Best eq adjusments?

I almost forgot; Madison, Mendham and Sterling, too.

Small world, eh?

Let me guess; AT&T/Bell or a Pharma Company?

 

Nabisco, Schindler Elevator, M&M, and Beneficial as an employee, and about 4 different Pharmas as an independent consultant.

REV

 

I forgot about the Cracker Factory! I worked in EH (on RT 10) for 8 years back in the 1970's/80's.

I'd taken the tour of M&M Mars in Hackettstown(?) years ago. MMMMMMMM-CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!! (drool):hungry:

I still have a few friends in the Pharma biz- Novartis, actually.

 

Uhhh...shouldn't you guys be PM'ing each other about these personal data instead of displaying them in public???

 

None of this is anything that can't be found on Twitbook or whatever, but you're probably right, Thai.

Sorry for the waste of bandwidth, gang!

 

After years of listening to great stereos costing tens of thousands of dollars and owning a great pair of ears that were tested as flat out to 15 khz I really have to make two points regarding this post.

First, the room makes all the difference. And where you sit in the room makes all the difference too. There are rooms that are live and require high end attenuation and there are rooms that will not reproduce bass no matter where you sit. An extreme example would be to judge the exact same high end stereo in a high absorption acoustic chamber and then take it to a room with painted walls and wood floors. Sound different? you bet. So I take complete exception to anyone that says all you have to do is buy very expensive equipment, hook'em up with very expensive cables and play them flat. If you really want to get the right sound ideally you would have to use an FFT analyzer and put a microphone array where your ears would ideally be and adjust the frequency response to flat using a graphic equalizer and white noise. This should take into account room acoustics, however you lose phase continuity through multiple filters and after all this you still might not like how it sounds because our ears are all different. What a mess!!!!

My second point is to disagree that it's useless to try to set up a decent stereo in a car because unlike most listening environments a car is a very controlled acoustic space. Your head is in the same place all the time and the materials and interiors are the same (except you might need to retune for leather or cloth) so ideally a system could be tuned exactly to reproduce flat mag and phase response at where the driver's ears are. Is anyone doing this? Not sure. Bose talks about this stuff so maybe they do buy I have never listened to one of their factory installed systems.

To comment on source material, this is a real crapshoot. Ideally one has to decide whether he listens to music to evaluate the sound of a cymbal on a direct to disk recording or puts up with a recording like Aqualung because he really likes "Cross Eyed Mary". Is it the sound or the content? In my case, I'm inclined to chose the content, but only to a point i.e. I listen to "Cross Eyed Mary" and love the song but always lament the rotten recording everytime I listen to it. Nirvana to me is a song I love recorded beautifully (Like Spock's Beard's "At the End of the Day" on V).

As you can tell, this issue has been a pet peeve for a long time for me so please don't take it personally. Comments and disussion are very welcome

 

What is your opinion on Audyssey auto room correction and eq? Personally, i am a big fan of Audyssey...i have it in my theater room. For me (and my room), Audyssey makes a huge difference.

As for the car audio stuff, i wrote this earlier:

For me, a perfect car system is not one that sounds great at one location (driver's seat for example), but a system that sounds good at every seating position. And unless it is a sound effect, you should not hear all the music coming from one corner or one speaker. I think that this is the basis for the 7.1 channel architecture systems (with discreet 5.1 surround sound) in high end factory car audio systems these days.

In our Prius JBL, i think that JBL did a really good job with the limited amount of speakers and a 2-channel system. Yet, for the most part, every seat in the Prius gets decent staging and sound quality. For me, the worst seat in the Prius is the front passenger...but still, a decent setup for what it is.