@zdenes You state "Sorry, this got a bit off 'thread title'. ", I actually think your post is incredibly relevant to this thread. There are a few of your points that I would like to pick up on.
To be honest, when I started this thread I thought it would be the normal kind of material. Something along the lines of this, adding the REF10, posts about how this improves sound quality, adding the SOtM kit, posts about how this improved sound quality, specifically versus the mR or Roon AIR. Maybe some posts about how the running the SOtM kit with and without the REF10 influenced sound quality. It did not turn out that way!
One thing I can declare is that I have had a hearing test! This was about a year ago at my local optician. They offer a free test on this machine that has a touch screen and headphones, you listen and select from the screen. I am happy to report that this did not highlight any issues with my hearing, I have no idea if this machine provided as sophisticated a test as the one that highlighted the 4000Hz dip you mention. In earlier posts, I mentioned my failed attempt to measure the mR and SOtM kit with test tones and a professional SPL meter. Although the test did not work, it did serve as a hearing test. I managed to find lots of test tones on line which ran up to very high frequencies. The highest I could hear was 15kHz, if I tried 18 or 20 kHz I could hear nothing, nada. The 15kHz test tone was actually very interesting, when I played it over the system I could hear it clearly, if only just. If I tweaked the volume up, this did not seem to make very much difference to what I perceived, maybe a fractional increase in volume, but I could see the SPL meter jumping significantly, from 70dB to 80dB or similar. Clearly the SPL meter can hear a lot better at 15kHz than I can! Whilst we are being candid about these things, I can declare that I am indeed over 35, quite a bit over, just past the 50 mark as it happens. Anyway, the reason that this is absolutely relevant to this thread is that so far, rather than this being about comparing kit, this thread has become more about how I perceive treble, and what the SOtM kit does in the HF area.
Initially, I declared the SOtM kit was good but has a slight digital edge in the HF area. This was wrong. I also declared that the SOtM kit is brighter, meaning a greater emphasis in the treble. In absolute terms, I now know this was wrong also, the mR, AIR & SOtM kit measure almost identically in terms of SPL at any given frequency.
OK, so a lot of my initial impressions were wrong, but in another way, there were not, they were accurately reflecting what I have perceived with the SOtM kit. Thanks to some of my original plans for the Easter break falling through, I have probably doubled the time I have spent listening to the SOtM kit, and a lot of that time I have been listening with the full knowledge that the SOtM does not measure one iota brighter than the mR or AIR. The key point is that even though I know this, I can say for certain that it most definitely does sound brighter. I do not know why this is, but I am just beginning to make sense of this. I think the first step in discovering this actually happened when I switched from the Expert to the Pro with the Blades. I am sure regular readers will recall some debate as to if the Pro was 'less forgiving'. If you don't recall, here is a relevant link:
https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=3811
It is interesting that when moving from the Expert to the Pro, the one potential issue mentioned was 'unforgiving' treble, nobody mentioned unforgiving bass or mid-range. Plus, I am as sure as I can be that if you measured a Pro from 10Hz to 20kHz, it would measure identically to an Expert. I think that I have found the Pro to be a bit less forgiving to poor recordings than the Expert, but this has not bothered me too much, and I have certainly found the Pro to be more resolving and generally realistic. So then we add the SOtM kit. In very broad terms, the change from the mR or AIR versus the SOtM kit is a bit like the change from the Expert to the Pro. In terms of my perception, the very same things are changing.
So what the means to my ears and my system is that the Blade and old Expert combination can play almost anything without the HF annoying me, even with poor recordings. Add the Pro, and poor or out of balance HF in some material does become more apparent, but not so much that it bothers me. Add the SOtM kit with the REF10, and all of a sudden things get pushed over the edge. It is early days, but I could almost make the bizarre conclusion that I do not like the SOtM kit because it is too good. OK, that is a bit of a crazy conclusion, so it brings us back to the question, why does the SOtM kit, or even the Pro, sound brighter? I am sure that many of us could come up with some good theories here, but I doubt we could establish any facts or an absolute truth. We are in the realm of psychoacoustics here, and I don't think anyone on the planet has solved all the issues with psychoacoustics.
At this point, I will pick up on another point that @zdenes was making. How do you choose what equipment to buy? OK, I too would never trust a magazine review. In a parallel universe, I would love to buy a magazine where bind test sessions comparing different components were held, with highly trained listeners who had had recent hearing tests, this would be great. Blind ABX testing of cables, comparisons of the super expensive stuff against the high performing more affordable kit, performed blind in true ABX conditions. That would be great, but it is a parallel universe. Plus you have magazines bias and their need to keep the advertisers happy, I read one review a while ago, the reviewer did highlight some issues in the test, these issues were backed up in some of the detail in the measurements. Read it carefully, it was a critical review, but a lot of the text was fluff and glowing praise, the product got an "Editors Chioce" stamp of approval. My preference is to use magazines, online reviews, user reviews etc. to 'short list', then take the top three choices and compare them back to back, preferably in my system, but I am lucky in having a dealer that has my exact same amp and speakers in stock, plus a demo room that sounds remarkably similar to my own room. My problem recently is that nothing on my short list of kit to buy is not available for demo, so I had to go with user reviews and similar. Thankfully, I could easily achieve @zdenes criteria of 6 to 8 reviews to gain a degree of objective comparison.
Curiously, I am coming to the conclusion that I had listened to say three options back to back in my system, I might have made the wrong choice. From where I am now, I would probably have selected the product that irritated me least with respect to the treble issue. In all likelihood, this would have been the worst performing of the choices. OK, you could argue here that is it is not the absolute performance that matters, it's what you like listening to best, what you can live with. For me this is relevant, I am not someone who has a vast collection of audiophile recordings that are selected because they make the system sound good and show what it can do. Believe it or not, I do make all this effort because I love listening to music, and a lot of the music I love to listen to tends not to be audiophile quality, quite the opposite.
So, have I now assembled a system now that is so good that I can no longer use it to play some of my favorite music because the recordings are so bad they become unlistenable? This is the question. I am now just at the stage now of starting to answer this question, and I think the answer will be no. Why no? Because the only issue is with treble, that's it. I recall talking to a hifi dealer once, he stated that personally that he did not like KEF speakers, he found them (all of them apparently) to be too harsh in the treble. I would not agree with this, but undoubtedly the KEF Uni-Q driver is at the ruthless end of the revealing scale. Add to this the Pro, the SOtM kit, Mutec and all the rest of it, I do have a system that will take any HF issues an throw them at you in a way that cannot be ignored, and indeed in a way that will detract from anything else the system might be capable of, not a good thing. For the record, I do quite like speakers such as the Dali Epicon, which has Soft Dome and Ribbon Tweeters. I have not bought Dali Epicon’s because I prefer other aspects of the Blade far more, but maybe the something like Epicon’s would be better for my HF troubles.
As an experiment and a bit of fun, I created a playlist of individual tracks that were all what you might consider ‘audiophile’ recordings, from sources such as Linn studio masters and similar. None of these displayed one iota of what you might consider HF harshness, the only issue I did have on a couple of tracks was a degree of sibilance with some female vocals, this may be the system, but might just be inherent with the recording. I had the Devialet remote set such that I could adjust the treble, although I could not see the display. On some tracks I tried adjusting the treble up and down, then gradually adjusting until things sounded just right, this is effectively done blind, but after finding the preferred setting, I could then check the actual setting on the Devialet’s display. Quite a few times I actually hit 0.0dB, only once was I + anything, but many times I did end up in the 0.0 to -3dB range. In fact, I was almost always in the 0.0 to -3dB range, only once above 0.0, only once below -3dB. The tendency was towards 0 or a mild tweak downwards, 0.0, -1dB or -2dB were by far the quite a common hits. This was with a selection of pretty high quality recordings, and here is the key point. I am finding that even when stumbling across something that is clearly an inherently poor recording that displays all the HF issues that bother me, a -3dB tweak on the treble cures the issue. Obviously it does not make the recording suddenly turn into a good recording, but it changes something that irritates the hell out of me into something I can happily enjoy for what it is, a not particularly well recorded piece of music I enjoy. As for the treble in these bad recordings, in terms of discerning the cymbals or whatever, I reckon you can hear these aspects much more clearly with the SOtM kit and the treble at -3dB that you could with the mR and the treble set flat. Curious, but it does take us back to the question as to why the SOtM kit, or even the Pro, does sound a touch brighter in the first place.
As to what -3dB sounds like, you can try this yourself. A -3dB tweak does sound fairly obvious when you do it, but I suspect that if someone sneaked into your house in the middle of the night and turned your treble down to -3dB, it might actually be a while before you noticed it. Indeed, if someone had done this to me the night before I installed the SOtM kit, there would have been little chance I would have noticed this, and I may have simply ended up reporting how good the SOtM sounds, my treble alarm would not have been activated. @Greg was suggesting getting a friend to listen, this leads me to a cunning plan. I can think of someone that I get to have a listen, someone who has heard the rig many times with the mR and Mutec, I could get them to have a listen with the SOtM kit in place, they will hear this as something new, but I could run the treble at -4dB or something, they will not know about this, will they notice? Could be fun, and informative.
All this makes me think of Ian G’s recent thread:
https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=5047
I hate the idea of using the tone controls, but maybe I need to get past this. There is no reason why I shouldn’t either, I have been more than happy to run SAM in the past. I know that some have noticed that SAM has a negative effect on the absolute resolution of the amp, I too can notice it, albeit as a tiny reduction to my ears. Is this the case with the tone controls also?
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the SOtM kit can allow me to turn the treble down 3dB or so with the treble actually sounding as it should, and the fact that turning the treble down 3dB can make a badly recorded harsh sounding track sound listenable, makes the SOtM kit with a treble tweak the ideal tool for listening to all those not so well recorded track I enjoy.
Over the next few weeks I should be able to establish if this is a maybe is in fact true or not. This will also be a good time to try the SMPS elimination test. Maybe this reduction in noise will add to the improvements the SOtM kit is making, and hence add to the treble issue, I might end up at -4dB with all SMPS’s eliminated! I am now at the point where I am familiar enough with the new kit to try this, a couple of weeks ago it would probably just added to my confusion.
So this is where I have got to after a very enjoyable Easter break. I have started to compile a playlist of individual tracks, these are all tracks that I might like to listen to, and all tracks that when I listen to on my current system the treble alarm triggers.
One final point, all this obsession with one aspect of my system has stopped me posting much about what the SOtM kit does from 8kHz downwards. It is very impressive. I was listening to one track that did not trigger my treble alarm, and I noticed a certain magic in the details, it was unusually mesmerising and engaging. The last time I recall the track sounding like that was when I listened to it with the dCS Upsampler and clock, albeit this was with a D800. But you get the idea, the SOtM kit delivers, realism, texture, and in particular in those little ambient details than turn a flat recording into something far more three dimensional and engaging. It’s properly good kit, it’s just a shame it irritates the hell out of me sometimes.
I shall sign off by offering the most inappropriate song of the moment......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCkvCPvDXk
To be honest, when I started this thread I thought it would be the normal kind of material. Something along the lines of this, adding the REF10, posts about how this improves sound quality, adding the SOtM kit, posts about how this improved sound quality, specifically versus the mR or Roon AIR. Maybe some posts about how the running the SOtM kit with and without the REF10 influenced sound quality. It did not turn out that way!
One thing I can declare is that I have had a hearing test! This was about a year ago at my local optician. They offer a free test on this machine that has a touch screen and headphones, you listen and select from the screen. I am happy to report that this did not highlight any issues with my hearing, I have no idea if this machine provided as sophisticated a test as the one that highlighted the 4000Hz dip you mention. In earlier posts, I mentioned my failed attempt to measure the mR and SOtM kit with test tones and a professional SPL meter. Although the test did not work, it did serve as a hearing test. I managed to find lots of test tones on line which ran up to very high frequencies. The highest I could hear was 15kHz, if I tried 18 or 20 kHz I could hear nothing, nada. The 15kHz test tone was actually very interesting, when I played it over the system I could hear it clearly, if only just. If I tweaked the volume up, this did not seem to make very much difference to what I perceived, maybe a fractional increase in volume, but I could see the SPL meter jumping significantly, from 70dB to 80dB or similar. Clearly the SPL meter can hear a lot better at 15kHz than I can! Whilst we are being candid about these things, I can declare that I am indeed over 35, quite a bit over, just past the 50 mark as it happens. Anyway, the reason that this is absolutely relevant to this thread is that so far, rather than this being about comparing kit, this thread has become more about how I perceive treble, and what the SOtM kit does in the HF area.
Initially, I declared the SOtM kit was good but has a slight digital edge in the HF area. This was wrong. I also declared that the SOtM kit is brighter, meaning a greater emphasis in the treble. In absolute terms, I now know this was wrong also, the mR, AIR & SOtM kit measure almost identically in terms of SPL at any given frequency.
OK, so a lot of my initial impressions were wrong, but in another way, there were not, they were accurately reflecting what I have perceived with the SOtM kit. Thanks to some of my original plans for the Easter break falling through, I have probably doubled the time I have spent listening to the SOtM kit, and a lot of that time I have been listening with the full knowledge that the SOtM does not measure one iota brighter than the mR or AIR. The key point is that even though I know this, I can say for certain that it most definitely does sound brighter. I do not know why this is, but I am just beginning to make sense of this. I think the first step in discovering this actually happened when I switched from the Expert to the Pro with the Blades. I am sure regular readers will recall some debate as to if the Pro was 'less forgiving'. If you don't recall, here is a relevant link:
https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=3811
It is interesting that when moving from the Expert to the Pro, the one potential issue mentioned was 'unforgiving' treble, nobody mentioned unforgiving bass or mid-range. Plus, I am as sure as I can be that if you measured a Pro from 10Hz to 20kHz, it would measure identically to an Expert. I think that I have found the Pro to be a bit less forgiving to poor recordings than the Expert, but this has not bothered me too much, and I have certainly found the Pro to be more resolving and generally realistic. So then we add the SOtM kit. In very broad terms, the change from the mR or AIR versus the SOtM kit is a bit like the change from the Expert to the Pro. In terms of my perception, the very same things are changing.
So what the means to my ears and my system is that the Blade and old Expert combination can play almost anything without the HF annoying me, even with poor recordings. Add the Pro, and poor or out of balance HF in some material does become more apparent, but not so much that it bothers me. Add the SOtM kit with the REF10, and all of a sudden things get pushed over the edge. It is early days, but I could almost make the bizarre conclusion that I do not like the SOtM kit because it is too good. OK, that is a bit of a crazy conclusion, so it brings us back to the question, why does the SOtM kit, or even the Pro, sound brighter? I am sure that many of us could come up with some good theories here, but I doubt we could establish any facts or an absolute truth. We are in the realm of psychoacoustics here, and I don't think anyone on the planet has solved all the issues with psychoacoustics.
At this point, I will pick up on another point that @zdenes was making. How do you choose what equipment to buy? OK, I too would never trust a magazine review. In a parallel universe, I would love to buy a magazine where bind test sessions comparing different components were held, with highly trained listeners who had had recent hearing tests, this would be great. Blind ABX testing of cables, comparisons of the super expensive stuff against the high performing more affordable kit, performed blind in true ABX conditions. That would be great, but it is a parallel universe. Plus you have magazines bias and their need to keep the advertisers happy, I read one review a while ago, the reviewer did highlight some issues in the test, these issues were backed up in some of the detail in the measurements. Read it carefully, it was a critical review, but a lot of the text was fluff and glowing praise, the product got an "Editors Chioce" stamp of approval. My preference is to use magazines, online reviews, user reviews etc. to 'short list', then take the top three choices and compare them back to back, preferably in my system, but I am lucky in having a dealer that has my exact same amp and speakers in stock, plus a demo room that sounds remarkably similar to my own room. My problem recently is that nothing on my short list of kit to buy is not available for demo, so I had to go with user reviews and similar. Thankfully, I could easily achieve @zdenes criteria of 6 to 8 reviews to gain a degree of objective comparison.
Curiously, I am coming to the conclusion that I had listened to say three options back to back in my system, I might have made the wrong choice. From where I am now, I would probably have selected the product that irritated me least with respect to the treble issue. In all likelihood, this would have been the worst performing of the choices. OK, you could argue here that is it is not the absolute performance that matters, it's what you like listening to best, what you can live with. For me this is relevant, I am not someone who has a vast collection of audiophile recordings that are selected because they make the system sound good and show what it can do. Believe it or not, I do make all this effort because I love listening to music, and a lot of the music I love to listen to tends not to be audiophile quality, quite the opposite.
So, have I now assembled a system now that is so good that I can no longer use it to play some of my favorite music because the recordings are so bad they become unlistenable? This is the question. I am now just at the stage now of starting to answer this question, and I think the answer will be no. Why no? Because the only issue is with treble, that's it. I recall talking to a hifi dealer once, he stated that personally that he did not like KEF speakers, he found them (all of them apparently) to be too harsh in the treble. I would not agree with this, but undoubtedly the KEF Uni-Q driver is at the ruthless end of the revealing scale. Add to this the Pro, the SOtM kit, Mutec and all the rest of it, I do have a system that will take any HF issues an throw them at you in a way that cannot be ignored, and indeed in a way that will detract from anything else the system might be capable of, not a good thing. For the record, I do quite like speakers such as the Dali Epicon, which has Soft Dome and Ribbon Tweeters. I have not bought Dali Epicon’s because I prefer other aspects of the Blade far more, but maybe the something like Epicon’s would be better for my HF troubles.
As an experiment and a bit of fun, I created a playlist of individual tracks that were all what you might consider ‘audiophile’ recordings, from sources such as Linn studio masters and similar. None of these displayed one iota of what you might consider HF harshness, the only issue I did have on a couple of tracks was a degree of sibilance with some female vocals, this may be the system, but might just be inherent with the recording. I had the Devialet remote set such that I could adjust the treble, although I could not see the display. On some tracks I tried adjusting the treble up and down, then gradually adjusting until things sounded just right, this is effectively done blind, but after finding the preferred setting, I could then check the actual setting on the Devialet’s display. Quite a few times I actually hit 0.0dB, only once was I + anything, but many times I did end up in the 0.0 to -3dB range. In fact, I was almost always in the 0.0 to -3dB range, only once above 0.0, only once below -3dB. The tendency was towards 0 or a mild tweak downwards, 0.0, -1dB or -2dB were by far the quite a common hits. This was with a selection of pretty high quality recordings, and here is the key point. I am finding that even when stumbling across something that is clearly an inherently poor recording that displays all the HF issues that bother me, a -3dB tweak on the treble cures the issue. Obviously it does not make the recording suddenly turn into a good recording, but it changes something that irritates the hell out of me into something I can happily enjoy for what it is, a not particularly well recorded piece of music I enjoy. As for the treble in these bad recordings, in terms of discerning the cymbals or whatever, I reckon you can hear these aspects much more clearly with the SOtM kit and the treble at -3dB that you could with the mR and the treble set flat. Curious, but it does take us back to the question as to why the SOtM kit, or even the Pro, does sound a touch brighter in the first place.
As to what -3dB sounds like, you can try this yourself. A -3dB tweak does sound fairly obvious when you do it, but I suspect that if someone sneaked into your house in the middle of the night and turned your treble down to -3dB, it might actually be a while before you noticed it. Indeed, if someone had done this to me the night before I installed the SOtM kit, there would have been little chance I would have noticed this, and I may have simply ended up reporting how good the SOtM sounds, my treble alarm would not have been activated. @Greg was suggesting getting a friend to listen, this leads me to a cunning plan. I can think of someone that I get to have a listen, someone who has heard the rig many times with the mR and Mutec, I could get them to have a listen with the SOtM kit in place, they will hear this as something new, but I could run the treble at -4dB or something, they will not know about this, will they notice? Could be fun, and informative.
All this makes me think of Ian G’s recent thread:
https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=5047
I hate the idea of using the tone controls, but maybe I need to get past this. There is no reason why I shouldn’t either, I have been more than happy to run SAM in the past. I know that some have noticed that SAM has a negative effect on the absolute resolution of the amp, I too can notice it, albeit as a tiny reduction to my ears. Is this the case with the tone controls also?
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the SOtM kit can allow me to turn the treble down 3dB or so with the treble actually sounding as it should, and the fact that turning the treble down 3dB can make a badly recorded harsh sounding track sound listenable, makes the SOtM kit with a treble tweak the ideal tool for listening to all those not so well recorded track I enjoy.
Over the next few weeks I should be able to establish if this is a maybe is in fact true or not. This will also be a good time to try the SMPS elimination test. Maybe this reduction in noise will add to the improvements the SOtM kit is making, and hence add to the treble issue, I might end up at -4dB with all SMPS’s eliminated! I am now at the point where I am familiar enough with the new kit to try this, a couple of weeks ago it would probably just added to my confusion.
So this is where I have got to after a very enjoyable Easter break. I have started to compile a playlist of individual tracks, these are all tracks that I might like to listen to, and all tracks that when I listen to on my current system the treble alarm triggers.
One final point, all this obsession with one aspect of my system has stopped me posting much about what the SOtM kit does from 8kHz downwards. It is very impressive. I was listening to one track that did not trigger my treble alarm, and I noticed a certain magic in the details, it was unusually mesmerising and engaging. The last time I recall the track sounding like that was when I listened to it with the dCS Upsampler and clock, albeit this was with a D800. But you get the idea, the SOtM kit delivers, realism, texture, and in particular in those little ambient details than turn a flat recording into something far more three dimensional and engaging. It’s properly good kit, it’s just a shame it irritates the hell out of me sometimes.
I shall sign off by offering the most inappropriate song of the moment......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCkvCPvDXk
1000 Pro - KEF Blade - iFi Zen Stream - Mutec REF10 - MC3+USB - Pro-Ject Signature 12
