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Sound Systems, What Do You Like?



Posts: 8   Visited by: 25 users
02.06.2016 - 20:19
Enteroctopus

To be clear, I'm talking systems, not just amps or speakers, so everything even including the room you listen in. What matters, what doesn't? Do you have multiple sets of speakers, say a Burger King drive-thru speaker for your trOO black metal and some Harman Kardon's for your vinyl Jazz collection?

My opinion (you knew it was coming): it's hard to beat your car. Acoustically, it's the best space for listening unless you're a millionaire with the time and/or money to invest in acoustically treating a room which, let's be honest, gets expensive. It also involves making drastic changes to the room itself, so forget having a "dual purpose" living room/kitchen with kids running all over the place. Who has space that is is suitable for high quality listening? Everyone! (Assuming you drive)

Why a car? Basically it's a "fuzz box," very similar to a studio vocal booth. That is to say it's acoustically "dead" with a reverb time in the thousandths of a second. I actually cut vocals in my car once for this exact reason. There is enough "fuzz" in terms of seat cushions to suck up most unwanted activity. In fact, that stuff they use to line your seat cushions is similar to what has been used in acoustic panels. It might even be the same stuff, depends on your seats and the panels. Acoustic paneling you've already paid for? Yes.

We do have one problem: space, i.e. where the Hell do you put the speakers? In my case I just use the back seats. It's a sacrifice, but if I ever need to I will just dump the speakers in the trunk. Hasn't happened yet, and probably won't. What I had was a mediocre set of home stereo speakers, so I replaced the woofers with a pair of Peavey Scorpion 10's from an old bass guitar cab and left the rest as-is. A bit of fiberglass insulation stuffed in the speaker cavity won't hurt, either. Together, the 10's act as a passive sub, and depending on how I arrange them they can achieve quite a bit bass-wise. It doesn't take much in terms of wattage to get impressive sounding low end from two industrial-grade 10's in a decent box.

Why is that? Well, if you have "properly designed" speaker cabinets the efficiency of the unit grows considerably over a "sub" in a lunch box design. Subs move a lot of air, and if you think about a man in a kayak, a fat person in a swimming pool will have a lot easier time moving water than a thin person. You want the air to move, not your sub, so ideally you want a fat man anchored to the concrete. I've got heavy wooden boxes sitting on dense foam. The equal and opposite reaction of the box moving is silenced, and I don't have to tear my car apart piece-by-piece, rebuild and rewire it to accomplish this. I just take advantage of two large acoustic aborbers I happen to have sitting around (aka "back seats") to act as isolation.

When I go to sell the car I'll just take my "system" with me and install it in the new car...

Coming improvements: I have purchased a Blaupunkt head unit which should give me plenty of wattage. Tonight I will install the Blaupunkt and find out how all of this sounds. I've had a little sneak preview with the Pioneer and the old shitty 12's in the old car. It sounded pretty darn good, to be honest. Solid 10's weighing in at 4-5 times the mass of the previous turds will definitely make a difference, and I will know how much difference as soon as I have an amp that will drive them.

That's my system of choice because small improvements will make a HUGE difference. Of course I am gradually improving my living room at the same time, but the car will sound worlds better a lot faster than the living room for the simple fact that it's simpler, smaller, and focused around a single purpose: rocking me while I drive. The living room has to serve 10 other purposes at the same time, not to mention being baby proof!!

In my living room: Honey, how about this 7-foot tall bass trap? "WILL IT FALL ON THE BABY?!"

How about you? What's your system of choice?
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17.06.2016 - 02:43
Overrwatcher

Sadly I don't have the car or money for a good sound system. It's a shame, with a good sound system a lot of deathcore music really stands out. Stuff from Thy Art Is Murder and oldschool Chelsea Grin are exceptionally heavy with a good sub.
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Overr's List Of Worthwhile Deathcore Albums

Written by Dr. Strawberry on 12.06.2016 at 19:43

Overwatcher, MS Xena, crumbled him in no time. MS needs you to kill the boredom in here.
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29.06.2016 - 20:18
Enteroctopus

Written by Overrwatcher on 17.06.2016 at 02:43

Sadly I don't have the car or money for a good sound system. It's a shame, with a good sound system a lot of deathcore music really stands out. Stuff from Thy Art Is Murder and oldschool Chelsea Grin are exceptionally heavy with a good sub.

That's kind of the point of my system: minimal cost. I bet you could trick out the whole thing for less than $100 if you do some legwork.

You could probably pick up an old set of decent "tower" speakers at a thrift shop or garage sale. They will plug into your speaker wires from the trunk, just check your polarity. A pair of 12's from a set of towers will be a fair enough "sub," you might just boost 60-125 Hz to achieve that.

As for a headunit, decent Pioneers can be had for $75-100.

The thing with sound equipment is this tech hasn't really improved much since the 1970's. Things go in and out of style, and right now people are dumping their towers because of the whole home theater movement. Lots of people just see them as pieces of junk collecting dust, or a risk for their toddler to pull over and get hurt and they junk 'em. So what if they're 30 years old? They ought to sound good.

Sound is a real pecker-waving contest, to be honest. People throw a lot of money at it like they do cars or any other stupid investment. You can achieve a lot with a bit of experimentation, especially if you're not afraid to blow an amp now and then, which you will if you tinker around with this stuff enough. Collect castoffs and you won't mind frying something you didn't pay for anyway.

Best investment I made recently was an 80 Hz crossover in the den. Improved the sound in there quite a bit. Total cost: $16 US and a bit of solder. Flux fumes will probably lead to my early death, but it will be worth it. Who wants to live forever anyway?
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15.07.2016 - 08:12
Fulcrum

Sadly, the car is among the worst places to listen to music and requires massive effort to make it sound good (it can indeed). And Harman Kardon is just a generic brand of entry level audio stuff which I would not rate as hi-fi. They're not much different of Sony, Pioneer, Yamaha and other lo-fi companies that rely on heavy market presence. As a group, HK do own some brands which are much better for music but not sold under the HK badge.

Jazz and metal indeed do not require differently tuned sound systems - but classical music may benefit from it. In general, I find metal music to sound best with some less precise audio system - higher group delay in the 50-100Hz region does make it more pleasant where higher 2nd order distortion can help too. Super precise systems do reveal flaws in recordings & play easily and with metal you'd end up finding too many, unfortunately. For classics - a several things are essential (which would benefit the others too) - very large cone area for bass duties duties - at least a well designed 11-12" hifi woofer or 15" pro, better to have two per speaker, driven by its own solid state amp with massive capacitor bank at disposal - an Aleph J amp would be nice for this duty - a large midwoofer to cover above, a 6.5" or 8" with extended reach - or even better if you have the space - a frontloaded mid horn driven by a good quality compression driver supplemented by another horn (separate to reduce horn distortion) for the higher range with both midbass/high frequency section driven by a very high quality SET amp. You can hardly go wrong with such setup.

Room acoustics (as is a car but with many more limitations) is easily ignored in the most critical bands by using controlled directivity - something many diy-ers fail to realize and aim for small drivers because of beaming concerns.
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21.07.2016 - 22:08
Enteroctopus

You seem very knowledgeable Fulcrum. I agree on HK: Decent speakers, but you're buying a name. If I were going out to buy a set of hi-fi speakers I'd probably go Bose or Polk. I've always liked them, personal taste. I've read Polk tests out fairly flat, but people complain about the bass response. Makes sense if you're flat - bass response is gonna suck!

I would say I take a more scientific approach and try to get everything in the chain right from CD or sound file to my ear drum. There are a lot of factors in there. Placement is important and listening position is very important. If you get that wrong it won't matter what gear you've got because you're room is gonna kill the experience. Background noise, interference. I also run an ASIO sound card, Midiman Delta 1010. I've recorded and mixed on in, but it's great for music and home theater, although you have to monkey with it a bit for movies.

Best thing I did was move the couch forward.

As for my car as long as I get enough wattage through those 10's in the back seat I'm good to go. I can run about 83 dB and sound's pretty good to me, below that the woofers aren't really moving and I lose the punch of the kick drum just a bit. I have an EQ setup for lower volume listening, boosting 60 and 120 Hz, also high shelf boost. I hate eqing, though, prefer just to listen loud!

I always run sound through the AUX. Tried Bluetooth and that's just shit. I use that for backyard parties occasionally, but I'm not really listening to the music anyway in that situation. Want good sound? Run wires. Headphone jacks are meh, but it's lightyears better than wireless. Don't know what it would cost to run SPIDF in my car, but that's a bit ridiculous. Headphone jack it is! Or a CD.

There's a lot you can do to improve your experience, even with just consumer quality stuff. Wiring it and placing it right goes a long way.
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07.08.2016 - 02:06
Fulcrum

Bose is crap. I have taken apart a few, both autosound and home. They rely on heavy marketing and sometimes introduce pretty common, but unnatural ideas, usually found in hifi or hi-end, to the ordinary consumer and he is fascinated how they did it.

Polk are more towards hifi although I do not like their sound, its muffled. One of their Rsi line used the Vifa XT25 which is a very fine tweeter (cheap and incredible if used properly), although they painted the phase plug in copper colour. But their low end stuff is exactly such - low end.

Bass response has a lot to do with room modes and speaker placement. Any nearby boundary would load the speaker and reduce its omnidirectional pattern, thus boosting a fraction of its power response. Its complicated and I won't go into details but if you want real musical experience, and music is emotion, you need to shove off modern iTunes, Spotify and etc. The least evil is a good CD player as most stuff is still issued on CD. Anything that runs a PCM63, PCM1702/1704, TDA1541 (that's an old guy that still kicks ass) would sound good. The first one is hard to find, it was built initially for the US army, its a 20bit DA/C and is still perhaps the best one ever done. Problem is, a single chip costed around USD100 and it was abandoned by the companies that dared to use it (Parasound, Wadia, Mark Levinson did). Then you need a good amp - here its pricey unless you have some basic DIY skills to build your own - go to chipamp and ask Brian - he has LM3886 Overture kits for pennies. This one sounds good and can be build with little knowledge and money. If you want to go above - tubes or some of the Aleph/First Watt amps - both top of the cake. Tubes require good output transformers to sound good, Tamura cost more than USD800/piece which puts many away. Lundahl from Sweden, Sowther from the UK and Jack from Electraprint make very fine transformers too. Solid state Pass designed amps are attractive (kits are on diyaudio.com) but operate in class A and require lots of money for capacitors in the power supply and heatsinks. if you want a readymade amp - the Audiolab gear has good price/performance ratio (an LM3886 amp would decimate it).

Speakers - those that are well designed cost over USD10, 000 a pair but there are lots of diy websites, like troels gravesen and tony gee's websites. Zaph (John Krutke) also has several projects but I don't like his builds, they'r too cold engineered and have been reported to sound exactly as such. Not hard to build once you know what parts you need. Troels is a very nice guy, I have exchanged some e-mails with him.

I haven't built any of the designs they offer (I design my own and also commercial speakers) but Troels' designs have been praised by the DIY community. Don't get fooled by thinking a brand, like HK or Polk would be superior to DIY-ers - if the later is build correctly - they are torn into pieces in the same price range. When you open such big brand speakers, like Yamaha for example which I opened last month, you'd find very crude crossovers (minimalist) with iron cored inductors, electrolytic polar caps (soldered with opposite polarity to make them bipolar) and cement inductive resistors driving loudspeaker drivers with very cheap look, thin steel frames and lots of glue, everywhere. Build quality is often mediocre with misaligned joints, no bracing and thin enclosure walls. With one word - cheap. So you buy a shiny speaker which has many dark secrets inside Those that cost USD650-800/pair usually employ very cheap drive units, costing less than $10 each but are designed properly and use their limits and compensate for their flaws with tricks in the crossover

My system of choice? I have built my own speakers, using Scanspeak Revelator woofer and tweeter in a sand filled curved enclosure with 39mm side walls and 60mm front baffle, using 2nd order Linkwitz Riley crossover (sounded and measured the best) for both with rive units physically time aligned (google can help you here) and the front baffle is chamfered and wrapped in leather. They're driven by an amp I built which is a hybrid - a tube (6N23P) cathode follower driving a solid state output stage and source is a Parasound CD/Transport & Parasound DA/C (upgraded to PCM63K and better digital filter). Its not something spectacular but I will take on it during the Christmas holidays and a new set of speakers and upgraded amp will come alive.
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20.12.2016 - 01:07
DoomGuild
Account deleted
I have some really expensive JL Audio speakers in my truck. The truck only has six speaker spots but we cut out some holes so now I have a total of 8 speakers. I sometimes go on drives just so I can listen to music.
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21.08.2017 - 07:31
MetalSpider

The sound system in my car is decent enough (2016 Mazda 3). Not the greatest and when I'm on the highway, I definitely have to crank it quite a bit because of road and wind noise.

My home system is a pair of Fostex TH-X00 Mahogany headphones, a Schiit Asgard Amp and an Audioquest Dragonfly USB DAC. I used to have KRK Rokit 6 external speakers but sold them a while back.
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