System Optimization - Would you pay a professional?

[crwilli]

Count me in as an interested prospect. One thing I always wonder about is - what I don't know SHOULD be happening in the music. An experienced expert could not only find it, but teach me to look for it and know what to do to find it. In other words, I don't know what problems my sound has as I am not an expert and am basically the only person who even tries to really listen to my system.

[audioguy3107]

I'm surprised with all the systems on here, no one (at least I don't think so) has done this but me! Jim Smith came out to the house about a year and a half ago and performed his room play here in my listening room. It was fantastic and made a great difference......now the caveat here is that it turns out that Jim only lives about 20 minutes! from me so it was a relatively easy process. It also gave me the opportunity to go over to his home and spend a couple of hours listening to his system and seeing how he optimized his room and setup. It was a very cool experience. If anyone is interested, just let me know and I can post in more detail what we did!

- Buck

[metaphacts]

Originally Posted by audioguy3107

I'm surprised with all the systems on here, no one (at least I don't think so) has done this but me! Jim Smith came out to the house about a year and a half ago and performed his room play here in my listening room. It was fantastic and made a great difference......now the caveat here is that it turns out that Jim only lives about 20 minutes! from me so it was a relatively easy process. It also gave me the opportunity to go over to his home and spend a couple of hours listening to his system and seeing how he optimized his room and setup. It was a very cool experience. If anyone is interested, just let me know and I can post in more detail what we did!

- Buck

[Randy Myers]

Originally Posted by audioguy3107

I'm surprised with all the systems on here, no one (at least I don't think so) has done this but me! Jim Smith came out to the house about a year and a half ago and performed his room play here in my listening room. It was fantastic and made a great difference......now the caveat here is that it turns out that Jim only lives about 20 minutes! from me so it was a relatively easy process. It also gave me the opportunity to go over to his home and spend a couple of hours listening to his system and seeing how he optimized his room and setup. It was a very cool experience. If anyone is interested, just let me know and I can post in more detail what we did!

- Buck

I would love to hear the type of things you did. Not necessarily specifics, but some hints as to what you were looking for and type of adjustments to get to those goals.

[W9TR]

I would be interested. I had William Phelps optimize my CRT projection video setup and I learned more from him in a day than I did from Joe Kane's ISF course that I took. There is no substitute for broad experience.
Tom

[antipop]

Bill, I didn't knew that such service existed. As you mentioned, price is a no-brainer when you think that I've spend more on a pair of cables ! The time saved on tweaking and placement can be spend on listening music and enjoying the system.

This should be mandatory in any deserving system. The issue is to find someone you can trust and know he'll deliver. If you ever know someone in London who does this, I'd be interested.

[Diapason]

Maybe we should arrange a European Tour for Bill!

[metaphacts]

Originally Posted by Diapason

Maybe we should arrange a European Tour for Bill!

Guys, though I am flattered and would love to come to Europe and see you, this is not about me at all.

This is about very skilled people who do this and only this for a living. They address every aspect of your listening room and system. They are beholding to their customer, not a particular manufacturer. I pointed out Stirling Trayle and Jim Smith because those are two with whose superb results I am very familiar.

As for a Euro tour, the article about Stirl was documenting a set up in the UK. Hmm.

[audioguy3107]

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

I would love to hear the type of things you did. Not necessarily specifics, but some hints as to what you were looking for and type of adjustments to get to those goals.

Well, the primary things that Jim focused on was speaker placement and subwoofer placement. Now obviously some rooms are going to be way worse honestly than mine was....Jim even mentioned that he was somewhat impressed with how far I got on my own....he told me some stories of mega systems he did where he couldn't believe the price of the gear and how poorly it was setup.

A second advantage of Jim's setup is his sheer volume of experience and expertise being in high end audio for years and years which means he's setup so many systems, he's quite familiar with the majority of loudspeakers and their tendencies....i.e. how they should sound, which models should be toed in or not, etc.... those kind of things. He spent years with companies such as Magnepan and Avantgarde Acoustics just to name a couple.

He began the session by listening to how everything sounds of course first. He brought with him about 6 CDs worth of material that he uses to tune systems, some of the stuff he recorded himself. He brought some equipment such as tripods, laser range measures, etc. and setup a grid based on the dimensions of the room so you can easily pinpoint the center point and other points around the room. Once the grid was setup, that's where the speakers were moved based not only on the grid measurements, but on listening with each slight move...he was even checking sound based on a movement of 1/16 of an inch!!!!! He was very patient obviously. Once he had the speakers exactly where he wanted them (which was a very long process), he went to work on the subwoofers with the same attention to detail using measurements, ears, and a spectrum analyzer. Once the primary positions were dialed in, micro adjustments on rake angle, toe in, you name it were done until he couldn't get any better performance.

This is just a brief overview of the process, all in all he was at the house for close to 8 hours and there was more detail than I could write up here, but after finishing it was successful since my wife could tell a difference. If she can tell, than you know it worked.

- Buck

[Taylode]

This just became infinitely more appealing knowing he is based out of Petaluma.