A Confused streaming system - Mutec / SOtM Ultra

[David A]

@Confused,

You have discovered the dark side of tweaking. All is not plain sailing.

There is a problem with trying to improve a specific aspect of sound. It can be very easy to change one thing, to get more detail for example, and find that it changes other things as well. More detail can add brightness, changing the bass or high frequency response changes the overall tonal balance and can affect how you hear the mid-range and the other end of the frequency spectrum. You find that changing one thing affects other things and improvement in one area often comes with an unwelcome cost in other things. You can then try to address those other things but that can turn into a never ending task.

To make things more complicated, it's easy to focus on the thing which annoys you. You tweak and "fix" that and you're really happy with the improvement but it can often take quite a while for you to notice the cost elsewhere. It's easy not to notice the cost while you're paying attention to the thing which initially annoyed you and enjoying the change, and it isn't until you stop paying attention to that aspect of the sound and simply start listening to the overall sound again that you notice the difference and then you can find that the end result overall isn't as much to your liking as the original sound. I once started tweaking with vibration control many years ago and got an improvement, noticed a cost, tweaked to fix the new problem, noticed a cost, tweaked again, and went through that process several times. Each time I did A/B comparisons and felt I got an improvement in the area I was interested in but then, after several successive tweaks, did an A/B comparison between my original tweak and my final result several tweaks later and removed everything but the first tweak. Focussing on individual issues blinded me to the overall sound and the end result of improving several individual "problems" one after another wasn't as good as just making the first improvement on its own.

There are reasons why people suggest that you should tweak slowly. I think burn in can be real in some cases, but I also think it takes time for us to adjust to the change in sound and become accustomed to it before we can really hear what the change actually gives us and be able to know whether or not fixing one thing is actually beneficial overall or whether the unanticipated costs outweigh the benefit of the fix. It's easy to lose sight of the forest when you're focussing on individual trees.

Over time I've learnt to become very cautious when I start making chains of changes which are intended to fix the problems that arose with a previous fix. Things become complicated and expensive and it's easy for the overall result to start going backwards without noticing it. One thing I've found which helps me is to make a change, live with it until I'm no longer noticing the change which can take a week or two, and then go back to the way things were before the change. That usually gives me a better idea of the overall benefit or otherwise of the change than several A/B comparisons at the time I introduced the change.

You asked if anyone could explain why increasing a system's resolution can increase the apparent prominence in the presence band. There could be several reasons but I strongly suspect that part of it is simply that you're noticing the presence band more because of the aspects of the sound that you're paying attention to. Paying attention to something makes us notice that thing and its immediate surroundings more than we notice other things. That's a big part of what's going on when I said above that I find that I get a better idea of the overall benefit of a change when I do an A/B comparison after I've become used to the sound and I'm no longer paying attention specifically to the change. It's a lot easier to hear whether a change improves the result musically when you're no longer paying attention to what it does to a specific aspect of the sound.

An additional thought:


You’re thinking about lowering the treble setting to deal with a too prominent presence region. That may work but it’s also possible that the solution is to leave the treble alone and to boost the bass. Those room response target curves you mentioned all start falling from the bass region. If the bottom end of the range isn’t strong enough the top end will sound bright but if you lower the top end and the bottom end isn’t strong enough in relation to the mids then you’re likely to end up with a too strong mid range which may still sound elevated in the presence region and with a top and bottom end which both end up sounding duller.

There’s that old distinction between people who see the glass as half full and those who see it as half empty. Some people have a tendency to view a rising frequency response as one with too much treble while others view it as one with too little bass. Both descriptions can often be applied to the same situation. Reducing the treble will work if the bass is strong enough in relation to the mids and presence region but you’ll get better results with increasing the bass if the bass is around the same level or lower than the mids. The response curve targets you mention all work on having the treble lower than the bass and a fairly even slope down from the bass. They don’t rely on having the treble lower than the mids or presence region, even though that will be the case if the response slopes down from the bass.

It might sound counter intuitive to fix an elevated presence/treble region by increasing the bass response rather than reducing the elevated area but depending on the bass response increasing the bass can actually be the best way to fix an elevated presence range or highs.