anachronid wrote:It's an easy comparison to make - what sounds better to you in your system is better.
Quite so. SO sounds better - for me.
anachronid wrote:Any thoughts (my previous post) on whether the beneficial effects of SO in your system are volume-dependent?
Actually, no, because I haven't tested that point specifically, though I have certainly heard systems at different volume levels during the course of SO setting sessions. Paulssurround, whom many members here will know from the Linn forum and who does follow the discussions here, often does quite a bit of his SO setting work at (for me) higher than normal volume levels. The changes he makes at those levels do seem to carry through to lower volume levels as well.
Of course the key emotional effect of the music is different at different volume levels, and, where the quantisation issues associated in particular with DVCs are present, they have to be taken into account as well. Actually, I have not found quantisation to be an issue at normal listening levels either with Katalyst or in any Exakt system I have listened to. But I suspect that some people are more sensitive than others to those effects, and the same could be true of SO settings as well. Either way, it can be difficult to disentangle one effect from another when you are doing listening tests.
As an aside, Peter Walker, the founder of Quad, used to say that the volume control should be thought of less as a loudness adjuster and more like the focus control on a camera lens. In other words, for any combination of player, recording, room and listener, there is a 'best' (i.e. most engaging) volume setting, where the music is most 'in focus'. PW's criterion was that the listener should perceive the main source of the music as being in the plane between and either side of the speakers; this was in the days before people wanted to hear front to back depth as well. I have found this approach useful in a negative sense; when the volume is either too low or too high for comfortable continuous listening, it is for me invariably the case that the music lacks a well-defined point of origin, which I think is essential for it to have a sense of reality and therefore emotional impact.
David