[Daygloworange]

What are the personal goals your are trying to achieve with your system? Are you looking to reproduce the live event? Are you looking to have your system simply sound good to your ears on the majority of music in your collection? Do you want to hear it like the engineers meant it to sound like?

No debating, no right or wrong, just describe your personal goals in your system design.

Cheers

[gonefishin]

What are the personal goals your are trying to achieve with your system? Are you looking to reproduce the live event? Are you looking to have your system simply sound good to your ears on the majority of music in your collection? Do you want to hear it like the engineers meant it to sound like?

No debating, no right or wrong, just describe your personal goals in your system design.

Cheers

What are the personal goals your are trying to achieve with your system? Are you looking to reproduce the live event?

    Hi Dayglow

  (to me)  I am trying to recreate the sound of the actual instruments (not so much any live event...but what the real instrument sounds like to me).  My main concerns are tone, clarity, detail, cohesiveness and dynamics.  After this imaging is also given importance with some soundstaging qualities falling a bit behind the rest of the field.  I also want to meet these "design goals" at low volumes (first and foremost), but with the ability to play at higher levels while preserving the same characteristics.

    My design goals for my second system (yet to start building) are bit more euphoric.  It will be a single driver (think Lowther pm2a's in Medallion cabinets) with low powered power tubes.  I've got some spare 45 tube and 10Y tubes that need a home some day .

 

Are you looking to have your system simply sound good to your ears on the majority of music in your collection?

   Yes.  But my collection may look a bit different than most.

Do you want to hear it like the engineers meant it to sound like?

   We can only speculate what the engineer was thinking, this isn't of major importance to me.

  take care,
   dan

[mcgsxr]

Decent question.

I am not trying to exactly reproduce the live event.  I would like to approach it, but not at the expense of how other music sounds...

I want it to sound good to me, in my room, with my music.  That music varies quite a bit - from Crystal Method through Brahms, so it is quite a span.  No rap, no country, no metal, but a large portion of classical, pop, alternative from the late 80's through mid 90's, trance, progressive house, spacemusic etc.

I will give up frequency extension, for midrange magic.
I will give up imaging, for coherency.
I will operate on a very low budget, and have very high demands.
I will gladly exchange looks for sound.
I will DIY!

Not that I want to, but I am willing to, and to a very real extent, have in my system.

[chadh]

I'm still new to all of this audio stuff.  I've been putting together a system for the past few years - but I lack real experience.  I haven't heard many other systems.  I have to guess what people mean when they start using various audiophile-approved adjectives.  So I don't even know how to describe what I'm looking to achieve.  But what I find, more and more, is that while I listen to my music, things stick in my mind - portions of the music, or aspects of the music, that either (1) leave me feeling disappointed, as though somehow I can tell that this could sound so much better, if only I could find a way to make it happen; or (2) leave me breathless, convinced that in some particular dimension the system is giving me exactly what I want.

I want my system to be quiet, and to reveal a certain level of detail.  I want to hear Cassandra Wilson's lips part, and her tongue move from the roof of her mouth when she sings "You Don't Know What Love Is."

I want what I imagine people call "coherency" (but i could be wrong):  when Cassandra Wilson sings "Easy Rider", and her voice gets deeper and deeper until she hits that incredibly low note, I want it to sound like it's the same Cassandra Wilson all the way through, and not a bunch of different Cassandra Wilsons singing different parts.

I want my system to convey not just accurate pitch, but textures of the music.  I want to be able to feel the difference in the way things are played.  When Mark Knopfler plays the solo in "Single-Handed Sailor", I want to be thrilled with how his tone changes from clear and bell-like to that gently distorted, slightly fuzzy tone that makes my eyes roll back in my head.

I want my system to make me feel the music right through my body.  That means it has to produce bass.  Not deep bass, necessarily.  But the frequencies that give a lot of music its drive.  I want to feel "Give me Shelter", irrepressible and urgent, with rhythms into which I can practically sink my teeth.

I want my system to to produce lots of noise effortlessly.  I think this is related to the previous point, but I'm not sure, as this is something that I'm still to find.  It's not volume I want.  But it's something that is clearly related to volume.  When it's missing, I think "I'll just turn up the volume and that will help."  But the volume never quite helps.  It almost makes it worse, as it demonstrates that I'm not really going to be able to satisfy myself.  When the Tallis Scholars reach a dramatic crescendo, I want to feel their voices engulfing me in sound.  I want to drown in the sound, rather than sit in my living room listening to the music coming out of my system.  It's almost a sheer quantity of sound that I want, rather than just a level.

Imaging and stuff like that has never seemed a very big deal.  But maybe that's because I've never really heard great imaging.  ( I heard one system at a store once, that should have had great imaging.  And I remember noticing the instruments spread out across the stage, but this was while I was being bored by a pretty lifeless presentation of pretty lifeless music).

Chad

[AB]

Mark in Canada wrote;

I will gladly exchange looks for sound.

Did you mean to write this?

[AB]

What Chad said.

Way to write, man. Excellent.

[aerius]

I want the system to make me happy.  Can I put this into words?  Not really, that's like trying to describe sex to a virgin.  It's basically one of those "I'll know it when I hear it" things, there's a bunch of things I'm looking for, I don't know how they fit together in the big picture, but when things fit together right it's like "yeah, that's good, I like it", and I'm happy.

[nodiak]

My room is really limiting what can be achieved now, so at this point I want to stop trying pieces of gear so much, I was missing out on the time to enjoy. So I went with enjoying music as a sensual experience. It has to make my body feel good. Not overly done with thick euphonics at all, just a great mix of clarity so I can go into the music and follow any part of it, and painless reproduction so I can listen all day. This room is small enough that it can play plenty loud effortlessly.
I haven't gotten restless with the electronics of this system, but it's inevitable to want to try new things. Speakers are the endless hobby so they get swapped at times.
I'm not very anal because there is so much difference in quality of cd's and lp's it's not worth it to me to get the system perfect and suffer for it. Besides, distortion is fundamental to every step along the way. However I hope to hear some of the uber systems others have created some day.

Don

[JLM]

Pure, simple, and inexpensive reproduction of digital audio media.

Reproduce exactly what is encoded on the media.  Any more or less is a form of distortion.  No more complicated than it has to be.  Keep the monetary investment balanced with the rest of my life and values.

[konut]

I want my main system to reproduce the material coming from the source with as little distortion as possible, as loud as possible, with as wide a bandwidth as my budget will allow.

[mcgsxr]

Mark in Canada wrote;

I will gladly exchange looks for sound.

Did you mean to write this?

Absolutely, my gear looks like crap, other than the SB3, it is all DIY, or salvaged, but it plays wonderful music!

[AB]

LOL. I originally read that absolutely 180 degrees out of phase... 

[bluewax]

Awesome question...

At any given moment, my reference playlist is an amalgam of the organic and the artificial, from Tibetan singing bowls to deep, abstract electronica. It all makes sense when each, though born of such variant methods and media, emerges such that my system no longer simply provides a window into the artistry, but rather dissolves away, leaving me (though too infrequently still) to engage the moment unencumbered by concerns over issues of conveyance.

[dwk]

First, my 'subjective' goal is to play my music so that it is enjoyable. This basically means 'reproduce the recording' so I'm aiming for neutral and low distortion, and in particular I don't subscribe to either the 'reproduce the live event' (little that i listen to really has a 'live reference' so it's kinda meaningless) or the 'performer is in your room' ideas (room influences shouldn't dominate). For a long time, I was going for a 'best possible sound' or 'audiophile cred' system, but I'm now much much happier having turned to 'best possible sound *IN MY ROOM*'. This is important largely because my room is really tough by normal standards - small and narrow at 7x16 w/7' ceilings, and IMHO the typical wide-dispersion audiophile speaker would have been a disaster.

Objectively, this led me down the 'controlled directivity' road, and the beginnings of understanding just how critical the room/speaker interface is.  I'm beginning to see the payoff.  The really cool thing is that by starting with controlled directivity and what it takes to do it 'properly', I got a whole bunch of other good things for free - high efficiency, low distortion, insane headroom and (somewhat unexpectedly) a relatively modest price tag (by 'high-end' standards, anyway).

I'm not done yet, but the current state already makes me believe that I'm on the right path.

[Scotty]

I did not set out to design a system,I just wanted a collection of gear which preserved as much of the essential dynamic life in the recording as possible. I chose equipment based on its' ability to reproduce the information it received with Hi Fidelity. The final piece of the system was the loudspeakers which cover a
bandwidth of greater than 20Hz to 20kHz in my listening room at a sensitivity of 95dB. The realism with which music is reproduced is quite startling at times and never fails to draw me into the performance. The preservation of dynamic life and
detail in the recording at very low listening levels was a welcome and unexpected
bonus which is handy during late night listening sessions. So far I am living a dream in Audio Nirvana and have no burning desire to seek out new equipment, only new music I have not heard before.
Scotty

[Daygloworange]

Having been accustomed to (predominantly) small two way near field monitors in a recording environment for more or less than last 15 years, I started to look at updating my monitoring.

The studio market is almost all active 2 way systems now. I was really displeased upon auditioning the ones currently available. So I started searching on the internet. And came across the DIY crowd and kit speaker manufacturers. I did quite a bit of homework, and finally decide to build a few. The price performance level was really good. Then I added a sub. That's when it got real interesting.

My system now consists of 3 way mains, with a satellite (active) subwoofer. Resolution is beyond most things I've ever heard. Clarity and dynamics are way up. I've always had an affinity for neutral sound reproduction, and I feel that with a few more front end upgrades, and then room treatments, I will be close to done.  

I'm a firm believer in as clean a signal path as possible, and try and work to that end.

My system is now based around an SB 3 front end, and that is for me, a really big deal as well. The convenience, archiving size, random accessibility have added tremendously value to me. It's also proving to be, (with mods), a really good sounding transport.

I want to hear recordings as they were done, with all their shortcomings, because from an engineering aspect, I'm looking to recognize mistakes, and to recognize what makes for exceptional recordings. You need precision to do that, and that's my personal goal.

I have listened to other people's systems, and it helps me in attaining my own goals.

Sometimes, a recording that is poorly done, glares at me, but if it's something I like, I can look past it, and it doesn't ruin the music for me. Thankfully.

Cheers  

[sts9fan]

kickass sound period.  Thats all I want.

[arthurs]

kickass sound period.  Thats all I want.

I'll second that     and add that I also wanted to create my own space to relax and listen in, so counting the room as part of my system and wanting that to be sonically and aesthetically pleasing plays in as well....

[nathanm]

100db at 10' at 10PM.

[Brad]

C'mon Nathan - I thought you liked to ROCK

120db at 12' at TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT