A good mate who is a massive tech nerd of mine has Bose 791's in his theatre and alfresco and it sounds pretty good but apparently his amp etc are good as well. He got it all off Ebay. Apparently loads cheaper but going by everything else he has, it would still be expensive.

I'm looking at a set of yamahas for my alfresco and they were about $400 a pair in the shop and sounded ok.

^^ You know your stuff huh. You need to have a listen to my Toshiba SS-30's

Hen's teeth and rocking horse sh!t all mixed up.

Hi Cauncy
You seem to be very into your music and know good sound.
Have a listen to a Sonos, I was very impressed
www.sonos.com/en-au/home
The Trueplay room tuning function is awesome

Check out Krix too. Aussie made.
www.krix.com.au/
Got phoenix's inside and aquatix out. They do a great range of in wall and ceiling speakers
www.krix.com.au/home-entertainment/concealed-audio.html

pffffft......

Cant beat my NTS Quads




stephen

Not to be a smart arse but home theatre gear is not really audio quality.

If you want quality you should look at studio quality equipment.

Yamaha, sonos, bose etc aren't studio grade.

Gestalt said...
Not to be a smart arse but home theatre gear is not really audio quality.

If you want quality you should look at studio quality equipment.

Yamaha, sonos, bose etc aren't studio grade.

Not wrong, had a demo at west coast with the sonos, everyone seemed impressed except me, cambridge audio is winning so far, had a bang & olufsen system years ago which had a stunning tone, some systems are all round, ie cinema and music, it's purely music I'm chasing, pretty sure I'll have to back the ceiling speakers with a bass speaker, a very decent amp/ speaker set up can be upward of $50'000, my budget is around $5000

Gestalt said..
Not to be a smart arse but home theatre gear is not really audio quality.

If you want quality you should look at studio quality equipment.

Yamaha, sonos, bose etc aren't studio grade.

I also believe that you will not get a studio quality monitor in ceiling mount speaker neither is sonos
I think if you had a listen to Sonos you would be impressed, the room tuning does help
It is small and easy to set up and power,. the way it deals with digital music is also good.
I'm thinking of getting the Sonos Connect Amp to drive Two KEF Eggs and Yamaha Sub.
Then in a bit a Sonos Playbar. I live in a flat so don't need to many Watts but love clarity
I'm also not an audiophile that only listens to records

KEF now also have wirelesss Eggs and other speaker solutions

international.kef.com/

P.S. I don't live in a studio acoustically perfect home

log man said..
^^^Pretty right mate though studio stuff is often "characterless". Studio monitors are a bit dead. Hi fi is the go imho. Australian speakers are especially good in the mid/ high end. Osborn, duntech, krix, DC from Adelaide are real giant killers. Check em out

I want to agree with you. part of me deep down has been imprinted with the same thoughts.

but reality is this is just no true. we get conditioned to thinking this way by marketing slogans. in reality there is only good speakers and bad speakers. being studio grade or hi fi grade doesn't predispose them to sounding a certain way.

what you do find is that studios tend to lean towards transparency. so you can hear the music. there is no reason why that is not also the desired outcome in a lounge room and is what the speaker designers are also trying to achieve.

I'm glad you raised the idea of acoustics because it is a major part of the deal. I see people with 10k systems in their houses and not a piece of acoustic treatment anywhere.

I designed and built the studio i'm currently using. have done a couple so have some experience there. studios also need a high level of isolation to remove the background noise which allows the listener to hear the fine detail. something you will struggle to achieve in a house if you are not using a sealed isolated room like a movie room.

a uniform stereo response is also desirable. a rectangular room. there are ratios that get used. the location of the speakers is critical. well designed speakers come with a chart that provides information on where to place them away from boundaries. something you can't do with ceiling speakers.

polished concrete is a very desirable floor surface. well that or something hard. carpet not so good. wall reflections and ceiling reflections are not so good if those reflections are hitting the listener too soon after the original sound reaches your ears. if you hear the reflected sound to soon after the initial sound you loose clarity. 20ms is what gets used in some situations.

you can deal with some reflections by how you position your speaker/couch arrangement. then you use acoustic treatments to deal with the surfaces that are causing issues. either absorbing the sound to reduce it's reflected volume or reflecting it away from the listener so it takes longer to reach them. remember we are not talking about the initial sound reaching your ears but the reflected sounds.

a classic example would be the wall behind the listener reflecting sound back to the listener. all surfaces have the same issue though. ceiling, side walls, floor etc.

there are also flutter echoes that cause issue.a flutter echoe occurs between 2 parallel surfaces and sound like comb filtering or phasing.

that's your average lounge room. taking it further, if the room is a sealed room like a movie room then you get other issues.

1. bass build up. for that you need bass trapping in all corners as a minimum.
2. room modes. specific treatments are needed dealing with peaks and nulls occurring due to room volume and dimensions.

so it's give and take. a sealed room provides a lower ambient noise level but needs more acoustic treatment and an open room suffers less from modes and bass issues but has a higher ambient noise level.

all just comes down to budget. in my mind it's worth it. a mediocre system will sound better in an acoustic space then a high end system in an untreated space. with the stuff I listen to I can put my hand into the sound stage and hear every detail of the room the music was recorded in. badly done recording sound badly done.

the seabreeze thumb nazi in action.

Gestalt said..
Not to be a smart arse but home theatre gear is not really audio quality.

If you want quality you should look at studio quality equipment.

Yamaha, sonos, bose etc aren't studio grade.

I agree. I assumed he was looking for surround sound with ceiling speakers. Wish I had your advice years ago. I built a system through components and expensive salesmanship. I ended up with a dust gathering unit that sounded better 1 room away; and when hooked into home theatre had a miniscule lag. It also, for my crappy hearing, was ordinary with voice dialogue at times. At least because I purchased high end, I had no trouble selling without resorting to losing $,000s in a garage sale.
I'm just really happy with that soundbar as a simple solution. It's certainly not as high end as you guys are talking. Just a matched system that has clean lines, with no need to carve into ceiling. It's clarity is excellent, especially as a replacement for TV panel speakers and watching anything online with music.
Reminds me of what a teacher used to say to me RTFQ.

I don't think there is any right or wrong answer there's just opinions.

I don't really know what you mean by sounds boring. To me if the music sounds boring then it was played poorly or was recorded poorly or just isn't music I like.
preferring eq could be the room acoustics are no good, could be you are listening to the music at a quiet level and want more bass, could be you don't like the way the music was handled by the mastering engineer and want either more top end or more mids or whatever or it could be you are listening to mp3's or yo ujust don't like the sound of the speaker or the amp or the converters.

in commercial club's and pub's eq is used to balance the room because it's cheaper than designing the room properly. EQ does degrade the quality of your audio signal. it introduces phase shifts and artefacts. that is the reality. if you prefer those things or if those things outweigh other issues in the signal chain or room then fair enough. my money is on the room acoustics being the issue and you are using EQ to make up for that. like in a car for example. could be your mate sits in the sweet spot and your sitting in a null.

ultimately, one mans clean is another mans dirty. it all just depends. I just go with what sounds good to me and honestly believe that eq is not needed and the shortest path to the speakers is the best outcome with the highest fidelity.

with that said, my home stereo has a 2 band eq that I really don't use so much. it's a rotel preamp and allows the eq to be bypassed which I find is how I prefer the sound. sometimes on really harsh sounding cd's i'll engage the eq and roll off some top end. sometimes on quiet listening levels I'll add some bass. but I don't have it engaged as a default setting.

I think it comes back to what we were talking about earlier which is you can't say because one hifi system is crap they all are. from what you've described, if the system is a good system, then the issue is room acoustics are making the music sound muddy. if it's not room acoustics then the system is poorly designed.

but again if you want an accurate sound using eq is not the way to go. dealing with the acoustics is a better though more expensive solution. in your case you are using your eq to fix room acoustics issues.

the biggest complaint you will hear in the studio world is that modern gear is too linear. in real terms speakers, amps, cd player that are designed correctly certainly are linear and way more linear than a home stereo eq is capable of achieving.

for eg, speakers are +/-2db from 40hz-20+khz and power amps are .5db from 10hz-200khz. converters are the same. so it's not gear which is making the music sound muddy.
the room on the other hand will have 10-20db peaks and nulls across the frequency spectrum.

gear that is purposefully designed not to be linear is gear you find like home stereos, home theatre gear, mp3 players etc. there they are using psychoacoustic methods to convince you the detail is there.

Yeah it starts getting pretty hard to hear the higher freq. In an isolated room with a studio level background noise I can get to around 18k. At home pretty much same as you log man. 15k ..... Maybe 16?.

A non scientific way I test a room is to sit in the listening position and do a sine wave sweep. You can hear all of the issues as the sound losses and gains volume depending on frequency.

There is also this fun site for audio nerds.
www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=0.5