no, it just uses more data to represent the same audio

sounds great, nice work

if you’re trying to run an isolated ground circuit for your audio rig, plugging it into ethernet that runs to the rest of your house is going to bridge ground between the two circuits (and probably introduce a ground loop)

this is a situation where you probably do want a wifi bridge between your audio setup and the rest of your network. alternatively, you could run a little fiber bridge between them.

i take it you’re already locked in on those speakers, but that positioning seems tricky

it’s a bit unorthodox, but have you considered smaller speakers, maybe ceiling mounted, so you can get a more symmetric targeting of the listening position? honestly probably not great either but i suspect it’d be an improvement

yeah so that means you’re going to be generating tons of overtones in the cheap sub.

super low frequencies tend to be non-directional (well, less directional, depends on the room) but it’s pretty easy to localize 160Hz and 320Hz overtones, so high subwoofer THD is going to mess up your stereo image.

dual sub rigs can be great though but i think in this case unless you’re using it to quietly fill in very specific null frequencies the cheap sub will be making things worse.

what does the REW graph say about subwoofer THD on the distortion tab between the two?

my guess is that’s what you’re hearing in the cheap sub, it’s a big part of the sound

encoders got better, but some material is easier to pick up to about 224kbps. above that it starts getting really hard with modern encoders.

anything with:

* tons of extreme panning

* crowd noise/tape hiss/white noise/cymbals

* sharp transients

* all of the above at the same time

tends to stress mp3 format pretty badly. most of these issues are addressed in other lossy formats.

impulse or step response measurement will reveal some aspects of clarity.

THD and box resonance measurements are also useful.

there are other graphs that can be made that show what sort of lat and vert frequency behaviour the speakers have which will indicate some in-room behaviour but are hard to interpret (they’re space-dependent).

honestly a lot depends on what you want and what space you have. do you want 360’ stadium sound? or laser pinpoint surgical precision? there are graphs that will indicate what gear will tend towards.

B&O are a lifestyle brand with occasionally really great products. AKG are a studio brand focusing on functionality with occasionally really great products. …can’t you get your AKGs repaired?

you can usually spot linear power supplies because they’re big and they get hot - there’s a big transformer in there and those are (relatively) expensive. these use coils to drop voltage.

the smaller, cheaper and more common switching power supplies chop incoming voltage up at high frequency (which is then filtered), which dumps radio frequency garbage all over your household power rails. but they’re super common and very efficient.

almost all gear can cope with noisy power though. there are voltage regulators in all your equipment to smooth out spikes and they normally work great.

in practical terms, upgrading a power supply might see a change in mains frequency hum (+ harmonics), or noise floor. unlikely to lead to dramatic audio performance changes… maaaybe better transient handling but if your equipment is that close to operating limits the power supply is probably not going to fix it. a bad linear power supply will be worse than a good switching power supply though. i wouldn’t bother doing this without measuring audio performance because otherwise there’s no way to figure out if it’s getting better or worse.

if you’re concerned you could always take it for a checkup. there’s a couple of basic things (regulators, rectifiers, power supply caps) that take the majority of electrical stress and they can be easily checked for signs of impending failure.

standard failure modes will normally be ‘pop and then silence’, sometimes accompanied by a blown fuse.

depends on how rough your hearing is

if it’s in really bad shape, something like this might be fun: https://subpac.com/what-is-the-subpac/

a lot of techno mix engineers swear by them

there’s only two ways you’d find any quality difference:

* handling of over-zero - lossy compressors sometimes decompress to “over-0dB”. playback software can choose to hard clip, soft clip, or limit. will manifest as a slight difference in harshness on very loud or poorly mastered material
* source rate conversion. players might handle mixed sample rate stuff differently (44kHz source vs 96kHz core). some algorithms work better than others often at a tradeoff of end-to-end latency. manifests as slightly different phase and response behaviour above 15kHz. if you’re over 30 years old you probably can’t hear differences up there.

apart from that, for the most part numbers are numbers, everything is buffered, and if it’s digital-in-digital-out almost nothing can go wrong.

aaaaargh fuck that squeaky pedal. can never un-hear it.

bowie’s stuff is all over the place, mix-wise. all eras. some of it is perfect though.

really like the stands!

from skimming that video - you can pretty safely skip the sections “calibrate your soundcard”, “calibrate input level”, which simplifies the whole process a lot. the important bit starts about 8:55

meh

my system looks bad because it’s optimised for sound, not looks. if i had to make it look good I’d have to pull out my treatment and that’ll make it sound worse.

same as cooking. i can cook tasty food but i don’t care about the plating and presentation. just tasty stuff in a bowl.

they’re a huge pain in the ass and need tons of space. I’ve made two. they worked but it wasn’t worth the loss of space.

you know, this is absolutely testable

1: buy new speaker, set it up in a room you can lock down

2: set up measurement mic on a stand

3: very first sound coming out should be a REW sweep (measuring)

4: let it blast pink noise for a day or two with the room locked down, not too loud to wreck anything

5: do another REW sweep. make sure nothing else has changed in that room, including where you’re standing and wearing while the sweep runs

there, science

then everyone can stop posting this topic over and over again on every forum

i have personally swapped a dead driver with a brand new one and didn’t measure any meaningful difference between the new one and the one in the other half of the stereo pair.