Noob requesting feedback from smart people.

Hello All,

I’m a passionate music listener, who is short on the audiophile technical know-how. I’d like to think that I have a fairly discerning ear, but I’m hampered by my lack of technical knowledge of hifi audio. Thus, I would really like to get help/feedback from smart people out there on several things…

Backstory:

I recently upgraded my Paradigm Titan V.5 monitors to the Sierra RAAL Towers (note: Sweet Helen of Troy, what a quantum leap in sound quality!). I have a friend who is an audiophile who recommended several options at the price point I was looking at, which is how I found my way to Ascend (note: he said something like, “…despite not owning any Ascend products myself, their metrics are astonishingly good, and it’s almost impossible to find a negative review of their products anywhere online”). For those interested in other things I was considering, I also auditioned Monitor Silver 8’s, Totem Hawk’s, Paradigm Prestige 75f and 85f, and KEF ls50’s.

I am really really pleased with how everything is sounding so far. Legitimately, the speakers might be a future proof purchase for me. However, I want reevaluate my overall setup to see if I have any glaring “weak links in the chain,” that may be significantly hampering the potential of my Sierra RAAL Towers.

My current setup is as follows:

I play all music from my computer (i.e., all my music is either Mp3 AAC 256 kbps purchased from the iTunes store, or Mp3’s at 320 kbps). My understanding is that sound quality could be marginally improved if I decided to switch to using CD’s. However, for practical reasons, I don’t see myself going this route unless it offered a profound improvement.

I stream music from my Apple laptop to my apple TV, which is connected to my receiver. My receiver is a Marantz sr5005. I use a receiver because my listening set up needs to include a TV and video game consul. My setup is stereo, and I have no interest in doing surround sound. Although I need my setup to be versatile enough to incorporate an apple TV and video game consul, I am much more interested/focused in listening to music. In short, I need versatility, but I’m much more interested in erring on the side of the best possible music setup.

When I listen to music, I turn my receiver to Pure Direct mode. This sounds much better to me. However, it is my understanding that Pure Direct mode shuts off the MDAX, which I believe is Marantz’s DAC designed to improve the quality of compressed music files (note: this is the technical stuff that I don’t understand, so what I’m saying here could be totally incorrect). However, this confuses me, as I seem to get better sound by turning off the device that was designed to improve the sound quality of compressed digital formats.

Also, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on speaker placement in the room, so no worries there. After a lot of tweaking, I’m very pleased with the speaker placement.

Here are things I’m wondering about:

(1) Specifically, what is an ideal set up for playing high quality digital music files? That is, do I need at some point to get a receiver with a better DAC (…if so, does that mean I would not use the Pure Direct mode on that receiver). Do I need to get a dedicated DAC device? Or is my current set probably pretty solid, with only marginal gains available?


(2) General recommendations you have on where to tweak, or areas that you see potential for major improvement?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter!

First, the easy one: it's not a surprise me that the "compressed music enhancer" (or whatever Marantz calls it) is actually bad. Most of these circuits do EQ that I find makes any music, compressed or not, sound worse.

The other things you're asking about are the subjects of great religious wars in the audiophile world. At the risk of being branded a heretic by one side or the other, I will attempt to walk the fine line here.

For a long time, people on the "objective" side have been saying that, more or less, all amps sound the same. Most of them don't mean this literally, more like "all similarly-spec'd solid state amps of the same class sound essentially the same." I won't get into my stance on this but you can google this and see millions of electrons have died on either side of this cause.

More recently, many folks in the objective camp have been saying that "all DACs sound the same" and there's less qualification offered on that than in the amp space. By and large, the claim goes, the technology for DACs has been "solved" and there's no difference between any two modern DACs. I think that position is perhaps a bit extreme, so let me just say this: the difference between any two reasonably-competent DACs is pretty small. I believe I can hear small differences between crappy cheap DACs and "good" DACs, but I haven't blind-tested myself so I'm not 100% sure. IMO, there may be some gain by adding a good outboard DAC, but I don't think the gain would be substantial.

Compressed music vs. full-resolution music is another controversy. (BTW, music from iTunes is not "Mp3 AAC," those two descriptors are mutually exclusive--a file is either an mp3 or an AAC file. iTunes music is AAC.) Anyway, you can definitely find folks out there who argue that people can't tell the difference here, either. This one I do have direct blind-testing experience with, and the data say that indeed, it's really hard to tell. However, sometimes I can if I listen really carefully. I think there are three things at play: (1) recording quality, (2) equipment, and (3) experience.

On (1), there's a lot of music in my library that I can blind test on pretty much anything and I can't tell the difference better than chance at all. It depends on what the music is in terms of content, how well it's mastered, and whether the key features are masked by other sounds or not. Bad 80s drum machines, for example, sound just as fake at 256 as they do at full resolution.

On (2), I think this is highly dependent on the quality of the reproduction. I'm positive I absolutely cannot tell the difference in a noisy environment (e.g., in the car) or with equipment that lacks resolving power. I definitely own headphones where I cannot tell at all, no matter what the music is. I'm sure that's true for several of the less-capable speakers in the house. However, with some material I can usually do better than chance on a blind test with my Sierras or with better headphones. I'm sure the RAAL towers are more than good enough here.

On (3), you have to know what to listen for. Compression tends to create certain artifacts, and if you know what to listen for, it's easier to find it. Back in the days of 128-bit files, I couldn't stand to listen to a lot of music compressed because the cymbal smearing was so bad; once I knew what to listen for I couldn't not hear it. Modern compression algorithms are much better and at AAC 256 or mp3 320, it's often really tough to tell.

TLDR: whatever difference there is, it's not huge.

Things like mastering and speaker placement make a bigger difference than these small effects. For example, difference between the original CD release of Dark Side of the Moon and the MFSL version is massively larger than the difference between uncompressed and 256 AAC, or between any two decent DACs. I recently bought new speaker stands that raised my Sierras to a more correct height and that made way more difference than changing DACs ever did.

First of all, thanks for your response! I really found it helpful, and you did a great job of breaking stuff down.

As to your response about the amp ("For a long time, people on the "objective" side have been saying that, more or less, all amps sound the same. Most of them don't mean this literally, more like "all similarly-spec'd solid state amps of the same class sound essentially the same.”), my take away from this is that at some point if I wanted to do a significant solid state amp upgrade (i.e., moving from the $800 range to the $2000-$3000 range), there may be some worthwhile gains. But that, without a substantial upgrade in this domain, any gains would likely be minimal.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Coolflo

(2) General recommendations you have on where to tweak, or areas that you see potential for major improvement?

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I heard no mention of a subwoofer. Even though your Raal towers can play down to the around 35 Hz, they might not be able to do so with authority if you turn up the volume a bit. Even more importantly, they are not going to be playing linear bass, becasue due to the dimensions of your room some frequencies in the bass will be accentuated and some will be diminished. In fact, saying accentuated and diminished is a big understatement. The peaks and dips in the bass range can be as large as 30dB.

One way of fixing this is with two subwoofers. In the $2,000 to $3,000 price range you mentioned for an amplifier you might spend in the future, you could easliy get a pair of Rythmik subwoofers to fix this issue. If you have any money leftover at this point you could also look into room treatments: absorption and maybe diffusion. The subwoofer will probably make the biggest difference, in comparison to just about anything else that you could do next. Room treatments probably the second biggest difference (or the first depending on how bad your room is). I think that the smallest improvement you might get is from an amplifier, unless you are listening quite loud and/or sitting quite far away. But, spending $2,000 to $3,000 for a 2 channel amplifier to drive the very easy to drive Sierra towers might be a bit much. Just get a good Emotiva, Outlaw, or B-stock ATI amp and you could probably easily come in at $1,000 or less.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by N Boros

One way of fixing this is with two subwoofers. In the $2,000 to $3,000 price range you mentioned for an amplifier you might spend in the future, you could easliy get a pair of Rythmik subwoofers to fix this issue. If you have any money leftover at this point you could also look into room treatments: absorption and maybe diffusion. The subwoofer will probably make the biggest difference, in comparison to just about anything else that you could do next. Room treatments probably the second biggest difference (or the first depending on how bad your room is). I think that the smallest improvement you might get is from an amplifier...

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This. Nicely said. If not Rythmik, some other servo sub. If it's not a servo, I'm not interested. The advantages of servo subs are impressive, especially when it comes to integration with your mains. Even ported subs. It was just slick and easy to integrate my Rythmik LVX12 pair with my Sierra-2s (rcl) and Sierra-1s (surrounds). The effect is that it sounds like the Sierra-2s magically grew another two octaves on the bottom. This for music or HT either one.

I fully agree with the above: 1) subs, 2) room treatments, 3) electronics, if not even later in the list.

With RAAL Towers, my first step would be to get rid of the lossy files and use either lossless compression or CDs. At least do direct comparisons with music you know well, and trust your ears rather than your expectations.

We could tell no difference between CD and 256 AAC on an NHT system. Then we got a Geneva Labs XL for another room and could hear the difference in a big way. That experience led me to find Ascend, and we replaced the NHTs with RAAL Towers. While I haven't gone back to test lossy files on the Towers (because I re-ripped everything lossless), they are even more revealing than the Geneva.

2nd vote for ripping your own high quality lossless files. I’m a dinosaur with ~500 cds who has physical media already, but managing them sucks. I’m very happy with my efforts to rip them all myself into flac files. While I’ve found a good number of compressed high quality mp3s that I can’t tell the difference from the cd - there’s still so many crappy rips from reputable vendors. Still can’t beat doing it yourself imo.

Ya... then buy a pair of subs ;)