A hard look at the effect of cables

Arthur, thanks for providing the great post and link. If only more Audiogoners could only follow your example in brevity, clarity, usefullness and supporting documentation.

my personal experience points to the source as having a significant affect upon the performance of a stereo system.

thus, the signal from a cd player passes through 2 interconnects and a preamp before it reaches the amplifier.
it is this link that has a greater audible impact than that of speaker cable, amp and speaker.

the signal fed to the amplifier is critical, for obvious reasons.

Psacanli, It's OK to criticize, but I don't have to agree. My limited experience is that subwoofers are not embraced by the all members of the audiophile community. Can they enhance bass response and overall system performance? YES. Are they easy to match with your system and room and set up to create coherent and musical reproduction? NO. Just my opinion, but I know it is shared by at least a few other dinosaurs.

PS - I own a subwoofer in my HT set up, and it enhances reproduction of both soundtracks and music. But it isn't perfect and I am not pining to add one to my modest hi fi-only set up, even though bass response is far from Full Spectrum. Maybe I should check out the Revel model you mentioned...

Knownothing,

FWIW, your strategy as regards a sub woofer seems quite sensible. I believe it is better without one unless you can get something of high enough quality to not do more harm than good to your bass and lower midrange. Producing good ultra LF with accuracy seems exponentially expensive compared to an equivalent quality mid range and treble, IMHO.

Shadrone, interestingly I recently brought a relatively cheap sub into the listening room. I have two independent sets of electronic's available to drive my speakers. With one set the sub's inclusion really flesh out depth, tightness, and imaging - a pretty good, even if with relatively inexpensive components, 'audiophile' listening experience.

However with the other set of components, in which the amp is fuller, deeper, and rounder on its own, it sounds more of 'one voice' with the system, draws less attention to the audiophile essentials, and allows a far more relaxed and enjoyable listen to musical content. Interesting......

BTW it took me about 18 hours of effort to match the sub with the mains using an SPL meter, test records, and some very critical listening. Not a walk in the park and I can imagine why folks get frustrated in trying to combine a sub with any speakers, let alone full range speakers, in a problematic room. :-)