Follow the new high end audio hierarchy below to avoid making the same costly mistakes time and time again:
It’s time to bring the source first myth down for the greater good.
All components play a part in the final result, as well as the room. No, a good source won’t necessarily correct a poor room/speaker match, but it will help. In other words, the result will still be better than with an inadequate source. So I agree that in such circumstances you definitely won’t be getting the best from the source. But I disgagree that “no amount of source first will make a difference”. It still will. The point is that unless you start with a suitably capable source for your speakers then you are doomed no matter what - good room interaction or no. There’s no circumstances where you can say the quality of the source is not of prime importance. That is if your primary goal is musical involvement.
Why is it a myth?
It simply won’t at all - nor will anything other than room rearrangement, acoustic treatment, posdibly different speakers and possibly electronic correction
I completely agree with the above! 
In my view, the listening room accounts for at least 60–70% of what we ultimately hear !!
That said, I rarely make that point these days, as it tends to be met with considerable resistance…
I started a thread on the subject some years ago and, apart from a handful of notable exceptions, it was received rather poorly.
Some members seemed genuinely offended by the suggestion that the room might have a greater influence on the final result than many of the components we spend so much time discussing.
Interestingly, despite the initial pushback, the thread is still alive and continues to attract a number of contributors with a strong scientific and engineering background.
The audiophile world is often built around deeply held convictions that are not always supported by evidence.
Yet, at its core, audio reproduction is simply an engineering problem. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Cheers,
Thomas
Yup. I get the source first thing. Crap in, crap out. But if the difference of the source quality is, say 30% between good and better (I am being generous. We have all experienced diminishing returns … ) a room making 50% difference to what comes out is still the dominating factor and will mess up any money spent upstream.
A cheaper system, well selected/set up in a good room will sound better than the expensive one in a crap room. Go to any Hifi show and tell me I’m wrong.
As has been said, everything is important but I personally put cabling, power conditioning etc way, way … way down the line. It really is only to finish off a well sorted rig Worry about more important things first. For those that have a lovely expensive system in a great room, you’re blessed.
Because it doesn’t work as advertised.
One corollary I would add to your post is that rooms vary and inevitably some will have far greater effect than others - e.g. one with benign dimension ratios, maybe sloping ceiling, solid walls and floor, thick wall-to-wall carpet and expansive thick curtains, thick soft furnishing, open vookshelves full of books and varied wallhangings will likely have far less impact than one near cubic with suspended floor with hard surface covering, simple plasterboard walls/dry lining, hard furniture, lots of glass axnd no curtains, and large expanses of uncovered wall. Most people’s homes likely sit somewhere on the spectrum between these, but modern fashion and construction tends towards the worse end.
No it won’t correct it, but as I said, it will help in the sense that the results will still be better than with an inadequate source.
I’m not suggesting that paying attention to getting a first rate source is a ‘cure all’ for all other shortcomings. Of course it isn’t. But the source is very much the foundation upon which the rest of the system rests, certainly in terms of musical coherence and integrity and also in in some respects purely sonically as well. For instance if you want deep bass that is musically convincing then you won’t get it simply by having wide bandwidth speakers. You also need a source capable of reproducing deep bass in a musically coherent way. Otherwise what you will get is uncontrolled deep bass that is musically incoherent or just less deep bass.
I’ve used small speakers all my life until we got the large floor standing Klipsch Forte III’s around five years ago. This really opened my eyes to the importance of large speakers in producing a really convincing illusion of reality that smaller speakers, no matter how capable, just can’t achieve. It’s less a matter of deep bass, though this helps a lot, but rather more a matter of scale, dynamic headroom and dynamic freedom. This allows the music to swell and grow in a very lifelike and convincing way which is quite startling when one is used to small bookshelf speakers.
So I’m not trying to diminish the importance of speakers at all. In terms of creating a credible illusion of reality they are vital. But in terms of musical involvement or coherence they are a lot less important than having a first rate source. I got excellent musical involvement over many years using an LP12 and then various high end Naim CD players fronting systems with tiny speakers. Those systems would have been even better with large speakers that were capable but they wouldn’t have given anything like the same musical satisfaction without first rate sources.
That definitely hasn’t been my experience. I’ve always found that the most musically satisfying systems were those that employed first rate sources as opposed to lesser sources with first rate speakers.
Evidently this applies to some people but certainly not all! I for one would get better musical involvement and enjoyment (not sure what coherence means here) with decent speakers meeting my preferences and a source that is only fairly decent (e.g. in older vinyl days say a Thorens TD150AB with Shure M75E cartridge) than a first rate source with speakers that significantly limit the scale and range of the music. Interestingly I seemed to have less of an upgrade and tweaking itch than others with better sources but limiting speakers, though of course that might just be my psyche.
Indeed room treatment is important , be it sound proofing them or tweaking them .
Evidently this is true, as your own preferences clearly demonstrate. Here is not really the place for an in-depth philosophical discussion but I believe that some people do listen differently and ‘get their buttons pushed’ as it were by significantly different things. Interestingly, before I got an LP12 (immediately before that I had a Thorens TD160) I would have agreed with you absolutely that the speakers were the most important thing. The LP12 fundamentally changed the way in which I listen to music. The music made sense in ways which before this it just hadn’t. This vastly expanded my musical tastes. Suddenly I found I could listen to and thoroughly enjoy stuff which before this I wouldn’t have gone near to. This is what I mean by musical coherence. All the elements of the music hanging together so that they are musically meaningful and engaging. It’s a difficult concept to explain because things like this are naturally very subjective and personal and what I regard as musical coherence you may think is unimportant.
Just to try to illustrate it a small example would be for instance listening to a piece of music with some backing vocals way back in the mix. These may seem of little importance on a lesser source and add little to the overall enjoyment. But on a top class source they can take on a much greater significance and suddenly the interplay between backing vocalists and the rest of the music is thrown into sharp relief and one’s musical appreciation and experience is vastly deepened.
It may be that you get different things from a top class source than I do. I recall you have a Dave DAC and things don’t get much better than that. It would be interesting to know if faced with a situation that demanded you downgrading either your speakers to say a pair of small bookshelf types, or your DAC to say a Chord Qutest (which we have) which way you would go. I’m guessing you would absolutely stick with your speakers. Me, I would go the other way.
Soundproofing and acoustic treatment are two completely different things.
That said, acoustic treatment is absolutely essential if one wants reasonably accurate reproduction below ~250 Hz.
In reality, most listening rooms receive little or no acoustic treatment.
As a result, room-induced colourations in the bass and lower midrange are inevitably significant.
The interesting thing is that most listeners gradually become accustomed to these colourations.
In most cases, they become so familiar with them that removing them can initially create the impression that something is missing from the music.
Achieving genuinely accurate low-frequency reproduction is extraordinarily difficult.
It typically requires such a substantial amount of acoustic treatment that it is simply not a realistic option for 99.9% of people outside the professional audio world.
In that respect, my listening room is quite unusual, as it incorporates a level of acoustic treatment rarely found in a domestic environment.
Cheers,
Thomas
Conjecture: Using a full loom is more likely to unbalance the sound, based on a premise that the manufacturer has a signature sound.
I have heard LP12/Ittok through limiting speakers, and whilst of course music was enjoyable it was incomplete and unsatisfying. When I first heard, back in late 1980s, I had the Thorens I memtioned, and the sound to me through my IMF speakers was so much better. My friend with the LP12 grabbed at the chance to take my IMFs when I changed a few years later, having heard my system.
As for expanding of musical taste, I’m very happy with my own quite wide taste covering heavy rock, prog rock, dramatic orchestral, chamber music, solo piano and opera, and I and have no interest in learning to bear others like jazz, soul or rap. (Especially if that is trying to find the least worst because other music no longer sounds as enjoyable!)
To answer your question, if I had to change either my DAC or speakers for something lesser, I know I would still find contentment with, say, a Chord Hugo through my present speakers, but not playing Dave through small limiting speakers. If physical downsizing were to make it impossible to accommodate decent full range speakers (or possibly small decent speakers with good subs) then I’d be considering headphones instead.
Clearly what we enjoy with music replay has significant differences! One thing I would note is that since first getting decent speakers I haven’t ever been dissatisfied listening to music through my system, upgrades purely having been because it has been possible, and the full range of music I like has played equally well - I wonder how many with small, limiting speakers can say that.
Which, if you think about it, is really crap if we are talking about cables.
Perhaps I misunderstood?
When I first got my LP12 I was 18 and then using small budget bookshelf speakers (KEF Coda II’s). I eventually graduated to Kans and then at the end of my Linn/Naim stint many years later finished up with IBL’s apart from a very brief dalliance with nSats. I found all these systems thoroughly satsifying musically and I can’t say that I found either the Kans or IBL’s to be in any way limiting of my musical enjoyment at the time. Now owning much larger speakers I can appreciate what I was missing all those years. But not at the time. If I did have to return to small speakers I think I would make the adjustment without too much trouble.
I recall many years ago when I got the Kans expressing disappointment to my dealer that I was unable to afford Isobariks, which I then greatly aspired to. Indeed not only the speakers, but the considerable cost of a top line LP12 and suitable Naim electronics to drive them. This was considered mandatory. Anyone suggesting otherwise, such as driving them with a Nait 2 (as I believe some have done since) would have been considered to be mentally deranged. And that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway my dealer told me not to despair as several of his customers had actually returned to Kans after “upgrading” to Isobariks as they thought they were musically superior.
I have a feeling, though I could be wrong, that people who never got embroiled in the whole Linn/Naim thing in the 70’s are probably less convinced or not convinced at all of the validity of the source first approach. I have in mind a typical Quad customer back then who for instance probably had a half decent turntable, though nothing exceptional, a 33/303 and a big pair of Spendor or Wharefale speakers. And loved it. Maybe I could have been one of those people had I not gone down the Linn/Naim route and maybe I would have been just as happy. I nearly did buy a 33/303 when I was around 20. I still adore the look of that amp! If I didn’t have what I have then I would be tempted by something like the new Quad 3 CDT, the Quad 3 integrated amp,and a pair of Wharfedale Dovedale speakers.
I think I confused myself too! I should have said: if there is a ‘house sound’ to a manufacturer’s cables, then the more of them you have, the further from neutrality yo might end up.
The source first approach was one of the most brilliant marketing strategies the modern commercial world has ever seen, still relevant after more than half a century, an almost perfect self fulfilling prophecy.