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The Two Most Frustrating Things about Hi-Fi...

RunOutGroove said:
Well... and I say this as someone who isn't nearly obsessed with perfect sound as some folks are - I listen to plenty of music that I love but is relatively low-fi and am fine with it... BUT there are certain recordings that seem like they should sound better than they do and this bugs me. It might be the pressing, the mastering or just that the original thing wasn't as good as I think it was, but I'll put on certain things and immediately ask myself "why is that so flat sounding?" Other things, which tend to be older recordings, recorded in a really basic way, I think of the lack of fidelity as being part and parcel of the music and it doesn't bother me at all...

If I may be permitted a #3 it goes back to the last thing, that everything, power cords, RCA cables, speaker wire, etc is really difficult to get to and I dread having to swap anything out, or even worse troubleshoot some possibly loose wire...
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#1: I listen to a lot of psychedelia and on some recordings, the artists and producers mess around with phase shifting to get an other-worldly sound, which sounds amazing in my car, but horrible on my system; Tame Impala's early stuff is a prime example. I haven't even tried to listen to Guided by Voices because of this, which doesn't play as much with phase, but was often recorded poorly in home studios with TASCAM Portastudio cassette decks...

#3: my cable management is a disaster. I don't even want to discuss it.
 
Years ago I ripped my CD collection and stored all of the files on a server that I built using FREENAS. I can stream my music anywhere in the house! Just to be safe, I wired my house for gigabit ETHERNET. Streaming movies over wired ethernet without any stuttering is a heck of a thing.

Ah but wait! My detached garage where my music listening room is located is WIFI only. I hate wifi. It's good for phones and Chromebooks, but for streaming movies and music, it downright sucks a bag of Ds.

I'm jammin' out. I'm in the zone, Tom Sawyer is soaking down deep into my psyche, halfway through one of Neil Peart's amazing drum fills aaaaaand --SILENCE-- then more silence, and then even more silence. Waiting-waiting-waiting. Ten seconds later the song resumes. Uhg. I hate that. I hate WIFI.
 
drp1003 said:
Years ago I ripped my CD collection and stored all of the files on a server that I built using FREENAS. I can stream my music anywhere in the house! Just to be safe, I wired my house for gigabit ETHERNET. Streaming movies over wired ethernet without any stuttering is a heck of a thing.

Ah but wait! My detached garage where my music listening room is located is WIFI only. I hate wifi. It's good for phones and Chromebooks, but for streaming movies and music, it downright sucks a bag of Ds.

I'm jammin' out. I'm in the zone, Tom Sawyer is soaking down deep into my psyche, halfway through one of Neil Peart's amazing drum fills aaaaaand --SILENCE-- then more silence, and then even more silence. Waiting-waiting-waiting. Ten seconds later the song resumes. Uhg. I hate that. I hate WIFI.
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Perhaps you just hate crappy wifi, which is what you appear to have.
 
Trying to help other audio buffs and they won't give information needed to make an informed offer of help.

That piece you really need is never available or more than you want to pay.
And then one shows up close by priced affordably and you can't spare the money right now to buy it.
 
spark1 said:
Perhaps you just hate crappy wifi, which is what you appear to have.
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I found this often when helping others set-up their streaming. That said, a lot of times it was the router location, that maybe the case in the situation you quoted.
 
goodolpg said:
That piece you really need is never available or more than you want to pay.
And then one shows up close by priced affordably and you can't spare the money right now to buy it.
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Or, you buy the more expensive or overpriced one, and the same thing shows up a few days later for less money.
 
GChief said:
I found this often when helping others set-up their streaming. That said, a lot of times it was the router location, that maybe the case in the situation you quoted.
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Being the WiFi based signal is sent from the house to the detached garage/listening room, good signal strength at the garage/listening room is very important, IMO/E, and the selection and use of a low neighborhood occupied channel is important as well.
Unless the WiFi access point channel is manually configured to a higher/highest channel like 11, most WiFi access devices unless changed during initial setup are factory default on channel 1, so my observation when scanning for 2.5 Gig. receivable signals when setting up my friends and mine WiFi link was that channel 1 was always heavily loaded with the nearby neighbors occupying that channel, probably due to the common use of the channel 1 factory default.

So both bands of my dual band WiFi access point are channel 11 selected for minimal chance of interference from my neighbors.
I won`t ever have these WiFi based music or video streaming issues, as I hard wired distribution of all 5 different channels of my video signals and 1 L/R stereo pair signal to the 6 rooms of my house, as in 2009 (when I had the house hardwired) I was not confident in reliable wireless A/V signal distribution.
 
Gigantic said:
#1: I listen to a lot of psychedelia and on some recordings, the artists and producers mess around with phase shifting to get an other-worldly sound, which sounds amazing in my car, but horrible on my system; Tame Impala's early stuff is a prime example. I haven't even tried to listen to Guided by Voices because of this, which doesn't play as much with phase, but was often recorded poorly in home studios with TASCAM Portastudio cassette decks...

#3: my cable management is a disaster. I don't even want to discuss it.
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We are kindred souls in that regard as I really like psychedelic music as well... though what I call "psychedelic" goes far beyond the psych-rock that most folks seem to think of when they hear that word (I dig reggae, lots of jazz and all kinds of various world musics which tend to give me that sensation). I never thought about stuff that sounds good in my car, but less so at home. I'll have to pay attention to that, though I don't listen to music nearly as frequently in the car, or at least my own music. I'm more likely to be tuning in non-commercial radio stuff and even then it's mostly talk on NPR.

As for the whole cable management issue, I would imagine that lots if not most folks on this forum have a more stereotypical audio setup with gear on a rack that's well away from the wall, speakers well into the room, etc. What I'm dealing with though is gear on top of cabinets and behind a large diffuclt to move or to reach behind flatscreen TV, etc... making those cables really difficult to get to, let alone move around. There's just too much stuff, too close together and too difficult to reach to make seperating everything into some kind of really coherent arrangement very possible. Maybe this sort of thing is why balanced cables are a thing, but I don't have a system that supports that (except for me Schiit DAC)...
 
The ONE most

Frustrating​

thing about Hi-Fi is my Health,period! All others are normal and don't count:)
 
tubelectron said:
Complication, in the sense of "why do simple when we can do complicated ?" - Jacques Rouxel / Les Shadoks / 1968

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Because simple is simpler, easier, and 'less prone to problems' on 'Major Scales.'

As we used to say at work: KISS (keep it simple stupid!). We always kept everything simple. Keep it as simple as possible in a complex world. KISS. :)

Frustrating? Just when vintage gear is breaks or malfunctions and it's just NOT 'cost-effective' to fix it. :dunno: Or... the piece of gear just doesn't seem to want to be fixed even after an investment has been made to fix it. "Another one bites the dust."
 
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RunOutGroove said:
We are kindred souls in that regard as I really like psychedelic music as well... though what I call "psychedelic" goes far beyond the psych-rock that most folks seem to think of when they hear that word (I dig reggae, lots of jazz and all kinds of various world musics which tend to give me that sensation). I never thought about stuff that sounds good in my car, but less so at home. I'll have to pay attention to that, though I don't listen to music nearly as frequently in the car, or at least my own music. I'm more likely to be tuning in non-commercial radio stuff and even then it's mostly talk on NPR.

As for the whole cable management issue, I would imagine that lots if not most folks on this forum have a more stereotypical audio setup with gear on a rack that's well away from the wall, speakers well into the room, etc. What I'm dealing with though is gear on top of cabinets and behind a large diffuclt to move or to reach behind flatscreen TV, etc... making those cables really difficult to get to, let alone move around. There's just too much stuff, too close together and too difficult to reach to make seperating everything into some kind of really coherent arrangement very possible. Maybe this sort of thing is why balanced cables are a thing, but I don't have a system that supports that (except for me Schiit DAC)...
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yep. My definition of psychedelia goes well beyond retro sounding neo-psych to include many sub-genres that tickle the headspace, from country-psych, funk, a lot of post-punk, a lot of what people refer to as "goth", (ie The Cure, Siouxsie, Bauhaus/Tones On Tail/ Love and Rockets are first and foremost psychedelic), shoe gaze and dream pop, post rock, electronica and so on.

yeah, I'm in a similar predicament with a limited space and a somewhat ad hoc arrangement. I'm not helping myself in that I also have an AVR in addition to a 2-channel system in my small-ish, inner city flat.
 
Late to the party on this thread...but will share anyways.


Always have had probs with bringing in FM stations, living in rural settings.

Lost the battle to put an indoor antenna in the attic with you know who. So, have gone the route of the T wire set-up on the walls, but with varying results.

Some member have posted on some results with powered inside antennae, but am wondering just how well they would bring in the signals. There are so many audio "scams" out there!


So, just the one lament.


Q
 
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Quadman2 said:
Late to the party on this thread...but will share anyways.


Always have had probs with bringing in FM stations, living in rural settings.

Lost the battle to put an indoor antenna in the attic with you know who. So, have gone the route of the T wire set-up on the walls, but with varying results.

Some member have posted on some results with powered inside antennae, but am wondering just how well they would bring in the signals. There are so many "scams" out there!


So, just the one lament.


Q
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I've tried a miriad of powered antennae and they all sucked, the only one I've tried that really beats the old dipole T is this one recommended by another here. I have one in the garage back to back with the master bedroom fed through the wall. The other is in the closet in the media rm (guest bedroom), the living rm makes due with the dipole T on the wall behind a wall unit to the left of the gear.

This is supposedly omni-directional but I found turning it while watching the signal strength meter does make a difference. Yes it's an outdoor antenna but it's small and works fine inside, just not much WAF lol.

Screenshot_20221222-233828.png
 
Audiofreak71 said:
1) I can spend hours and hours tweaking the location of my speakers (speaker placement) in order to eek out another ounce of soundstage width and depth. If you ask me, speaker placement is the most important aspect of Hi-Fi. Nothing else even comes close. Speaker placement can make your system sound amazing, better than anything


Imo you’re partially right with this, while the speakers and dialing them in to the smallest degree make a huge difference it’s your room that they’re in that will be the factor on how they sound after dialed in. Acoustic treatments be it DIY, bought and or furniture placed in the room make the biggest difference over anything, once you got that right it’s fairly smooth sailing from there.


Audiofreak71
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Cardas golden rule measure, the bulwark of which has never failed me.
 
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