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I feel like I'm a horrible person for thinking about this. In @The Computer Audiophile's system, there is no intention to watch any movies so technically, it is not necessary to use a Mezzo CSC as the centre speaker... In a cost no object scenario, getting a matching Alexia V as the centre speaker would open up sonic possibilities that most home theatre enthusiasts can't imagine. Of course, I presume Alexia V costs a lot more than Mezzo CSC. But I have to wonder if Wilson would be willing to manufacture a matching speaker to go with your other two and replace the Mezzo CSC. My personal problem is that once someone says something about my audio system, if it's a sound advice, it's like they have inceptioned me and I can't get the concept out of my head. So I feel bad about saying this but I thought it is a sufficiently worthwhile comment to make that I had to speak my mind. Whatever happens, I'm super happy that you have such a fantastic system to listen to.

Rendu products are amazing. Thanks for another great review. And I didn't realize Vanska's Mahler Symphony No. 3 recording is finally out (since June 2024 it seems). Attending the live performance was a fantastic experience for me too. I'm glad I can now relive it at home. Thanks for talking about it.

I second @Audiophile Neuroscience comment that perhaps the best thing to do in the future is to explore digital room correction usually when people want to address room acoustic issues, you ideally first want lots of options to move your listening seat to smooth out your bass and then some room to move the speakers for further refinement and then the ability to put acoustic treatments on the walls and corners. You have a living room that significantly limits your options so any minor adjustments are simply not going to have that much impact. perhaps @Nicoalix next upgrade should be something like Lyngdorf TDAI-1120 so you can run RoomPerfect for digital room correction. It’ll be good for your current speakers and future speakers. Some higher end NAD supports Dirac but I find Dirac to be sometimes finicky and more prone to over-correction.

I leave my C214 on 24/7 i also have passive bass traps in my living room. I don’t take them in and out of their spots. So why would I turn off the C214?

I re-read what I said in that topic. One thing I didn’t mention is that even though I think of these as humongous bass traps, unlike true huge passive bass traps, they don’t actually absorb anything above 150Hz so if your room is very resonant, you could end up with a situation where the PSI AVAA absorbs a lot of bass but now the midrange and treble are too resonant compared to the bass.

See the above discussion

I didn't realize until just now that this has moved onto a "why does a product cost as much as it does discussion" My understanding is that some companies price their products based on the production bill of materials (BoM) and then multiply that by a certain amount which they hope would cover the R&D cost and profits. Other companies would just price their products at a price that the market is willing to bear to optimize profits. So if selling more cheaper products make more money, they'll price it cheaper. If selling fewer more expensive products make more total profits, they'll sell at a higher price. Since I'm not dCS, I don't know which type of company dCS belongs to in terms of pricing. But at the end of the day, I think individuals should just buy what they feel is fair to them. I have definitely seen some people complain that a company is charging a low multiple of BoM and they feel that the product is too expensive even though there is no way the complainer themselves even with all the technical know-how can build the product for themselves at a lower cost than what the company charges. That is their opinion of the pricing, I guess. Similarly, I have also seen people justify extremely expensive products that were priced probably at more than the entire BoM+R&D cost of the product on a per unit basis (aka. selling one unit would recoup all the costs) because they feel it's the best that's out there (and nobody else can do the same R&D or build). I personally prefer companies that charge a "reasonable" multiple of BoM but even the word "reasonable" is subjective. Ultimately, kudos to those who like and can afford the dCS Varese and would end up enjoying it tremendously. But also kudos to those who feel that it's overpriced or simply doesn't like it and they are saving money on some other DAC/streamer that they like and feel are better priced instead. But at the end of the day, dCS is a business so they owe us nothing in terms of how they want to price their products. Just as we as consumers don't owe dCS our business.

https://dcs.community/t/a-response-to-recent-claims-regarding-dcs/6722 Yes. I am quite satisfied with dCS's response. To me, a lot of these situations arise because people misunderstand each other and then things started escalating more and more because bad feelings about each other started developing in these types of conflicts. You can kinda tell from the VP marketing/lawyer emails to GoldenSound that there is a lot of anger/frustration in the tone that seems a bit out of proportion to the content and subjective opinion. Sometimes, near the end, people don't even remember what they were arguing about in the first place. I hope dCS and GoldenSound can settle their differences in a satisfactory manner. And I think we can all go back to listening to music that we like with gear that we like.

Obviously, providing PGGB'd music for free to paying Patreon subscribers is wrong. Especially when PGGB author provides music for free for people to test. Although I don't see that as something he listed as a Patreon service. So I'll trust your sources on this. With respect to "publicly releasing a reverse engineered headphone filter designed by Mitch Barnett", I ended up doing some searches and reading on this. While I 100% agree with you that it was a highly problematic and inappropriate move, I think in this situation context matters. And unfortunately, on Head-Fi, some of the original posts were removed so I can only re-construct what happened based on some guesses. My understanding was that GoldenSound was saying that given a convolution filter, you can usually create an equivalent set of parametric EQs to mimick the convolution filter. And then somebody said they tried to do that with Mitch's filter and it didn't sound the same. So GoldenSound took Mitch's filter and created an equivalent set of parametric EQs and posted it online. Like I said, I 100% agree with you that I don't think GoldenSound should have done that. However, if I want to prove the equivalency (or closeness) of a set of parametric EQs vs a convolution filter, and I just randomly generate a convolution filter with an equivalent parametric EQ, nobody is going to try it and people are going to argue that my example is very specific and I won't be able to do that with Mitch's convolution filter. So ultimately, GoldenSound had to" reverse engineer" a convolution filter people would actually use as demonstration. Hence, my take on it is that I don't have a problem with him "reverse engineering a headphone filter designed by Mitch Barnett". After all, I think we have discussed this before about HQPlayer and PGGB vs Chord WTA filters that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I do think that GoldenSound could have just privately sent the set of parametric EQ settings to the individuals who owned/purchased Mitch's convolution filter and let them compare themselves. Of course, if I am mistaken in my understanding of the situation, please enlighten me further.

Hmmm… Okay. But in the longer YouTube video on The Headphone Show (that I linked to), GoldenSound addresses all the “misrepresentations” listed in the final attorney letter. Can you specify on which items you feel GoldenSound is being disingenuous or inappropriate on?

I also think we should link to GoldenSound’s explanation of what happened from his perspective. and then we can just wait to see what dCS has to say. To me, Goldensound actually said what dCS said and I have to admit, unless something is being omitted, I’m on GoldenSound’s side so far.

@Windows X, I wonder what your frequency response and spectrogram looks like from REW. But I agree with everything you said about preamp transparency and room acoustics.

I own a C214 and have placed it in two different spots in my living room where my stereo is and took measurements of them. Basically, we should think of the C214 as humungous bass traps. So you can imagine if you randomly place a bass trap in your room, it might make the sound better, it might not do anything, it might make the sound worse. For me, one position I placed the C214 basically doesn't do much. The current position at the left rear corner for me sounds great. Moreover, a single bass trap, even a large one, is unlikely to change the frequency response by much so your 10-15dB bass peaks are not likely to drop by more than 2-3dB (rarely 5dB). However, if you look at your RT60 or waterfall plot, you'll notice the RT60 can drop by quite a bit, like 200-500ms and that also has a significant improvement to sound.

I have often wondered if some variations in individual preferences for frequency responses are related to different people preferring to listen at different volumes. In those scenarios, Fletcher-Munson curves/equal loudness contour kicks in. But I would still prefer to know the frequency responses of most headphones so I can figure out what frequency response curves I enjoy. That way, I don’t have to try all the headphones that deviate too far from my preferences. While I 100% agree with the article, I have often seen people use the arguments in the article to say that speakers in-room measurements (or even room acoustics) don’t matter. I think since most headphones have smooth bass response and most rooms don’t, that is a perspective I can’t buy into. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know. So once again, if people don’t measure their rooms, they don’t really know what they’re hearing.

I have to admit, I was super confused by this thread because I stopped upgrading JRiver a long time ago but I still recommend a lot of people to use it. First, I realized this issue/announcement started in May 2023. Second, I didn’t understand not being able to acces JRiver server means so I ended up looking it up first. Free JRiver Server Access Has Ended For Older Versions If you're using JRiver Media Center 27 or older, the player will no longer be able to access some online services provided by JRiver. Core functionality will work, but cover art and CD lookup will fail. These servers are expensive to run and so we will provide them for free only for recent versions of MC (28 to 31 at this time). So I guess if you haven’t upgraded since 2019, you won’t get the CD data when you rip a CD. That sucks. I think the free exact audio copy gives you the CD data but I can’t remember where the data comes from. But if you’re spending $15 to buy a CD and can’t afford to pay JRiver $30, you have the option to manually enter the CD data and manually download the album art for that CD. But are there other functionalities that people are missing from not being able to access the JRiver Server? Also, what would be a payment alternative that people would accept? Let’s say JRiver knew that running these server for some services would always have an additional cost. And customers expect to have indefinite access to these features once they buy the software. Should they charge $30 for the software and then an annual fee of $2/year for access to the JRiver server? So that people like @Audiophile Neuroscience can know upfront what features would be indefinite supported and what features actually has annual costs? What exactly is the time limit for cutting off the software support here if there is no subscription model for this server access? Sure, 5 years seems short. But some people would say 10 years, some would say 30 years. Think of people you helped with 5 or 10 years ago. If they come back to you and expect free assistance, do you think it’s fair?