Thoughts on my ultimate system

[@NickP333]

Janos, my day has been made better because of seeing you put up a vid. Thank you 🥳🎶😊💜

[@realworldaudio]

Cheers Nick, have a wonderful week with the kits! ; Janos

[@frankgeeraerts6243]

Indeed a trilling comment ...........so real for many nof us getting older ! As an little thinking about .....long ago someone told that he had a problem with the neighbors about music playing to loud in his badly acoustic isolated appartment ... He said , before I had a EL84 PP amp and nobody complained , but since I bought a EL34 amplifier the problem started and now I am rather scared to play music or I try to play music whe n they are not at home..... Someone replied :" Turn down the volume ..........." Thoughts about an ultimate system ! ? .........well to me that means that when I would listen to such a system...........I would have NO thougts at all other than listening to music and totaly disconnect from any eartly awareness as well as forgetting all the electronics and speakers........ Have a good day Janos

[@Mikexception]

Good point. I developed last time simmilar situation. But also I am annoyed by music through walls. Researching it I l discovered that it is not whole music which is coming through but mid low tones which are more audible then lowest. Walls resonate with them but not with band above say 700 Hz which is characteristic for talking and a natural life sounds . This upper tones are quite good damped - we do not hear neighbiurs talking but music goes through as low annoying hitting with one resonated by walls audible harmonic. Lowest band is stopped my mas of walls (except very powerfull.) Most speakers deliver that mid bass because it is exposed too much (which is also fatiguing to listener ears) . For silent listening it is good to deminish lowest and mid tones which are audible for neighbours and enjoy natural ( type say tourist radio speaker) but not bass priviledged sounding. .

[@realworldaudio]

@@Mikexception Here in the US the situation is a lot worse, as the walls are generally drywalls on wooden frames. Often single wall consturction here in Hawaii as there's no winters and nobody needs thermal insulation. (Well, we do need it badly for the heat and humidity, but people just stick in an AC and blast it.... a portable AC is a lot cheaper than proper walls). With these flimsy walls the deep bass comes through with a vengeance (on top of a lot of midbass and some midrange as well). I have heavily insulated my walls (luckily, double wall construction, and applied insulation on top of that - put in the same triple insulation as used in movies theater rooms, it cuts down an extra 65dB for most of the sound range, except deep bass). The only thing that comes through now is sub 30Hz, and occasional door slams or metal object dropped on tile floor. Although cannot make out what exactly happened, other than a sharp thud, like someone trying to knock the wall down. Otherwise everything dead quiet, even at excessive volumes.

[@frankgeeraerts6243]

Natural sound and tone, melody and emotions ............that's the most difficult to create and reproduce .....I often use recordings made in nature to fine tune an amplifier or a system.....be it analog or digital. When you get close to that goal ....you can be fooled and look outside while it is in the recording..hahaha.

[@realworldaudio]

Hi Frank, the natural sounds are also my main compass. Even for TV shows.... I find that we are watching a whole lot of them, and I am quite satisfied as the sounds in the background are natural. A little confusing though, as I can never tell it's my phone ringing, or in the show, the bike is from the speakers or the neighbor... eventually, I can mostly tell easily because the sounds are not just bike / dog / door, but very clear which breed of dog, what brand of bike, and what is the material of the door, how heavy it is, and where in space - if it's slammed behind the wall, I know I have no door there so it must come from the recording... Same with birds, bells, although I am very much not looking forward to explosion sounds. We have a military base nearby, and they do plenty of practice, so I have an "A/B test" for all sorts of explosions and helicopter machine gun fire.... I do not understand though the need to explode and shoot everything in every single bloody show / film made nowadays. Prefer watching older series where the point was not to get us used to living in a war zone.

[@frankgeeraerts6243]

@@realworldaudio Love those older movies too, .....so entertaining without artifial techno aertifacts and boring conversations loading the movie.... hahahaha.........getting fooled by the ringing phone and anything else ....even sometimes hearing sounds like a dogbarking behindf me , or a thunder still far away ....looking outside for what's commi ng and be fooled once again . Have a very nice day Janos.......

[@Thiago_S..]

Hi Janos, interesting thought-provoking topic! Would your choice for the AO being related to its reduced width (size) or what makes you ultimatey prefer them over the La Grande for the one bedroom situation?

[@hugobloemers4425]

Interesting, I was thinking the same very recent while we where cleaning out the one bed room place the mother of my GF lived. She then just passed away. She had a Chinese mini Ghetto blaster that sounds so awful I wanted to throw it in the tip but some other family member wanted to save it for some reason. I think something in the line of "Le Petit" could be good. I would maybe also start streaming with a TDA1543 DAC. As for the amp, not sure yet. Perhaps tubes but also a single ended class A MOSFET amp of around 5 to 10 Watt may be good. Oh, and the whole thing in mono. I have been playing independently with the idea of how close to a tube amp this MOSFET derivative can be made to sound. Any way, you speak of 60 to 70 yo, I am now 61 and still working and travelling for work. I hope to be (at least well) in my 80's before this becomes reality.

[@realworldaudio]

Those are sweet choices... indeed. :) Yes, I also have hopes that I have long years before that. Although when I will get there it will seem as the time went by in the blink of an eye.

[@Mikexception]

I also thought about time when I would be not independent that I would need good and very compact system the most. . Althought I do not need yet it scaling down is just happening. Slowly getting to perfection my system without even any my push is shrinking just because the little dimensions and good efficientcy makes all my wishes true more than big and more powerfull as I expected many years ago .

[@realworldaudio]

Yes, nowdays I also want to shrink size of amps, speakers.... I am happy with what I have now, but at the same time curious about shrinking it down and still have that quality that I have with the big system.

[@Drunken_Hamster]

Hey, I have a 2003 Accord that has an integrated head unit and climate controls. It seems the only two options are to pick a chinesium head unit that replaces both together but has crappy low voltage preamp outputs or to replace my bottom cubby hole with a double din mount and standard head unit. Both of these options, quite frankly, suck. So I was wondering how I might approach getting a more quality-oriented head unit company to copy but improve the chinesium big display designs, or otherwise replace my climate controls and head unit separately while looking near or completely seamless in my dashboard. Or barring all of that, is there a way I can physically hack the chinesium unit, myself, to add, change, or improve features and RCA output voltage? Or should I just run the high-level outputs or use a line driver on the weak RCAs to get a clean signal to a DSP/amp?

[@realworldaudio]

I was thinking about that as well.... my solution was getting a better head unit (cheap Pioneer with the least gizmos / stupid features, worked surprisingly well), changing the speakers to paper cone units, and placed a battery ground tweak on the battery (which made the biggest difference - and also improved engine power and mileage!). Bad thing is that someone broke into my car and ripped out the head unit... sigh. Since then I replaced it with a unit with a big screen to have camera for reverse (for Nelli). She can park more easily, but the sound sucks big time. Good enough for listening to podcasts in traffic, but I do not listen to music in the car anymore.

[@Drunken_Hamster]

@@realworldaudio What's this about the battery ground tweak improving mileage and power? I've never heard of that, before...