Every aspect of the room was built around the grand utopias and their placement. If you’re not familiar with them check them out here. https://www.focal.com/en/home-audio/high-fidelity-speakers/u...
The subwoofer drivers are unique in that they use an electromagnet instead of the usual strontium or neodymium permanent magnet.
I think what impressed me the most was that this guy was not annoying or in to the hand wavy audiophile hocus pocus. Just super passionate about getting everything done to get the absolute best sound even if the bang per buck was low. He had a wall of vinyl and was happy to let me pick several selections to play. From what I understand, this guy would open his home to anyone interested in a listening session. If anyone is in the DFW area and you can get plugged in to that community it seemed like a great group of folks.
In my limited experience, "clean power" (I know nil about this so I'm just repeating what I hear) was the most important difference people would "hear". My uncle used to have a Hi-Fi shop and I helped him sometimes. People hearing distortions in their existing setup used to make up for 90% of his customers. In those cases the number one step was to make sure that the power that comes to the system is clean. Being a certified electrician, he used to do his thing and you would almost always hear the "aaah" from the customers the moment you hit play. To me also the difference was generally night and day.
(Now of course that might be less true for some poorly made vinyl/phono level equipment but if you actually cared about audible distortions you wouldn't be listening to the sound of a needle scratching its way across a fragile plastic groove in the first place...)
If you spend most of your day wearing headphones, you might invest to them a bit.
Maybe in 50 years when it breaks I'll get a new one :)
The best speakers i heard to date are from a german company called Backes & Müller. Active crossovers, each speaker has its own poweramp and a sensor attached to the membrane. The signal of the sensor is fed back into a comparator which calculates the difference to the music signal, this is then used to force the speaker to follow the music signal exactly.
>On the basis of physical factors all drivers make mistakes, which one must accept in passive and uncontrolled systems. In contrast, all BM drivers are a part of active error correction systems.
>Active loudspeakers know no conduction loss, no impedance issues; have faultless crossover performance, exact phasing, an optimal amplifier-chassis ratio, more actual output stage power at their disposal, quicker impulse processing and higher dynamics. All of this produces active regulatory intelligence. A sensor system continuously compares and corrects the membrane movements with the actual music signal.
>B&M uses two types of negative feedback: inductive and capacitive. Intelligent electronic fuses ensure that the entire system is reliably shut down in the case of an impending overload. The BM electronic crossover splits the music signal into individual paths of respective frequency ranges and allocates these to their individual output stage. Every individual output stage drives to its respective driver, optimised for its frequency range.
from http://www.backesmueller.de/en/b-m-technology.html
Pricey and not DIY friendly, but you can pick them up used on ebay for "peanuts". W0as thinking about buying an BM8 (3-way) refurbished for 2800 Euros, BM10 (4-way) refurbished costs 10000 Euros, got a BM12 (5-way) used for 1400 Euros.
The company is now owned by http://ksaudio.com
I agree completely, but emphasising that point tends to lead to flame-wars in most places on the internet. And it's such an imprecise subject to debate because everyone's room is different. Some rooms can be atrocious, while others can be unintentionally excellent. Some rooms can be easy to improve, some require knowledge and experience in order to improve. Some only require repositioning, some require treatment products that can cost a lot more than many enthusiasts realise.
My favourite video that demonstrates the effectiveness of acoustic treatment:
That thread contains little to no evidentiary merit and a boatload of technical ignorance.
Most other factors are rarely an issue and/or inferior parts have a much lower magnitude of impact on sound quality. Sufficiently good source material (256kbps AAC or better) is widely available. Most amplifiers are fine. Almost all wire/cable is perfectly good. High quality DACs are more abundant than you might think (e.g. the digital inputs of any half-decent AV receiver made in the past decade).
Good speakers.
Good placement.
Good acoustics.
Those are the ones to focus on. They're the ones to spend money on. If you wanted to add a fourth to that list, I'd add an honourable mention to in-room calibration systems like Audyssey and DIRAC. Depending on the sorts of imperfections in a given system the opportunity for improvements with DSP might be substantial and dramatic, or marginal to the point of being irrelevant. (For most systems it's somewhere in the middle.)