Priorities For Building A Better System

This page is a basic guide to explore the levels of importance when putting together an audio system, and where the biggest improvements will often be made. The more fundamental the subject, the bigger the change. Even budget systems, put in the right circumstances, can benefit from smaller changes like cables, DACs and sources, but the more that the fundamentals are under control, the more apparent those previously minor change will become.

For everything being discussed below, cost and brand are not given any importance or consideration, as they are not always a guarantee to the quality of a given device or tool, beyond it’s looks or potential brand recognition, as cheaper and DIY options often exist for many such product and categories. A moderately-treated room with decent setup & gear can easily compete with much more expensive or prestigious gear left in a bare room.

Fundamentals First!

The speakers you use, and the room you put them in, will always play the biggest part in determining how your system will sound. Change one and everything else changes with it. An amazing speaker in a bad room can easily kill what should otherwise be an excellent experience, just like a bad speaker in a great room leaves a lot to be desired. But get both of them right, and you’re in for a treat. Let’s dive into the things that make these two fundamental elements so important, and how they lay the groundwork for the rest of your system.

The Speakers:

Speakers are the means by which the electrical impulses from your gear translate the physical movement of the drivers into the acoustic waves that fill your room with music. A great speaker should be as neutral or accurate as possible and able to reproduce music over as wide a range as possible, be that through a single driver, small bookshelf, or massive towers with external subwoofers. Selecting a well-behaved & well-designed speaker will allow you to get the most out of your system.  The better the quality of the drivers/crossover/design the better it is able to handle fine details and show you what hides within the recording. Without a speaker, there is no sound.

The right tool for the job?: No speaker is “perfect” for every application. It doesn’t make sense to use a small desktop speaker in a concert hall, just as it doesn’t make sense to cram a 7-foot tall speaker into a small bedroom. Make sure your speakers are appropriate for the space you wish to use them. You can make a bookshelf work in a fairly large room by rolling off the lowest octaves and using a subwoofer, or two, to fill in the bottom end, giving the speaker a lot more headroom to play louder without overdriving the speaker, within reason. But reality is you probably need a larger speaker with higher efficiency, especially as the room gets larger.

Dispersion & directivity Matters: Below 200Hz, most drivers output become omnidirectional and the response will be dominated by the room. As you go up in frequency, the sound coming out of the drivers gradually narrows until the frequencies are shorter than the width of the drivers, where the sound only plays within the surface area directly in front of the driver, known as “beaming”. As drivers get larger, the lower in frequency they will begin to narrow & beam. A 12″ woofer will begin to beam as early as ~700-1000Hz, but if your tweeter can only play down to 2500Hz, then less energy between ~700-2500Hz will be able to interact with your room and will change the sound of your speaker in-room compared to another speaker. If you have a speaker with a 6″ woofer crossing at ~2500Hz to your tweeter, you may be putting out more energy in the 2000-4000Hz range, which in a small, or narrow, room may make the speakers sound bright, as more sound is interacting with the room, but in a “wide” room there may be less of an issue, as the side walls are further away. Ideally you want a speaker with an even dispersion pattern, that rolls off smoothly as you turn the speaker to the left or right.

The Heart of the Speaker: The crossover is what controls the integration of the drivers within a speaker, as well as determining a speakers overall tonal qualities, which can be a big factor in determining the quality of a speaker’s overall design. However, being internal, the crossover is often the first place for manufacturers to cut corners. Cheap parts leave a lot of performance on the table by smearing the signal they receive, especially in the midrange and treble, harming the clarity and soundstage performance in the process. Replacing cheap electrolytic caps and iron core inductors with decent budget polycaps and air-core inductors of the same values will go a long way to improving those factors. Higher-end components can also be used to influence the tone of a speaker, if desired. 

Efficiency and Dynamics:  Every speaker has a rated efficiency, which is typically the measurement of output at either 1Watt at 1Meter or 2.38V at 1 Meter. Most speakers typically fall into the 85-90dB range. High-efficiency speakers, are often rated anywhere from 95db to 100+ dB at 1W. High-efficiency speakers give you better dynamics, making them ideal options for larger rooms and home theater applications, as they don’t need a lot of power to get them to dance.

Ported or Sealed?: Each has it’s advantages and drawbacks. Ported/Vented designs offer deeper bass extension, but at the cost of higher group delay which can sacrifice clarity in the bass, and if the ports are too small, they can begin to chuff, creating noise that is distracting from the actual sound. Sealed designs sacrifice bass extension for better control over the bass, leading to a tighter, more impactful, mid-bass. They are also less sensitive to placement in the room thanks to their moew limited low-end. Bass extension in a sealed speaker will also depend on the size of the drivers. Smaller drivers are often limited to ~60-70Hz, while a larger 12″ driver may play often down to ~30-40Hz. Sealed speakers also offer a more gradual roll off making them easier to blend with a subwoofer.

Full-range Tower or Stand-mount + Subs?: A “dirty little secret” is that sometimes the best place for the midrange & treble isn’t always the best place for an even bass response, so you may find that a good quality pair of bookshelf speakers with a separate subwoofer, or two, may provide for a much more even bass response than a pair of large towers in one location. If you want to be able to drive the smaller speakers louder, you can high-pass them to roll off the bottom end around 70-80Hz, giving you a lot of additional headroom, leaving the bottom end for your subwoofers. Of course, you can still use a sub with larger tower speakers to better help balance out room issues, and fill in the very bottom end.

Placement is Key: Want a free upgrade to the soundstage performance of your speakers? Pull them out into the room, away from the front and side walls! Pulling speakers out into the room delays reflections from your front/side walls, leading to better separation of the instruments and singers within the soundstage of the music, and providing actual depth to the soundstage.

Three feet or more from the walls is where the magic really begins to occur. Speakers that sound “boomy” near the walls were likely designed to be pulled away from walls, and speakers that sound “thin” when pulled out were likely designed to be placed closer to the wall, but should still be pulled out 1-2 feet from the wall, you can also use a subwoofer to fill in the bottom end when the speaker is pulled out. 

The Room:

The room you put the speakers into plays a massive part in how the speakers will sound, and it can easily be argued that most of what you hear is the effect of the room on your speakers, more than the speaker itself. An untreated room, with hard walls/floors, etc. is going to wreak havoc on the sound your system produces. Hard, flat surfaces create issues with standing waves and reverb which will smother any fine details your system is capable of. The size/shape of the room and where you place the speakers & your listening position can also make big differences to the sound of your system. In one place, the speakers may sound boomy, but move them around a bit, and they may sound thin. Same thing often happens when you move your listening position. For more information about finding the best place for your speakers, we recommend using the L.O.T.S. Method. (See first video in the playlist below.) We’ve also included several videos discussing room treatment from both an “Audiophile” and “Studio” perspectives to give you a fuller & more nuanced understanding of how important the room really is.

The First step is treating your room, and absorption is key, and will be the most cost effective means to control the affects your room has on your speakers. In the end, treating the room will bring about far bigger improvements to your system than changing out any other single piece of gear, speakers included.

“Wife Acceptance”: To get this point out of the way, we understand that not everyone has the luxury of a dedicated listening space, so the biggest hurdle to any sort of room treatment is always going to be the living conditions under which your system will be put into. If your wife/partner/family likes a clean & tidy living room, it’s unlikely that playing with speaker positioning or any sort of room treatment are factors that can be considered. Often times you’re speakers go where they “have to.” Sometimes meaning un-even cable lengths, corner placement, speakers right against the wall, etc. Settings that are far from the ideal for system performance. In those cases there’s not much you can do unless you move into a new home with an extra room, or you get the chance to build your own “sound shed.”

Creating space: Getting speakers away from any walls, furniture and other objects, is the easiest way to improve soundstage performance of any speaker. If you don’t create distance between your speakers and the walls, your soundstage depth will always be limited to the back wall and forward. Pulling your speakers out into the room allows for delay between the generated sound from the speaker and the reflections off the front walls. The more distance you can afford between your speakers and the walls around them, the larger and deeper that soundstage will become. Some speakers are designed specifically to reply on near-wall placement so you may be limited unless you have a subwoofer to fill out the bottom end.

Room Modes: Playing music in any room will create what are called “room modes” where the reflections of the sound within the room creates areas where certain frequencies are either amplified or nullified within your room, creating boomy or hollow bass. Where and the frequency at which those modes occur depends largely on the size and shape of your room. Your listening position should be in an area were as few problems occur as possible. Walls and corners are often the areas with the most& biggest issues. The larger your room is, the lower in frequency they will be, the smaller the room the higher in frequency they will be. There are basic room mode calculators available to estimate which frequencies will likely be most problematic within your room, but most only work with regular & rectangular shaped rooms, with more advanced calculators being able to estimate room modes for more complex room shapes. The Best way to find the best listening spot for your room is to set up a microphone with Room EQ Wizard and move it around your room taking measurements from 20-1000Hz at many different locations to find the area(s) with the least issues.

Absorption First: Bare walls are the biggest enemy to great sound, but don’t think that you can just slap some cheap 1″ thick foam sheets from Amazon on the walls, a paper-thin area rug, along with some basic furniture, and assume it will fix your problems. Sure, it’s “better than nothing” but it’s far from a proper solution. The thicker, larger, and more of those those panels used, the lower frequencies they can absorb, and the more effect they will have controlling the room. 2×4 foot panels filled with fiberglass, rockwool, or even cheap towels will go a long way to getting the ball rolling in controlling the reflections under control.

At minimum, you should use 2″ thick absorption panels as they will be 75% effective down to ~1000Hz. For effective control down through the midrange you will want at least 4 inch thick panels with a 2-3 inch air-gap behind them. Such a thick panel will be 75% effective down to ~200Hz.

You will want to treat the primary reflection points first, followed by the corners, which need to be filled as much as possible, the larger and thicker the better, next will be the primary reflection off the ceiling. The more you absorb, the more you get to hear of the speaker, as the treatment helps to control things like reverb reducing smearing, providing better clarity and precision, letting you hear deeper into the recording and giving you a more realistic soundstage.

Bass Traps: Deep bass is the hardest frequency range to effectively control as the wavelengths at play are often several feet long. A 1-foot thick acoustic panel is only ~75% effective down to ~70Hz if your lucky, and trying to control deep bass can get expensive very quickly, so fine tune your speaker and listening positions first, to get the best response before tackling the low end. They will also be most effective in the corners of the room or areas in the room where bass builds up the most.

Pressure traps, and Helmholtz resonators are another option to controlling bass, but by nature they have to be individually tuned to very narrow frequencies, which makes them very difficult to get right. They are often very large, and need to be placed in very specific locations to really be effective, so they should be written off for 99% of home audio applications.

“Active” bass traps do exist, but they are also very expensive and you still need multiple units to really manage the low end, at that point you’re likely spending enough money to buy a whole other system.

Diffusion is nice, but…: Beyond absorbing the primary reflections and corners with bass traps, diffusion serves to break up the reflections of flat walls by scattering the soundwaves, but to truly be effective you need to be several feet away from the them, so they often work best on the front and/or back walls, as well as the side walls just beyond your absorption panels on the side walls. In smaller rooms they are much less effective as they need space for the waves to scatter, you will also need a LOT of them to really be effective, especially in larger rooms. Things like furniture, bookshelves can also act as forms of absorption and diffusion, but are far less effective than dedicated treatment. In smaller rooms, hybrid panels that use absorption with a diffusion panel on top can help to strike a balance where diffusion alone doesn’t work nearly as well, and absorption alone may be too much.

Overdoing it?: You’re not looking to make your room a professional-level recording or mastering studio, with tons of treatment spread across every surface of your room. Such a room would be far too “dry” or “sterile” for most people. The main goal is treating the primary reflections, the corners, along with the front & rear walls, which will make the most difference for most people. You’re often better off tweaking the speaker or listening position to find where things sound best.

JUST EQ IT! There are things EQ can certainly address, such as peaks from room modes, and too much or too little output at  certain frequencies, but it’s not a magic bullet, and shouldn’t be treated as such. The reality is, there is a lot more that it cannot fix. EQ cannot fix dips caused by room modes, issues with edge diffraction, phase issues, and other room-related issues, such as reflections, decay times, comb filtering, etc. For best results, keep any EQ within the digital domain (before your DAC) and below 200-300Hz. The less work it has to do, the better it is. It should be your very last step, if used at all.

To further illustrate the importance of “the room” and room treatment and setup we’ve added several videos down below from a few great channels:
New Record Day and Present Day Production and Acoustics Insider

Music & Source gear

Not all music is made equal. Some music is well recorded with a delightfully detailed and dynamic sound, and some songs are incredibly dull, others are over-compressed with nothing interesting to offer beyond a fun beat or catchy lyrics. Most music falls somewhere in-between. (This is not to disparage the artists or engineers who performed, mixed or mastered it. It is the simple reality of nearly 100+ years of commercially recorded music, which has seen an ever-changing landscape of styles, workflows, and technologies that exist within the industry)

The quality & qualities of the music you listen to, and the gear you use to convert those formats into an electrical signal matter a lot more than some might expect.

The Music: The music you listen to has been mixed and mastered to sound a certain way, but that doesn’t always mean there are “hidden treasures” within every song just waiting to be uncovered. As your gear (and your ear) become more attuned to what high quality recordings can bring to the table, the more the shortcomings of poorly produced music become apparent. If you only ever listen to say hip-hop, or 70s & 80s glam metal, there’s likely not much there that will really draw you in about a high-end system, but when you find a new song that sets forth a natural and open soundstage, where everything has it’s place with impeccable precision, you really understand how easily you can get lost in well-recorded music and everything that it brings brought to the table.

The Source: “Source” refers to any medium/format/gear that music stored on; vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, streaming, CDs, FLAC, MP3, WAV, etc. The higher the quality of these sources, the more fine details they will contain, especially with well-produced music. You don’t always need ultra-high resolution FLAC stored on a gold plated PC to get the most out of your system, but as your system grows, the more information will be there for you to hear. Do note that while up-sampling is an option, it’s not really a substitution for better quality sources; Just as upscaling a 1080P video to 4K resolution never looks quite as good as native 4K video. If most of your library is old MP3s from 2003, try re-ripping those CDs into a lossless format like FLAC, WAV, AIFF or ALAC, and depending on what your source/gear is able to play. You may also want to consider higher quality releases, if they are available. 

Source Gear: The gear you use to play or convert that music to an electrical audio signal needs to be capable of reproducing the signal it is given. It should present the music in a was that is a neutral and natural as possible. If you have a high-resolution FLAC library, but are using a $10 DAC dangling off the end of your phone, you’re not going to get the most out of those files. Or if you have a $2500 DAC, but you still listen to the same MP3 files you ripped from CDs back in 2002, you’re still leaving performance on the table. Streaming, and Bluetooth setups offer great convenience, but often not without severe performance hits due to the compression those formats use. You can still get great sound out of budget gear and even MP3s, but you can still take it further in the future. Same goes for Vinyl, spending $3000+ on a fancy turntable to play records you’ve been spinning since college doesn’t make a lot of sense, just like buying a dirt cheap record player to play high-quality “first presses” of your favorite albums. 

Striking the balance: The quality of your music and the quality of your gear should go hand in hand, and as you step up one, you should consider stepping up the other. Still have your old CDs? Consider ripping them to a lossless format. Just got a new turntable or better phono cartridge? Look for some fresh or high-quality pressings to really take advantage of what your turntable can bring to the table.

Giving Power to “Budget” and “Taste.”

“What is a “preamp”? Technically, any piece of gear before your amplifier can be considered a “preamp,” but generally speaking, it refers to any gear that sits between your source gear and power amp. Phono stages, volume controls, equalizers, tone controls, tube buffer, etc. are some common “preamp” devices. Some contain tubes, others are solid-state, and others are passive with no active electronics beyond a volume pot/switch and some wire, and each can be used to affect the sound of your system overall in one direction or another. Tube preamps & tube buffers are a common means to add a touch of warmth and the holographic soundstage of tubes, without the crazy cost, or power bill, of massive tube amps. If your source, amp or DAC gear offers digital volume control, you can sometimes bypass the use of a separate preamp device altogether.

Bring on the power!: Be it 500W monster monoblock amps, budget 100W stereo receivers, or tiny flea-watt chip amps. You need power to drive your speakers. Picking the right amplifier for your speaker can be difficult as there is a lot to consider. An easy rule of thumb is that it’s generally better to have “too much” power than “too little.” Unless your gear is prone to suddenly pumping 100% volume to your amps, it’s rare that “too much” power will kill a speaker, especially in short bursts. Having that extra headroom on hand improves dynamics and offers better overall performance. Too little power and the amp will begin to clip which will quickly fry your tweeters, even at moderate volumes. Smaller rooms need less power than bigger rooms, just as low-efficiency speakers (under 85dB) need a lot more power than high efficiency speakers (over 90-95dB). so be sure the amps you choose are a proper match for your room size and speaker efficiency.

To Integrate or Not To Integrate? For the space and budget conscious, it’s not uncommon to use integrated amplifiers that include both the preamp and power amplifier sections all in one device, some may also offer streaming, phono and DAC stages built-in as well. They save the clutter of extra cables running between each device, but they generally offer decent performance for the money. The only downside is you are often locked in to their “house sound” based on the electronics they chose to use inside. Typically, most brands keep things fairly neutral, but some may “color” things a little one way or another.

“Separates” have the benefit of letting you play with combinations like using a tube preamp with Class-D power amps, or exploring the differences between Saber DACs and R2R ladder DACs, or finding out what gear suits your own tastes best, but also means you need more cables to connect that new piece of gear to the rest of your system.

Garbage In – Garbage Out: An amplifier’s purpose is to turn a weak signal into a powerful signal, amplifying any signal that they receive, including both the good and the bad. The cleaner and better quality the signal that you feed into your amplifier, the better the sound quality it’s going to be able to give you at the other end, so upgrading the sources, gear and cables used before your amplifier also means an upgrade to the performance of your amplifier.

Finding “Synergy”: The drawback of “separates” is that you’re not guaranteed that one piece of gear will always play nice with another. Sometimes things like impedance miss-matches between gear can cause issues you don’t expect, and can be the difference between a dull, lifeless system and one that is fun and engaging. Just as pairing a “detailed” amplifier with a “bright” speaker may cause your system to sound “clinical” or even “harsh” just as pairing a “smooth” speaker with warm gear may cause your system to sound “dark” or “veiled.” Playing with different gear gives you the ability to explore and see what combination of gear works best for you.

Cable Matters

Getting into the nitty-gritty: Generally speaking, so long as you’re using any decent quality cable with a sufficient gauge, there is very little to worry about for most people. We’re often talking a 5-10% differences, at most, and often it is in terms of finer details like soundstage positioning, layering and the like. That said, if you have a budget system with speakers against the wall which cannot reproduce a deep, 3-dimentional soundstage, or the music you listen to doesn’t have any of that to begin with, then you’re likely never going to hear any differences that better cables can bring to the table, and that’s okay. 

The Bare Minimums: Often times the stock power and generic “lamp cord” for speaker cables used in most systems is perfectly adequate. But for high-voltage gear, like speaker cables, there are some “minimums” to consider, without unintentionally leaving performance on the table. For the most part, 16awg pure copper wire is the standard. Going with a tiny gauge wire (20-24awg) will restrict bass output and may leave the speakers sounding “thin”. For longer runs (15-30 feet) consider some larger 14awg copper wire to reduce resistance over long runs. Bare-copper wire also oxidize over time, and will degrade performance in the long term, solder & seal those ends with a banana or spade connector and some heat shrink to prevent that oxidation over time.

Metal Matters: The metals used to make cables can have a surprising effect on the tone of your system.

We always recommend oxygen-free copper (OFC) wires coated in polyethylene or Teflon for the best results.

Among the worst is “copper clad aluminum,” (cheap aluminum wire with a thin outer coating of copper) next being “tinned topper” followed by “military grade” silver-coated copper.

Cables with a base metal, coated with another metal, will affect the tone and cause a phase-shift and the longer the cables are, the worse the effect is. Tinned-copper will soften the treble as tin is less conductive than the copper core. Copper-clad aluminum has the opposite effect as it has a higher resistance base metal and so the mid and bass will be softer compared to the treble. Silver-coated copper has a similar signature to the previous arrangement, but boosts treble rather than reducing the mid and bass, and can make a speaker sound bright or edgy, and can leave things like acoustic instruments sounding “disjoined” with the body of the instrument sounding separated from the strings.

Pure-silver cables are always an option too, as they come without out the side effects of being an outer coating, but are understandably very costly compared to pure-copper cables.

Cable Geometry?: Every cable on the market can be electrically measured via 3 parameters; Resistance, Inductance and Capacitance, all 3 of which you want to be as low as possible, and depending on the cable’s gauge and geometry/layout the parameters are affected differently, and can influence your power amplifier as well.

If the only difference between your new and old cable is the gauge, then you shouldn’t expect big changes, as you’re not really changing anything else about the cable other than its size.

Flat-ribbon cables with their broad faces up against each other will have high-capacitance, which in some cases can make an amplifier unstable, or in the worst cases, kill drivers or even the amplifiers themselves.

Twisted pairs or 2 sets of twisted pairs are a great way to help reject external EMI and RFI, and a braided geometry cable offers the most external noise rejection, especially if you can separate those strands so they cross at a 90-degree angle. A cotton rope or hollow Teflon tube can help to separate out the individual strands, lowering capacitance of the cable.

Solid or Stranded: Wire typically comes in 2 forms; solid-core and stranded varieties.
Depending on the application and the gear in question, solid core can have the benefit of better control over bass, but may also leave the treble feeling lacking, it is also much more stiff than stranded wire, and it only gets stiffer the larger the gauge you plan to use.

Stranded wire is much more flexible, especially at larger gauges, and may bring what was missing in the treble from the solid core cable, but you may not have the same level of impact in the bass.

Depending on your setup you may want to try different kinds of cable, or even a combination of both to see what best suits your system and taste.

Bi-Wire or Buy wire? So long as you’re using a single, good-quality speaker cable, there is very little benefit to bi-wiring. Especially, if you’re using the same kind of wire for both the tweeter and woofer sections, you’re simply buying more wire than you really need. Try using different types of wire for each set of terminals, and see what differences, if any, can be had. This recommendation also applies to bi-amping speakers.

Shielded and Balanced Cables: Unless you’re working in pro-audio, need really-long runs from one side of the room to another, or live in a really electrically “noisy” environment, there is often very little need for shielded or balanced gear. Shielded and balanced cables also make the most sense for low-voltage connections between source gear and your power amp. We don’t recommend using shielded speaker cables as it raises their capacitance over standard cables, which you want to avoid as it can make some amps unstable.

Cleaning power at the source: To get the most out of power conditioning or power cables or interconnects in general, they need to be used at the source, be it your streamer, DAC, Phono stage, etc. The lower the noise floor and cleaner the signal of the early part of your system, the cleaner the signal will be provided to the rest of your system. A cleaner signal improves the space that exists between elements of the soundstage, as you amplifier isn’t having to amplify the boosted noise-floor of all the gear that is before it, giving you that “inky blackness” that so many look for with quality gear. The trick is to avoid over-filtering or current-limiting devices as both will hurt dynamics. On a power amp, there is less benefit outside of simply swapping to higher gauge cables as you want to reduce the resistance of the power cable, but overall will be a minor difference.

Bonus: Chasing that “last 5%”

If you’ve done everything else imaginable from the fundamentals of room treatment and speaker placement, to achieving system synergy, that gets your feet tapping every time, there’s always the desire to see what else is out there, and what more you can do to further improve your system. You can spend crazy amounts of money chasing after those last minor changes, some of which may be better or even worse than what you already have, or just end up being a lateral move, exchanging one aspect of performance for another.

Going Beyond: In order to take things further, you often have to explore the more unique and often esoteric technologies and concepts that are often impractical for the vast majority of the market, like rotary subwoofers, battery-powered gear, power conditioning or regeneration, dedicated power lines, modifications to gear or speakers, open-baffle designs, new & emerging or even proprietary technologies. The list goes on. It’s here where you have to decide what works, and what makes sense for your system and what you’re after, and what falls within your budget. Multiple sets of three, small, wooden pucks scattered around your room might improve the Feng-shui of your room, but it likely isn’t going to ascend the sound of your system to another plane of existence. However, removing the noise from your power and gear is going to help with improving the soundstage performance by avoiding or even removing the electrical noise of other devices in your system/home. 

Without drastic changes to your system, or gear, to explore other avenues, there’s simply not much you can really do to push your system further towards that desire for “perfection.” Sometimes you just need to “put the brush down” and enjoy the destination of your long journey.