Somebody forgot to master the levels on this episode 😉

No kidding! HAHAHA My audio ended up way too loud but that’s alright, a rough podcast is better than no podcast.

Seriously though it was great to talk to Tom but I can absolutely agree with him that he needs to find an Aussie host that he can go local with. The delay was CRAZY between the two of us (why I’m not talking very much) and I felt like I was walking all over him when I did say something. It’s difficult to “pass the ball” when you have such a large delay like that and someone local or even in the room would yeild much more chemistry than what you can get from 8,000 miles of distance.

The podcast with Rob and I went much smoother and the delay was almost non-existant. Get across the pond and it goes all to hell.

Geez Tom, thanks for callin me out to all the listeners! I attempted to send you an e-mail but it got bounced. Spamcop something or other…

Hey, Leif – you just have to do what I did when I recorded last week’s podcast: start talking before Tom has finished or just not let Tom get a word in edge-wise at all!

lol

Oh, by the by, when Leif and I recorded, Leif’s mic level would often jump up and get too loud. I went through and evened out the levels in post. Check your Skype settings. There’s an option that allows Skype to control your mic level. Be sure to uncheck that so that you mic levels stay flat 😉

The whole issue of amplifiers is a tricky one. Most of the time, your speakers are drawing hardly any power at all. Even if you are listening at reference levels (an average SPL of 85dB at the primary seat with peaks as high as 105dB in the speakers and peaks of 115dB in the LFE), most of the time, each speaker is only drawing <1-20 Watts!

But it's those peaks and, in particular, transients, where, for a very brief moment, the power draw can be huge! This is why it's more important to have an amplifier design where the power section (especially the bank of capacitors) can deliver sudden, but brief, huge spikes of power than to have an amplifier design that can deliver a lot of continuous power.

The bigger problem in my opinion is noise floor. It's relatively easy to deliver gobs of Watts. It's not so easy to do so with linear frequency response, very little distortion and extremely little noise though.

If you take a look at Emotiva's XPA amplifiers, they deliver gobs of power. They have plenty of "headroom" and are able to deliver those massive transient peaks. But they have only mediocre cross-talk dampening and they have unusually high gain on the inputs which means that any tiny bit of noise in the source signal gets boosted to an unusually high level. All of this creates a slightly higher noise floor than I would like to hear myself.

With a Class H design, you tend to have separate power sections for each channel. This means awesomely low cross-talk, but you don't get the massive power bank to give you the headroom for those huge transient peaks.

For Leif, I would actually suggest that you consider getting 3 of the UPA-1 monoblocks to drive your front 3 speakers and then just allow your Denon receiver to handle the surrounds. The XPA-1 is, of course, even far more powerful, and with its truly balanced design, black-hole quiet. But the price starts to get a bit out of hand with multiple XPA-1. The UPA-1, on the other hand, is very affordable and gives you pretty much the best of all worlds.

Of course, the best amplification in the world can't make up for speakers that don't quite cut the mustard. In Leif's case, it's tough to know exactly where his problem lies.

As Tom said, the Infinity Beta speakers could most definitely be breaking up at reference volume levels. It's really tough to create the necessary output in a room of Leif's room's size at full reference volume levels, which is why most large-venue speakers use multiple tweeters!

Then again, the room itself can certainly be to blame. I don't know how much room treatment Leif has at this point, but something like ringing or dialogue unintelligibility is 9 times out of 10 the fault of the room.

This is why I look to the amp as being the least likely culprit in this case. While noise, distortion or clipping in the amp could certainly cause less than pleasant sound, it just doesn't seem to be the likely cause of Leif's dissatisfaction because amps such as the ones in Leif's Denon receiver all employ soft-clipping and are actually pretty low in distortion.

For sure, a truly powerful amp would allow Leif's speakers to "open up" and deliver clearer transients and therefore better delineation as well as more dynamic peaks. But the lack of those things would not be perceived as any sort of shrillness, unintelligibility or noisiness. Compression – yes. But not the problems that Leif was describing. Those problems sound more like room acoustics or the speakers being pushed beyond their limits.

So I would put the order of "upgrade" importance as such:

1) Treat the room's acoustics. Take advantage of a service like Auralex' Room Analyzer and really make the room itself the best acoustic environment possible.

2) Get better speakers. Something like the MKSound THX speakers that offer multiple tweeters or extremely efficient speakers such as Klipsch or extremely robust speakers such as Paradigm Signatures (with their beryllium tweeters) or speakers that offer all three approaches to high output, such as the RBH T-Series!

3) Get awesome amplification to really let the new speakers sing to their fullest 😀

But for right now, I don't think your amp is your problem, nor do I think it will offer you the improvement and solution that you're looking for.

Not all best buy employees are dolts… I’m actually a magnolia rep at best buy and I listen to this podcast! I think I hate Bose and Monster as much as Tom does.

Sometimes I try and convince people that the Bose system they want to buy sound like crap but they general give me the your just a stupid employee look. I’ve even told the Bose rep that I think Bose…well in nicer terms.

To be honest its the manufacture reps and the literature that they give us that makes most store employees seem like idiots. For example, in a video about how to sell calibrations the employee references the need to have a monster 1000 cable to get the full 16 bits of color from a bluray. All that info was given to him by the monster rep. What he doesn’t know is that bluray disks are ALL encoded at 8 bit. I could go on…

The Magnolia rep I used to buy all my gear from told me how much hated Bose, himself. (He always touted Mirage as a cheaper, better alternative.)

He also told me that stores like Best Buy were not allowed to put Bose systems next to any competing systems, presumably so that consumers could not A/B them.

@jedrgy, is that true?

It’s mostly true, Bose will not allow you to place their demo by other demo equipment. At Best Buy, everything except the Acoustimass systems are set apart. I have actually spoken with a shop who wanted to carry Bose just to get people into their store, but Bose required a section apart from the other brands. Simply put, they know their systems suck and don’t want consumers to compare them to better equipment.