity describes the 901's), then it's an EPIC FAIL.

H9

cstmar01

heiney9 wrote: »

If everything in your rig sounds the same (like serendipity describes the 901's), then it's an EPIC FAIL.

H9

very true. If everythign sounds the same (like the Bose) then to me there is a problem. Not all music sounds the same depending on how it was recorded. Don't beleive me? I'll send you two great CD's that show how HORRIBLE music can sound. The one sounds like ants are playing the instruments and their is a curtain in front of them.

The other is highly compressed and has an annoying click which sounds like a metronome (sp?) keeping beat. Both are smaller groups not well known and was some of their early work. It shows.

KayMan2

WilliamM2 wrote: »

I don't know where the dealer got the 1mv to 1v idea, most source components will put out 2 volts, so the pre-pro is quite often attenuating the signal, not amplifying it. And you certainly won't be continuously sending 1v to the amplifier, unless you want to go deaf.

That said, the processor is important, and with modern room correction has the potential to make a much larger difference to the sound than the amp. But you still need both.

William,
In your case, the source is doing majority of the amplification. The DAC chip (Burr-Brown / Texas Instruments etc.) converts the Digital signal like DTS-HD MA to Analog signal. Now if you go to TI.com and look at the specifications PDF file for their Burr-Brown DAC, they put out a very weak signal at around 20mV. There is definitely massive amplification going on inside the pre-processor or source components to put out a 1-2v signal at the RCA connection.


The TI website with specifications for DACs you find in most pre-pro / sources:
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?familyId=582&sectionId=630&tabId=2701&family=analog&uiTemplateId=AUDIO_PRDSRCH_T


Here is a nice primer on how DACs work, especially pages 2 and 8:
http://www.me.gatech.edu/charles.ume/me4447_6405Spring03/DAC.pdf

Serendipity

Maybe some people prefer the smoothness/sameness in the sound? No two sets of ears are the same, I do not have the ability to hear what your ears are hearing and vice versa, and some people are more sensitive to high and low frequencies (I personally hear lots of tweeter glare and low-end "thump" in most systems) so I guess this is a case of different strokes for different folks...