The Incredible Importance of Fine tuning (to me)

LL21 · May 28, 2016

Hi All,

Just sharing personal experience:

- Our system was literally packed up and put in storage for almost 5 months while we moved and went under major construction
- So a new place, new room and new setup with the same equipment
- The only change was we went from Transp Ref XLMM2 speaker cables to Opus Gen 5

So here is the learning experience after having professional Wilson setup (they will come back again to finetune) and help setting up everything in a fashion similar to our old setup (each component in its own 'isolation sandwich' with HRS/Stillpoints isolation under and mass damping (using serious weight/HRS/Artseania) on top):

- FIRST, the system is changing by the day as it 'settles in', the cable breaks in, and all matter of 'literally physical settling in' occurs (we have solid masonry outer walls, but the floors are 19th Century timber beams over masonry piles...so i imagine adding 2,500lbs of equipment to the floor takes some time to settle in.

- SECOND, the old system in the old house was there for 10 years, and after the main building blocks (amp, source, pre, speakers, cables) got sorted, we embarked on 3 years of isolation, grounding, room treatments. *i have become a big fan of isolation (HRS, Stillpoints, Artesania) as well as Tripoint/Entreq grounding...and i am unequivocal that in that room, if i moved ONE HRS pad 3cm underneath a piece of equipment, you could hear the difference. *

- THIRD, based on the above experience, i would have thought it was the quality of the system main building blocks that allowed me to hear those minute changes. *WRONG.

- FOURTH, in our current system, i have found many of those nuances are gone. *I cannot discern moving an HRS pad 3cm anymore. *(Sure, we have dedicated power lines now, isolated 16amp line JUST for the Gryphon amp, etc.) *BUT, i am NOW convinced that EVERYTHING INCLUDING SETUP ITSELF really, really matters in order for the NUANCES to come out of a system...which is really enjoyable for me.

- FIFTH, our new room is better, and system overall sounds much much much better in this room, with far greater detail, depth of soundstage, scale, and delicacy in the upper registers. *HOWEVER, those nuances from changing isolation are much harder to discern than in our old room...and i am NOT convinced it is because the new room is better. *I am convinced it is because i have yet to go piece by piece, and really fine tune every bit of isolation, placement, etc which i had done over 3+ years in being in the old room. *(NOTE: *we literally have had the system up for 1 week now.)

- SIXTH, to explore my thesis, we have the Velodyne and Entreq/Stillpoints distributors coming over in the next week or so to help the finetuning process...particularly Entreq/Stillpoints who were the biggest part of the 3-year period of finetuning in the old room. *Hopefully, it wont take 3 years this time!!!

*

I am hopeful that as we get the system equipment settled in, focus (read: obsess) on placement of equipment, isolation/mass damping, etc and placement of room treatments, etc...we may start to take what is an incredibly good sounding/promising system setup and really get it 'perfect' so that many of those super-subtle changes one makes can once again be instantly detected in the system delivery

THIS IS AN ONGOING LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR ME...WILL UPDATE...

Bobalob · Jun 2, 2016

I would recommend Jim Smith Get Better Sound . I must admit I found the nearly 300 page book and 3 DVDs a bit daunting and it took me a while to get round to it. However the results have been amazing and well worth the time and effort involved. I realise now I had just been tinkering round the edges without addressing the fundamental issues of speaker placement and listening position. More galling however is the realisation I've had the speakers in the wrong position for the past 10 years and never had the system working to it's full potential.
In the end the "Suddenly" moment, when you wonder how it could possibly be any better, arrived with the speakers just 3 inches further out , a little bit wider apart and toe in increased for a new and closer listening position.
For the cost of the Get Better Sound package , Bosch PLR 15 laser measure , insulation tape and Chieftains Tears of Stone CD the improvement has been far more dramatic than a component change.

It did take a long time though and as a short cut I would recommend concentrating on tips 74 to 79 in the book and DVD and approaching the exercise with an open mind. I would never have arrived at the final set up with random experimentation or just going by what looks right. The final position will always be a compromise but even if you have to put everything back as it was at least you will have had a chance to experience the full potential of your system .

PeterA · Jun 2, 2016

Bobalob said:
I would recommend Jim Smith Get Better Sound . I must admit I found the nearly 300 page book and 3 DVDs a bit daunting and it took me a while to get round to it. However the results have been amazing and well worth the time and effort involved. I realise now I had just been tinkering round the edges without addressing the fundamental issues of speaker placement and listening position. More galling however is the realisation I've had the speakers in the wrong position for the past 10 years and never had the system working to it's full potential.
In the end the "Suddenly" moment, when you wonder how it could possibly be any better, arrived with the speakers just 3 inches further out , a little bit wider apart and toe in increased for a new and closer listening position.
For the cost of the Get Better Sound package , Bosch PLR 15 laser measure , insulation tape and Chieftains Tears of Stone CD the improvement has been far more dramatic than a component change.

It did take a long time though and as a short cut I would recommend concentrating on tips 74 to 79 in the book and DVD and approaching the exercise with an open mind. I would never have arrived at the final set up with random experimentation or just going by what looks right. The final position will always be a compromise but even if you have to put everything back as it was at least you will have had a chance to experience the full potential of your system .

Bob, you get my vote for quote of the day. This is one of, if not THE, most cost effective ways of improving the sound of one's system. It can have much better results than a component upgrade and one can learn a lot about sound, his system, and audio in general, by spending the time to follow the advice in this book. It does take some effort and patience, but it is well worth it. I consider it an essential reference for audio.

I read the book and followed the advice. But I somehow thought it could still get better, so I hired Jim to do his RoomPlay services on my system. I had gotten very close by just reading the book. But then Jim taught me how to squeeze just a bit more performance out of my system, and the improvement really increased my emotional enjoyment of my system. The book is great, the RoomPlay service is even better.

Congratulations on your progress.

LL21 · Jun 2, 2016

Great stuff, gents...thanks for the advice!

As a very brief update, I decide to play around with a few of the Entreq AC wraps just to see what would happen. I removed 3 and i noticed that instead of a deep soundstage, some of the treble 'pulled' to the speaker, both disrupting the soundstage but also making the speakers 'appear' in the rom. I then put them back in and the instruments did not 'pull to the tweeter' anymore, and the speakers disappeared once more.

getting there slowly...

fas42 · Jun 2, 2016

LL21, it's always a journey :b - I am a born masochist, and keep fiddling with this nonsense endlessly, and to make it worse I do it with low cost components, so I have to overcome their limitations as well

!

Getting the speakers to disappear is the game to follow, and this is all about getting those low level gremlins to a level of inaudibility - if they're not then the sound will zap straight back to the drivers again, as you've noted. The level to aim for is when using a pure mono recording, standing centre between the speakers, very close to the line of the speakers; the sound will obviously be straight in front of you, so now move your head steadily to the left, or right - at a certain point the sound will suddenly jump to the speaker now closer to you; at optimum that jumping never occurs, the sound always remains "in front of" you.

LL21 · Jun 2, 2016

fas42 said:
LL21, it's always a journey :b - I am a born masochist, and keep fiddling with this nonsense endlessly, and to make it worse I do it with low cost components, so I have to overcome their limitations as well !

Getting the speakers to disappear is the game to follow, and this is all about getting those low level gremlins to a level of inaudibility - if they're not then the sound will zap straight back to the drivers again, as you've noted. The level to aim for is when using a pure mono recording, standing centre between the speakers, very close to the line of the speakers; the sound will be straight in front of you, so now move your head steadily to the left, or right - at a certain point the sound will suddenly jump to the speaker now closer to you; at optimum that jumping never occurs, the sound always remains "in front of" you.

Thanks for that! I will give that a try!!! Meanwhile, i have continued to add the original layers of shielding back on, and one of the Entreq cables, plus removing the grill on the sub...its now steadily coming back in terms of tangibility of choral music, etc. Plus, due to the room being much much better, there are clearly areas where the understability, clairty and space are far superior.

Jazzhead · Jun 2, 2016

LL21 said:
Great stuff, gents...thanks for the advice!

As a very brief update, I decide to play around with a few of the Entreq AC wraps just to see what would happen. I removed 3 and i noticed that instead of a deep soundstage, some of the treble 'pulled' to the speaker, both disrupting the soundstage but also making the speakers 'appear' in the rom. I then put them back in and the instruments did not 'pull to the tweeter' anymore, and the speakers disappeared once more.

getting there slowly...

Glad to hear on progress LL . Am a big proponent of the Entreq wraps . Knowing where to drop the Copper wrap amongst the silver , is essential in mounding final tone and further eradicating digititus . Look forward to your updates and certain new aspects , that you will experience due course final tuning . Cheers

LL21 · Jun 3, 2016

Jazzhead said:
Glad to hear on progress LL . Am a big proponent of the Entreq wraps . Knowing where to drop the Copper wrap amongst the silver , is essential in mounding final tone and further eradicating digititus . Look forward to your updates and certain new aspects , that you will experience due course final tuning . Cheers

Hey Jazzhead, yes agree! We have put all the Wrap in place, and it is making a very nice improvement overall. When the Entreq/Stillpoints distributor comes, i will ask him to bring a few 'toys' so we can see if there is anything in the new setup that might be replaced. A few wraps from copper to silver, etc.

I am trying to avoid any major changes (big new Entreq grounding boxes for amps, or apparently you can ground the speaker cones themselves which apparently is quite good.)

We shall see...! Hope all's well...anything new on your front?

rnsa2000 · Jun 3, 2016

Hi Lloyd,

good luck in your new room.

These experiences are always enriching. Every new experience I realize how much difference makes small adjustments and details on our systems.

Best regards,
Ricardo.

stehno · Jul 14, 2016

LL21 said:
- THIRD, based on the above experience, i would have thought it was the quality of the system main building blocks that allowed me to hear those minute changes. *WRONG.

One of the most insightful comments I've ever come across on any audio website.

LL21 · Jul 25, 2016

stehno said:
One of the most insightful comments I've ever come across on any audio website.

Thank you...i am sure that cannot be right

but I'll accept the kind words! So we are 1 month in (probably 160 hours or so)...all new room, new setup, new Furutech outlets, in fact whole new electrical wiring...

...for the first time, i shifted 2 HRS damping plate and rotated them 90 degrees on a hunch as to the components inside the box and how they might be laid out...definitely 'hearable', and i double checked my ears with a photo i later found of the insides. who knows...i think i heard a difference...

...then i also took one of the damping plates off one component i recall from memory had been [nearly] the same unless i went to extreme measures to mass damp it. I moved the damping plate to my Gryphon...that made a much better improvement in lower treble/upper mid note clarity.

so it seems [finally] the system is being slowly fine tuned to the point where [once again] relatively innocuous seeming changes are making small, incremental but satisfying improvements.

And the Distributor is coming back next month to fine-tune the setup (resistors) of the Wilsons. We agreed to let the whole system settle in, and stabilize and to let me play around a bit, until i got a sense of what final adjustments i wanted.

The system is better than before, but it seems the changes i intuitively wanted the day it was all setup are the same as now...except that perhaps i can articulate it better having listened to a lot more music since that first day.

stay tuned

stehno · Jul 25, 2016

LL21 said:
Thank you...i am sure that cannot be right but I'll accept the kind words! So we are 1 month in (probably 160 hours or so)...all new room, new setup, new Furutech outlets, in fact whole new electrical wiring...

...for the first time, i shifted 2 HRS damping plate and rotated them 90 degrees on a hunch as to the components inside the box and how they might be laid out...definitely 'hearable', and i double checked my ears with a photo i later found of the insides. who knows...i think i heard a difference...

...then i also took one of the damping plates off one component i recall from memory had been [nearly] the same unless i went to extreme measures to mass damp it. I moved the damping plate to my Gryphon...that made a much better improvement in lower treble/upper mid note clarity.

so it seems [finally] the system is being slowly fine tuned to the point where [once again] relatively innocuous seeming changes are making small, incremental but satisfying improvements.

And the Distributor is coming back next month to fine-tune the setup (resistors) of the Wilsons. We agreed to let the whole system settle in, and stabilize and to let me play around a bit, until i got a sense of what final adjustments i wanted.

The system is better than before, but it seems the changes i intuitively wanted the day it was all setup are the same as now...except that perhaps i can articulate it better having listened to a lot more music since that first day.

stay tuned

Although you state now that your improvements were only small incrementals, most likely due to inferior vibration controlling products, I'll just say that in theory your prior claims were right on the money. Considering nobody else seems to have come close to such claims and regardless of your real experienced outcome, your comments remain as one of the most insightful I've yet encountered.

Geardaddy · Jul 25, 2016

LL21 said:
Hi All,

Just sharing personal experience:

- Our system was literally packed up and put in storage for almost 5 months while we moved and went under major construction
- So a new place, new room and new setup with the same equipment
- The only change was we went from Transp Ref XLMM2 speaker cables to Opus Gen 5

So here is the learning experience after having professional Wilson setup (they will come back again to finetune) and help setting up everything in a fashion similar to our old setup (each component in its own 'isolation sandwich' with HRS/Stillpoints isolation under and mass damping (using serious weight/HRS/Artseania) on top):

- FIRST, the system is changing by the day as it 'settles in', the cable breaks in, and all matter of 'literally physical settling in' occurs (we have solid masonry outer walls, but the floors are 19th Century timber beams over masonry piles...so i imagine adding 2,500lbs of equipment to the floor takes some time to settle in.

- SECOND, the old system in the old house was there for 10 years, and after the main building blocks (amp, source, pre, speakers, cables) got sorted, we embarked on 3 years of isolation, grounding, room treatments. *i have become a big fan of isolation (HRS, Stillpoints, Artesania) as well as Tripoint/Entreq grounding...and i am unequivocal that in that room, if i moved ONE HRS pad 3cm underneath a piece of equipment, you could hear the difference. *

- THIRD, based on the above experience, i would have thought it was the quality of the system main building blocks that allowed me to hear those minute changes. *WRONG.

- FOURTH, in our current system, i have found many of those nuances are gone. *I cannot discern moving an HRS pad 3cm anymore. *(Sure, we have dedicated power lines now, isolated 16amp line JUST for the Gryphon amp, etc.) *BUT, i am NOW convinced that EVERYTHING INCLUDING SETUP ITSELF really, really matters in order for the NUANCES to come out of a system...which is really enjoyable for me.

- FIFTH, our new room is better, and system overall sounds much much much better in this room, with far greater detail, depth of soundstage, scale, and delicacy in the upper registers. *HOWEVER, those nuances from changing isolation are much harder to discern than in our old room...and i am NOT convinced it is because the new room is better. *I am convinced it is because i have yet to go piece by piece, and really fine tune every bit of isolation, placement, etc which i had done over 3+ years in being in the old room. *(NOTE: *we literally have had the system up for 1 week now.)

- SIXTH, to explore my thesis, we have the Velodyne and Entreq/Stillpoints distributors coming over in the next week or so to help the finetuning process...particularly Entreq/Stillpoints who were the biggest part of the 3-year period of finetuning in the old room. *Hopefully, it wont take 3 years this time!!! *

I am hopeful that as we get the system equipment settled in, focus (read: obsess) on placement of equipment, isolation/mass damping, etc and placement of room treatments, etc...we may start to take what is an incredibly good sounding/promising system setup and really get it 'perfect' so that many of those super-subtle changes one makes can once again be instantly detected in the system delivery

THIS IS AN ONGOING LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR ME...WILL UPDATE...

Finetuning is everything. People get sucked into the Brownian motion of equipment whoredom and never arrive because they shirk that fundamental responsibility. I certainly have.

Ron Resnick · Jul 26, 2016

LL21, Thank you for chronicling your experience and your improvements as you progress. It is exciting to read of your progress and feel your enthusiasm as you go!

Did you consider an isolation transformer as part of your electrical upgrades?

LL21 · Jul 26, 2016

Ron Resnick said:
LL21, Thank you for chronicling your experience and your improvements as you progress. It is exciting to read of your progress and feel your enthusiasm as you go!

Did you consider an isolation transformer as part of your electrical upgrades?

Hey Ron, I still need to get back to you on your PM. Let me sort that out.

Meanwhile, i spoke with our electricians about that. What he recommended to do was dedicated lines, special dedicated high-current outlet (it uses the same blue outlet as the Boulder 3050 mono amps), and a 2 hour battery back up buffer...plus the ability to easily stick in an Equitech or equivalent in the future. We went with that.

Power went out in our square for the first time in at least 35 years, and we had music for 2 hours by candlelight!

DaveC · Jul 26, 2016

Allowing the components to perform as intended by setting them up properly is key! I agree and why I advocate for acquiring neutral, resolving cables and clean power distribution right off the bat, otherwise you'll never hear what your components are really capable of and will choose colored components to offset the colored cables and tone down the ill effects of unfiltered power and inadequate power delivery. The results are often unfortunate... Cables and power are the backbone of a system and controlling vibration key to good setup...

Also, any non-super-high-end gear can probably benefit from simple upgrades of jacks and wire... consider there's basically the equivalent of a cable inside your components and speakers. Spending big $ on external cable while ignoring the connectors and wire typical in most components and speakers is a mistake. Using extremely high end parts in the signal path from power outlets to speaker drivers can yield amazing improvements.

stehno · Jul 27, 2016

DaveC said:
Allowing the components to perform as intended by setting them up properly is key! I agree and why I advocate for acquiring neutral, resolving cables and clean power distribution right off the bat, otherwise you'll never hear what your components are really capable of and will choose colored components to offset the colored cables and tone down the ill effects of unfiltered power and inadequate power delivery. The results are often unfortunate... Cables and power are the backbone of a system and controlling vibration key to good setup...

Also, any non-super-high-end gear can probably benefit from simple upgrades of jacks and wire... consider there's basically the equivalent of a cable inside your components and speakers. Spending big $ on external cable while ignoring the connectors and wire typical in most components and speakers is a mistake. Using extremely high end parts in the signal path from power outlets to speaker drivers can yield amazing improvements.

I was under the impression that a truly neutral (is there any other kind?) cable and AC power were impossible achievements. Can you elaborate on how this is achieved?

Same thing with "colored" components. Can you share which components you've thus far determined to be colored verses those which are not? And how are you able to decidedly tell the difference?

In other words, how is one able to tell any of these items (isolated) are neutral or uncolored? Especially when every other facet of a playback system will to one degree or another be colored / lack neutrality and you are only able to audition the collective whole?

DaveC · Jul 28, 2016

stehno said:
I was under the impression that a truly neutral (is there any other kind?) cable and AC power were impossible achievements. Can you elaborate on how this is achieved?

Same thing with "colored" components. Can you share which components you've thus far determined to be colored verses those which are not? And how are you able to decidedly tell the difference?

In other words, how is one able to tell any of these items (isolated) are neutral or uncolored? Especially when every other facet of a playback system will to one degree or another be colored / lack neutrality and you are only able to audition the collective whole?

We've talked about this a few times, I need to write something on my website about how to determine neutral....

I agree nothing is truly neutral but we can determine whether something is more neutral than something else, it's a relative comparison. So the question is really what things do you listen for when making the determination. Also, it's helpful to be able to recognize undesirable sonic characteristics so they can be avoided. As far as the design process I've measured cables but it's only a small part of the picture. Mostly it's just experience, intuition, trial and error and hopefully good luck.

Resolution and clarity combined with realistic timbre with no harshness is what I'm after in a nutshell. Resolution allows for the reproduction of fine detail which has various audible benefits that are very easy to listen for in a good system. I want no "bright" or "warm" characteristics to be audible, and these have signs to listen for... warmth smears details and makes the sound boring, brightness accentuates leading edges and makes the experience more stimulating. A neutral cable is stimulating in a much better way though, the presence of fine detail makes the experience stimulating in a way that does not cause listening fatigue, in fact the opposite. Brightness does cause fatigue but it's also often mistaken for increased detail. With practice it's actually very quick and easy to evaluate fairly subtle changes in my cables.

Also, some anecdotal evidence... I have a cable that sounds romantic, lush and smooth without sacrificing a great deal of detail or sounding very boring, it's the cable made with Duelund 5N silver ribbon wire with mineral oil impregnated silk dielectric. However, it's anything but neutral and the reactions I get to people testing it over the years is one of love or hate, with a few in the middle... it works great with certain systems and very poorly with others. My D4 cable is meant to be as neutral as possible and I've never had anyone not like it in what's gotta be a hundred demos or more, and the demo to sale rate is over 90%. Everybody has very similar comments about how it sounds to them. One of the best is from Andre Marc's review, he describes my design goals exactly:

...I realized there was a new sense of overall clarity, depth, and precision. This was the highest resolution I had ever experienced with either system, and there was an absolutely spot on balance, tonally.

I knew this was going to be a tricky review after several weeks of critical listening in that I was going to have to figure out a way to describe the sound of “nothing”. It was like hearing a direct link from component to component and amplifier to speaker. Also, the power cords were among the most impressive I have used, and that goes for models costing as much as five times more, with similar connectors. The task at hand is similar to trying to describe the clarity and of the purest water stream without sounding pompous.

Then it dawned on me the perfect word to describe ZenWave cable is indeed purity. The shimmer of a lightly struck cymbal, the strum of an acoustic guitar, and the presence of a close mic’d vocal were so pristine, and so precise in their location on the imaginary soundstage we call recordings, it removed much of the need to suspend disbelief.

http://www.avrev.com/home-theater-a...cables-and-surgex-zenwave-edition-review.html

And Matej from Mono & Stereo describes something very similar:

...Where silver typically looses the believable tone and timbre this particular combination resolves with instant recognizable natural “voicing”. There is certain light feathered easiness, unusual and not really usually manifested at this price point....

There is something just about right with the way D4 cables sounds like. Zen in Zenwave stands for calm, natural and stressless transfer of audio signal without typical negative attributes one can easily and instantly hear with so called typical high end audio cable.

ZenWave XLR and RCA interconnects serves the music without imposing its own language onto the audio material whatever the context is.

http://www.monoandstereo.com/2016/06/zenwave-d4-rca-and-xlr-interconnects.html

LL21 · Jul 29, 2016

well with some help from the distributor, we managed to fine tune, recalibrate the Velodyne to the room. It appears reasonably flat, roughly +/- 2db from 20hz to just under 100hz, and i suppose one could say close to +/- 3db from 15hz to 200hz.

Velodyne DD18+ Measurements July 29 2016.jpg

LL21 · Jul 30, 2016

Updated change:

Definitely now rolling off the subsonic (sub-15hz) filter now at 24db/octave instead of only 6db/octave. After continuing to listen while working, it became insane how much sub-20hz information there can be on certain CDs...i thought there could not be any...caused insane rumble in certain corners of the room...with 24db rolloff, much better. Same for movie soundtracks where with a 24db roll-off below 15hz is just cleaner. Would love to keep it, but then would have to move the sub around, etc which is not in the cards.

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