A cute little amp that’s topping in measurements

[Decadent_Spectre]

Okay. In this system, have you tried different amplifiers ? Or is the DSP making it so good that an amp change will not show up at all due to its insignificance? In a friend's system that is fully custom and active, we once tried tube amplification for the highs while retaining SS for the lows. Difference was night and day. Never played with DSP, so don't have no clue about how massive the changes will be.

Yes, the amplifiers do make a difference.

Regardless of what you do with the DSP, many amps do sound different so the differences are audible if your hearing is sensitive enough.

DSP itself can change the sound in an endless amount of ways. People often focus too much on frequency and distortion, if they played around with DSP and time/phase they would understand the difference it makes.

 

[Vineethkumar01]

Yes, the amplifiers do make a difference.

Regardless of what you do with the DSP, many amps do sound different so the differences are audible if your hearing is sensitive enough.

DSP itself can change the sound in an endless amount of ways. People often focus too much on frequency and distortion, if they played around with DSP and time/phase they would understand the difference it makes.

I am not entering the discussion regarding relevance of subjective vs objective considerations here. Just wanted to clarify something/get opinions regarding the use of DSP.
To the best of my understanding, if a speaker as a whole was a linear time invariant system (LTI), then altering its time domain behavior via DSP would show up in the frequency response measurement as well. The Fourier/inverse transform which takes signal representation from time domain to frequency domain and vice versa is a one-to-one transformation when it acts on energy-limited signals. So, for such LTI systems (more technical details need to be stated which I am omitting here), every change that alters time domain signal behavior will definitely show up in frequency response measurements as well.
In terms of what we understand in terms of acoustical measurements, if we take the impulse response of the speaker system as our reference to study the effect of time/phase changes done via DSP, the frequency response of the system will also get altered. The only problem is, to see this we need to look at both the magnitude and the phase spectrum of the system. Unlike the typical approach of studying only the magnitude spectrum as the benchmark for speaker performance.
All the above description pertains to LTI systems. However speaker may not always be 100% LTI systems.. Baffle diffraction is a example of an effect which causes the system to deviate from its LTI behavior. There are/could be many other such effects and nonlinearities that will cause the overall speaker system to deviate from the ideal LTI behavior that we would ideally like to see (from the point of completely characterizing the system performance in terms of impulse response/ frequency response).
In summary, we are trying to analyze a possibly nonlinear system (in the most general sense) using a set of tools (Fourier transform, impulse response) developed to completely characterize LTI system behavior..
No wonder why people say frequency response doesn't tell everything about a speaker...
I wont even get into distortion and other things..

 

[Kannan]

Time/phase only makes relevance if the crossover are active and reside before the speaker drivers.
If the xo is passive and resides after the DSP time/phase delays, the changes will only be applicable to each of the left or right speakers as a whole and cannot impact the individual drivers unless ofcourse one runs single full range drivers.

In a passive environment, the DSP effect that bring is more changes are the equalisers.
All passive speaker manufacturers strive to attain the best possible phase coherence between the left and right speakers through the passive crossover so that one gets the best possible imaging and accurate stage.
Transparency though a different aspect of the design, also aligns within the crossover design.
Without proper tools, it is almost impossible to design a proper passive crossover.

Any pre amp DSP phase/time delays one incorporates in a passive setup will essentially have to do with getting the imaging correct if the left and right speakers are not properly positioned due to room constrains.

Other DSP possibilities include playing with the gain, octaves (equalisers), nowadays even up-sampling or down-sampling signals, preconfigured filters/plugins and even stuff like speaker setup that you find in AV receivers where-in one can measure the distance to listening, back and side walls etc for the DSP to set the delays accordingly (popularly termed room correction).

Some of the most advanced implementation of DSP includes tuning individual tracks to your taste and automatically recalling the same every time the song is played back through the software.

Digital Room Correction (DRC under Soundforge) This is possibly the most powerful and most complex of software DSP implementation under continuous development since 2002. The best part is, it is absolutely open source and free and is supported by JRiver, Foobar and all those playback software that support external plugins.

 

[Vineethkumar01]

Time/phase only makes relevance if the crossover are active and reside before the speaker drivers.
If the xo is passive and resides after the DSP time/phase delays, the changes will only be applicable to each of the left or right speakers as a whole and cannot impact the individual drivers unless ofcourse one runs single full range drivers.

In a passive environment, the DSP effect that bring is more changes are the equalisers.
All passive speaker manufacturers strive to attain the best possible phase coherence between the left and right speakers through the passive crossover so that one gets the best possible imaging and accurate stage.
Transparency though a different aspect of the design, also aligns within the crossover design.
Without proper tools, it is almost impossible to design a proper passive crossover.

Any pre amp DSP phase/time delays one incorporates in a passive setup will essentially have to do with getting the imaging correct if the left and right speakers are not properly positioned due to room constrains.

Other DSP possibilities include playing with the gain, octaves (equalisers), nowadays even up-sampling or down-sampling signals, preconfigured filters/plugins and even stuff like speaker setup that you find in AV receivers where-in one can measure the distance to listening, back and side walls etc for the DSP to set the delays accordingly (popularly termed room correction).

Some of the most advanced implementation of DSP includes tuning individual tracks to your taste and automatically recalling the same every time the song is played back through the software.

Digital Room Correction (DRC under Soundforge) This is possibly the most powerful and most complex of software DSP implementation under continuous development since 2002. The best part is, it is absolutely open source and free and is supported by JRiver, Foobar and all those playback software that support external plugins.

I agree with the notion that applying DSP before the passive crossover is essentially an equalization of the input signal to the speaker. Time/phase changes will apply to the system (one/both of the speakers) as a whole and not to individual drivers. Full control over drivers need a DSP channel for each driver.
However, if the overall acoustic concept is well implemented (overall shape of the radiator/speaker box, which changes the time/space-varying nature of sound radiation from the system and good quality components including drivers and crossover components, which reduces overall non-linearities), then this kind of EQ will also, to reasonably good extent (also depending upon the type of crossover etc), result in driver passband linearization/non-linearization D) both ON and OFF axis in similar manner. Otherwise the EQ may affect ON axis in some way and OFF axes in some other ways, which would then alter the overall sound balance, which is then also impacted by the environment in which the speaker is placed in before reaching our ears.

Off course, even though all these technicalities are there in the background, if by tweaking using DSP (time domain behavior/frequency domain behavior), the overall sound suites one's personal preferences, then case closed..