Hi Bryon,
Another of your fascinating and thought-provoking threads, which expectably has stimulated some excellent responses.
The one thing that occurs to me that has not yet been mentioned, and which I think factors into "warmth" significantly, is hall ambience, or the lack thereof.
It seems to me that proper reproduction of hall ambience is a key factor underlying Learsfool's astute comment that
Assembling a system that sounds "real" is automatically also going to be a system that sounds "warm." I suspect this is true for the great majority of audiophiles out there, especially those whose reference is live, unamplified acoustic music in a good performing venue.
And it strikes me as a key factor in achieving the "richness" that several other posters referred to.
Hall ambience, of course, was discussed at great length in your excellent
"They are here" vs. "You are there" thread. Obviously its proper reproduction is highly dependent on the recording. I would offer the hypothesis that recordings that are lacking in "warmth," or "richness," or which tend not to sound "real," commonly have not adequately captured hall ambience.
If so, the obvious question is what to do about it. One approach, which iirc you offered in the other thread, is to try to adjust room acoustics such that they draw a reasonable compromise between adding some semblance of concert-hall acoustics to enhance the presentation of ambience in the case of mediocre or poor recordings, while not overshadowing the ambience that is captured on good recordings. Obviously there will usually be practical limitations to how effectively that can be done.
Another approach would be to try to adjust frequency response. But while emphasizing upper bass and lower mid-range frequencies, for instance, may to some rough approximation replicate the frequency response effects of hall ambience, that approach will be unsatisfactory IMO because it does not address the timing relationships between direct and reflected sound.
What does strike me as likely to be, in general, the most promising way of enhancing warmth and ambience on mediocre and poor recordings, without significantly compromising the reproduction of well done recordings, is the introduction of tubes into the system, as others have suggested above. The added dimensionality that is commonly attributed to tubes (that attribution being correct in my experience, although from a technical standpoint I have no idea why that would be so), and perhaps the relative emphasis that they may give to lower order even harmonics, seem to me to be the best way of achieving that balance.
Concerning where to put the tubes in the system, as you’ve no doubt seen there have been many debates on that question in prior threads here, with opinions sharply divided. FWIW, I am in the tube power amp camp. However in this case I certainly do not think that replacing your XA-30.5 with a tube amp would be the right approach. I say that partly because of the Pass amp’s outstanding reputation, but also because, assuming that the impedance characteristics of your 1027be’s are similar to those of the
1037be, the higher output impedance of a tube amp would result in increased treble emphasis and de-emphasized lower mids and bass, counter to what you are trying to achieve.
So I have no bottom line answer to suggest, beyond some of the suggestions that have already been made, but those are some thoughts.
Best regards,
-- Al
