I feel as I’m in a new world, it’s a strange place to be given that I’ve been listening to good gear now for a couple of years and critically listening on top of enjoying my music.
But I wanted to talk about this because I feel as if I’ve had another revelatory moment in the hobby.
So the question is as the title asks, how much can decent speakers and headphones scale?
I ask because after connecting my Zu speakers to the LTA Int + and the Weiss DAC, they sound better than I ever remember them. Even in a room that’s not ready for prime time sonically yet, it was obvious from my first listen how much more detail and subtleties in the sound they were able to reproduce. The same went for my VC… even though I’ve not had them long, they’ve been the main source of listening for the last two months or so. They were showing me so much more, especially in the lower bass region, there was detail there in tracks that simply wasn’t there before.
This is my first dabble really outside the mid-fi realm, and I’m sort of left questioning if what I’ve been listening to before was just simply a colorbook version of what the music really sounds like. It’s not even a question of good or bad, it’s just that I’m surprised that there could be so much difference in sonic presentation and I find that I’m enjoying both where before I was sure that I wouldn’t enjoy something too much outside that warm, corporal weight signature.
The question then becomes at what point do you upgrade your source or your end points? There probably isn’t even a right or wrong answer to this question, it’s just that as I sit here typing, the realm of possibilities has just opened up for me more than I’d ever expected it could.
Short answer: it depends and there’s no real way to give any estimation without knowing the system, potential upgrade options, and listener in question. It’s also very hard to find the true limits of nicer transducers, and then the question becomes “is it actually even worthwhile then or am I just better off getting new transducers”. Depends on the design, depends on the current state of the system, and depends on the experience and usage of the listener.
I guess some answer to satisfy the question might be “if it’s decently nice speakers/headphones/iems, it likely scales higher than you think, and you upgrade the transducers when the next jump forward in source gear far outweighs the cost of upgrading to better transducers.” But even then, if you find something nice enough, and fall in love with how that speaker/headphone/iem sounds, you may just be better off continuing to upgrade the source gear if there’s not really a direct upgrade you like. But all depends. You’ll just likely find yourself playing cat and mouse in your system, boosting a transducer to it’s reasonable limits, then upgrading that transducer and then upping your source gear to better maximize it’s new higher demand for source gear. Never ending lol
Long answer: it’s going to be too long and basically say the same thing as above with more words, so too lazy to write that
The simple answer is a lot. I’m not even that far in myself, but I have been able to gather that diminishing returns is less prominent once you get to the entry/middle high end level of source gear, or at least it stops being as noticeable, at that level the source matters a lot. It also will depends on the transducer, some headphones and speakers have the ability to scale very high while others wont give you nearly as much growth, lots of factors involved in why that is, but I’m not gonna attempt to theorize why.
This is just me here theorizing and guessing, but I feel speakers will take the cake here and that’s mostly due to room acoustics. If you think about it, we like to dabble in very high resolution gear and where does it end up? In a low resolution room. How many of us here have actually been in a fully treated room built from the ground up? Likely none of us here (myself included), maybe M0N, I don’t know. So that right there, I feel, is a huge handicap. Even if you invest in some panels here and there I don’t think that’ll cut it. It will help for sure, but if you don’t have a dedicated room for it then the problems still exist and that’ll surely inhibit the gear. Maybe you could even think of room acoustics as part of the source gear as well. Anyway, that’s just me guessing and theorizing here (can definitely be wrong). Maybe someday I’ll venture into one of these dedicated facilities and hear for myself.
So, yes I’ve been in some insanely treated or built from the ground up for audio rooms, and they have been really good in some cases, but honestly some of the best systems I’ve ever heard were in average moderately treated rooms. Room treatment can be helpful, but what might seem good in theory doesn’t always translate to the most desirable sound in practice. Most speakers aren’t designed to sound good in an anechoic chamber or full built studio levels of treatment, because they know the mass majority of their buyers aren’t going to be able to put them in that environment, so they don’t design for that. Treatment is good, but over treatment is imo just as bad as no treatment, you want the room to have some character, energy, and life, which you can quickly get rid of with too much treatment (for hifi, not studio settings keep in mind).
Room treatment is worth considering and can play a sizable role in the overall sound of a system, but the level of room treatment will depend on the room and what’s desirable for one system may not be for another. Also while you will handicap your system by putting it in a poorly treated or designed room, it’s still going to show improvements from source gear. It’s something that I would both pay careful attention to, but also not make my main focus
Isn’t that a half-truth though? You could put all the treatment you want provided you’re treating what needs to be treated correctly. But that is in theory, maybe not in practice like you said…
Fair point about the speakers, didn’t account for that.
Depends on the speaker. If you have a speaker designed to be used in a heavily treated space then yes more treatment would be better. But even then those speakers aren’t designed to be in an acoustically dead space regardless. You want to make sure your goal of treatment is to better craft the room to sound how you want, not try and remove the room altogether
It is very true that you hear your room first before you hear your speakers. This is fact and cannot be refuted, having said this though not every home listening environment is terrible nor do most even know what to listen for so it’s almost a moot point until you make it real to yourself.
On the other hand, speaker and listening seat placement gives back an immediate return that even the most musically daft can appreciate and experience immediately.
HP’s take the room out of the equation, it’s a wonderful feeling to put an older piece on upgraded equipment and get an improved experience out of it. Some pieces that are already good to begin w/ absolutely do scale well.
@dB_Cooper, the proof is in the listening experience, believe in your ears first but remember you may reach your own limitations before your equipment does, we’re not getting any younger buddy…LOL
Its been said thousands of times but using the HD6XX for years and thinking it was good, then popping it onto just a bhc and the scaling from that alone.
As for room treatment, there was a video I watched that said something that made sense, and goes with your statements. If you treat a room so much that it is deadened, your ears and brain kind of dont take to it well and its not a natural translation. Even if you were in the middle of the salt flats there would be some cues to your surroundings. Eliminating all of those makes it sound very wrong.
I’ve had a good experience with Harbeth scaling without an indicator of a ceiling yet. Will I get more of an upgrade by moving up the Harbeth line? Sure.
My model has an MSRP of about 7k for reference, but so far I have still noticed big upgrades in:
Upgrading my amp 3x/tiers
Upgrading my preamp 2 tiers
Upgrading my DAC 3 tiers
Upgrading my server/source 3 tiers
Upgrading my cables multiple times
Upgrading my stands and stabilization
It’s a point where my electronics far outweigh my speakers and I still think there is room on top. YMMV
