Melco SQ wise, Innous comfort wise (roon core integrated, very easy set up and operation). Both are vey very good, you can‘t go wrong buying one of these.
I tried this with some other speakers c. 7 or 8 years ago. SWMBO was NOT impressed. I did it whilst she was out walking the dogs… 10 mins after her return the slabs were back in the garden
Try blending the slabs into the room - paint them, put a piece of carpet on top and frame them like a painting on the floor. Get SWMBO to do it or help do it so she can feel included in preservation of the look of the room. All this assuming that you thought the slabs were worthwhile for SQ.
tbh I did suggest we could paint them white; after all the whole house is Farrow&Ball white! Still didn’t go down well.
ce la vie
Hi the best ever tweek I made was , I had a pair of rebuilt quad ESL 57 Speakers I read online that they needed to be raised about 2ft off the ground and set vertically ,The Quad
esl 557s are not vertical they are about 3 inches of the floor with tiny wooden legs and laid back
I bought kitching worktops solid ,heavy and dence I worked out the angle to make them up them vertical and to 2ft and i covered them to match my black speaker cloth of the Quads ,bingo yatsee ding, ding ,ding , they came alive a cheap tweet ( I should have patented it I’d now be rich lol ) mery christmas to all
I tried some slabs under a pair of SBLs once and it was awful. The sound became thin and screechy.
I wonder with some of these ‘tweaks’ whether they really do make an improve the or just a slight difference, or maybe no difference at all. Perhaps is someone who’d done a lot of tweaks took them all out the sound would actually improve.
It’s easy to think something is better because you are told it’s better. The MusicWorks reflex lite block I tried made the sound worse.
I remember a beta version of software for the legacy streamers. Naim wanted out view on which version was preferred. Those trying the NDX and NDS were in general agreement. But I simply could not decide between the two for the 272. After a few days I rather sheepishly admitted that I couldn’t tell the difference, despite trying really hard. It turned out they were both the same…
I have wondered similarly, finding it rather bemusing the number of tweaks some people do - and always finding improvement quite often apparently as big a change as a black box upgrade (though of course not all black box upgrades make a massive difference). Constant tweaking gives me the impression that the person isn’t satisfied with their system, and I sometimes wonder if they’d be better off re-evaluating from scratch.
On the other hand, where a tweak is simple and low cost, and other people perhaps with similar systems say it makes a major improvement, it seems almost wrong not to give it a go…!
I agree and it’s hard to decide when a tweak is a tweak. I bought a MusicWorks mains block and with the extra PowerLine it cost the best part of £2,000. My dealer kindly ordered it in for me and let me try it without obligation to buy. I also changed from expensive ethernet cables to cheap ones and got a nice improvement. Are these both tweaks, I don’t know.
By improvement I’m referring to naturalness and engagement in the performance, rather than ‘hifi’ descriptions per se.
Like you I’m baffled when people report improvement after improvement with successive tweaks, you’d think it had turned their Nait into a Statement. I do think that perhaps it shows a lack of basic satisfaction and perhaps an excessive focus on the equipment, like those blokes who are constantly tweaking their car. Wider wheels, lowered suspension, shiny exhausts and then some stylish decals to finish it all off. If they’d bought a decent car in the first place none of that would be necessary.
I did exactly that with my Chord Choral system. I had several iFI devices purifying the USB feed, dual headed USB cabling, an Aqvox PSU, Stello U3 USB to SPDIF, Chord Company cables. I took the lot out and used fairly inexpensive cables as I may have mentioned elsewhere. In other words I set my system up exactly as recommended by its designers. It has never sounded better.
TBH even having dedicated mains for this setup makes minimal difference, but as I have it then I use it. It does make a more discernible difference with Naim kit IME.
I’m not anti tweak, but I think it can be overdone. Of course, to those who have tweaking as a hobby then fair play, “Carry On Tweaking”.
Tweakery is a fluid thing. Nothing has changed in my system for a good while, I’m happy with it and the thought of tweaking has no importance.
Although if I were to get some new item, some new speakers for example that might present some installation issues, then I might again look at tweaks - like room acoustic treatments, different cables and such.
I agree that it’s good practice to take them out and incrementally add them back just to be certain of what contribution is made.
Differentiation of what’s an upgrade, a tweak or just fiddling, we should start a thread
(err, no, maybe not)
I see hi-fi tweaking as improving what I have with a small low cost change, it might be visual, audible or just convenience. I try it & if it works move on.
I’ve just changed a 13A plug to a Furutech, not because its a Furutech & the promises of night & day SQ improvements, but because it’s cable outlet is further out from the wall compared to ‘normal’ plugs & that makes the cable dressing easier.
The fine tuning threads we have on the forum I see as something else, it’s understandable & I’ve joined in, but there comes a point when its not much more than casing rainbows.
(all IMO of cause)
I used to find my music sounded a lott better past ,12 o’clock at night , but the Quads DID sound a heap better with the kitchin worktops tweak
As this thread specifically invites tweakers to tell us of their tweaks, it might seem we are all tweaking all the time. Clearly not the case.
I do try out some tweaks that I find interesting and have an apparent reason for working i.e. a scientific explanation. The concern I have is the reliability of my assessment of a particular tweak’s impact on SQ. I believe I am particularly susceptible to expectation bias when tweaking, even though the tweak might be relatively cheap.
My system seems to vary in performance from day to day and time of day, something I put down to the quality of the mains and other stuff going on in the house that can affect SQ. It could of course be more to do with mood, or the albums I have selected to play on a particular occasion. In reality the variation in SQ will most likely be due to a combination of these and other factors.
The issue of the ‘natural’ variation of the SQ in my system is that it can outweigh a particular tweak I am trying to assess. Still, as others have said, it would be silly not to give these thinhgs a go, if you feel in the mood for fiddling. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t.
People also forget that their ears aren’t the same every day - the example I’ve used in a different thread is when you have a bit of cold and your’re a bit bunged up’, sounds you hear can change dramatically after yawning, which equalises the pressure behind your eardrums. Other changes may not be as dramatic. I know that the birds in my garden don’t sound exactly the same from day to day, sometimes clearer than others, so the fact that the hifi is affected as well is unsurprising. Yes, other effects may be happening, such as if the system suffers from interference of any sort borne through the mains, but the system itslef, the electronics and wires connecting them won’t be changing by any significant amount from day to day (unless you have wildly fluctuating room temperature affecting equipment temperature).
Agreed, and I did acknowledge SQ variations will be due to a number of factors.
I can tell when my ears are partially blocked and I do gently pop them, which, as you say, can have a rather dramatic affect on the apparent SQ.
I guess my point is that a tweak could indeed be beneficial to SQ and could be rather subtle in magnitude. The ‘natural’ (apparent) variation in SQ can either wrongly emphasise the degree of the tweak’s impact or obliterate it or even make a tweak sound apparently worse. The only way to properly assess a tweak’s impact on SQ is to listen over an extended period, punctuated by A/B comparisons, something I am rarely inclined to do.
I think of this more as refinements to the system to get the most out of the block boxes I have. The boxes being the heart of the system and then the refinements being just that, getting a little more from the base setup. I’ve done this with a Superlumina interconnect (transformational, to my surprise), a chord streaming cable to the NDX2, a power board to tidy up main noise and cable configurations, a power line to XPS DR and balls and nut under my glass shelves to improve decoupling and aesthetics). I’ll probably add power lines to the other boxes next year, not sure about SL speaker cables - mixed views on that it seems.
What I have found, it’s that the system responds positively to these refinements and the SN2 is good enough to deliver more - as the source improves the amp delivers and better sound transforms!
I check my cable dressing each and every time I am about to start a serious listening session. I want to ensure in particular that all PLs remain an inch away from each other and from any I/C of course. I have to gently move them a bit once in a while. It sometimes makes a huge difference in SQ in terms of music flow and airiness.
Chag -
I tried the llamas but they Doolittle for me
Zero cost tweaks (well sort of):
- After playing 2-3 LPs my system just sounds even better;
- Keeping my stylus clean.
Richard
Being retired in march. Much more time for listening and tweaking.