Because i can not afford an serious speaker and sound system i have to use a little enhancements.
I have obtained an fairy awesome speaker setup for low money recently (30$) and that setup is:

4x Sony SS-V305 (Rated 100W)
1x Sony SS-CN305 (Rated 120W)
1x Sony SA-W305G (Rated 60W)

The speakers were almost brand new, never used. And now i am in search of an Amplifier that can run these 6 speakers. The woofer is active so i run it directly from my sound card (Asus Xonar D2X , Set to HI-FI mode with out any shitty effects) and two satellite speakers from my Ei Nikola Tesla RP 5025S.

I have one Pioneer A-P510 but it wont turn on.

Stojke wrote:

Because i can not afford an serious speaker and sound system i have to use a little enhancements.

Well I think it's also a matter of taste. obobkivisch has serious speakers, yet he still enjoys DSP effects for music. If you still like enhancements even after you buy yourself some serious speakers, don't let anyone stop you. 😀

Stojke wrote:

I have obtained an fairy awesome speaker setup for low money recently (30$) and that setup is: […]
Show full quote

I have obtained an fairy awesome speaker setup for low money recently (30$) and that setup is:

4x Sony SS-V305 (Rated 100W)
1x Sony SS-CN305 (Rated 120W)
1x Sony SA-W305G (Rated 60W)

The speakers were almost brand new, never used. And now i am in search of an Amplifier that can run these 6 speakers. The woofer is active so i run it directly from my sound card (Asus Xonar D2X , Set to HI-FI mode with out any shitty effects) and two satellite speakers from my Ei Nikola Tesla RP 5025S.

I have one Pioneer A-P510 but it wont turn on.

They're good speakers. However, multichannel power amplifier is insanely expensive. I think you better off with multiple stereo power amplifiers like Crown or Hafler. Pro audio amps are generally cheaper than home audiophile amps, despite the same quality.

Or go vintage. However, if you go the integrated amplifier route, make sure you buy those with "separate mode" so you can bypass directly to the amp's power section. 😀

True. But i saw very good Harman Kardon , Yamaha, Sony, and other amplifiers here on the flea market, imported from Austria and Germany for as low as 50 euro to 150 euro for real beast amplifiers (bought the speakers at the same place). So sooner or latter i will buy an cool one 🤣

http://picsstorage.aupedo.com/1121/bd1715ff-b … 90/IMG_9608.JPG

Stojke wrote:

True. But i saw very good Harman Kardon , Yamaha, Sony, and other amplifiers here on the flea market, imported from Austria and Germany for as low as 50 euro to 150 euro for real beast amplifiers (bought the speakers at the same place). So sooner or latter i will buy an cool one 🤣

http://picsstorage.aupedo.com/1121/bd1715ff-b … 90/IMG_9608.JPG

Nice to hear that, let us know when you have build your system. 😀

I think it depends on the music, and the game. Take the old (very old(ish) ) game Bubble Bobble. There I prefer the raw sound, as on the C64 and the arcade. But the Amiga version makes me a bit irritated, because I feel the music is too "soft". Just like with Gianna Sisters, there I love the C64 version of the game, because the SID chip makes me smile again. Where the Amiga version has that "irritation" again. But with Space Crusade on the Amiga, there I just fucking love that version of the music. Any other version of that theme is a bit meh to me. But as I said it depends on the game, or the musical media. But I do prefer quality sound none the less 😀

WolverineDK wrote:

I think it depends on the music, and the game. Take the old (very old(ish) ) game Bubble Bobble. There I prefer the raw sound, as on the C64 and the arcade. But the Amiga version makes me a bit irritated, because I feel the music is too "soft". Just like with Gianna Sisters, there I love the C64 version of the game, because the SID chip makes me smile again. Where the Amiga version has that "irritation" again. But with Space Crusade on the Amiga, there I just fucking love that version of the music. Any other version of that theme is a bit meh to me. But as I said it depends on the game, or the musical media. But I do prefer quality sound none the less 😀

Then it's the opposite of me, because I actually like enhancements for very oldish games. 😁

I like a selective mix of both worlds.

For example I do like authentic speed, scrolling, sound and music. But I don't miss authentic ball mice, floppies, slow computers. It is very subjective however. I do like LCD monitors for example.

And the question of "how the designer intended", does this really help? Because that person could only do what technology at that time was able to do. Tale scanlines for example. What artist would draw the scanlines in their draft designs? It was really a lack of technology back in the day to display it another way. And in the actual memory the scanlines also didn't exist. Just the pixels with colour information 😀

This was one of the reasons I started my time machine projects. Mixing authentic core hardware, which IMO shouldn't be substituted, but combine in with things that make life easier like reliable floppy emulators, ATX PSU, optical mouse, large LCD screen, modern storage options...

I want the full retro experience , except the ball mice. Everything else need to be crt, sc-55, floppies etc etc and always NO emulation in pc stuff.
The most I went is modding all consoles/hardware that don't support RGB so they support it and then purchased a 300eur upscaler (framemeister mini) to have said consoles display clear rectangular pixels in lcd panels at 720p/1080p HDMI with scanlines or purchase flashcards and mod systems to use SD cards for media and that's because I don't have room anymore for a good gaming crt and a bazillion games in various formats... all that are stored atm.
Oh, and I hate every gfx "enhancement" filter with a passion, if you can't see the pixels it's crap for me 🤣

On the amiga side of things, I enjoy modding them to hell and replacing/adding parts with modern ones. It's almost the opposite from how I treat my pcs... sure they are pimped but every hardware part used is old... 😵

I have a foot in both camps. I like my systems to be "fully stocked" with working floppy drives and CD-ROM drives, even though I may have seldom use for them. For a system before the 21st century, I always would have it displayed on a CRT. Hardware MIDI modules and real Sound Blasters beat software emulations any day.

However, I do recognize the powerful pull of convenience. Hard drives is an area where I typically run larger than the norm, and in pure DOS machines I use CF cards. They are fast, often cheap and take up little space. There isn't a lot of writing going on in DOS, so the wear and tear on the flash memory inside the card should be very reasonable. It helps that you can pull them out to transfer data through a USB adapter.

Unlike friend Keropi, I don't mind ball mice :p

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Well I think it's also a matter of taste. obobkivisch has serious speakers, yet he still enjoys DSP effects for music. If you still like enhancements even after you buy yourself some serious speakers, don't let anyone stop you. 😀

On headphones too. 😀

In general though, I think "less is more" is applicable here - a lot of "enhancements" tend to either default to very exaggerated settings, or only work as an exaggerated feature, which to me strikes more of showroom appeal than usable feature. In general the feature should "add" or "enhance" the listening experience imho, not overshadow it (imho the point should be enjoying whatever you're listening to, not listening to whatever whizbang feature the gear/device has).

Regarding the question about music vs movies - I'd say my experience/taste is that I'm a lot more forgiving when it comes to movies (and even moreso with TV shows (especially if they're broadcast, vs DVD/Blu-ray sourced)). For example I will enable dynamic compression ("Night Mode" on a lot of devices) without a second thought in a lot of cases, or force downmixing to stereo (or downmixing to stereo and then "up" that to mirrored-quad so that my surrounds run the same signal as my mains), if it makes dialog more intelligible. Not the highest fidelity thing ever, but if it makes whatever material watchable without having to jump the volume control up and down 20 times an hour I'm happy. For DVD/Blu-ray/etc movies I'm usually letting the decoder run in auto-lock and not complaining, but having DSP "extras" is always nice, especially for "big production" movies (like Indiana Jones).

For music I'm more inclined to leave things at "default" on the assumption that music isn't mixed with a preference to big or small screen playback, but instead should be more "general." And for the most part I think that's probably true (though I've heard of newer albums being mastered with ipod/earbud playback in mind, which is a truly scary concept imho). So for the most part I find that most albums tend not to require any sort of "help" to be listenable, but sometimes post-processing can increase the "fun" factor depending on the album and mood (it's also sometimes a matter of just listening on different speakers/headphones/equipment - variety and all that).

I'll add that in the case of headphones, surround-to-headphone processing (most modern soundcards, many AV receivers, and at least some stand-alone boxes will do this in some manner or another) is a fantastic "effect" for most games and movies that have any sort of surround capabilities. Especially if the headphones themselves have a very good (and relatively large) soundstage. 😎

Outside of sound - I don't like it when I can't enable AA/AF in a 3D game, and try to ensure that my systems have enough GPU power on tap to deliver AA/AF at a reasonable frame rate (which usually means I end up playing games on "overkill systems"). I'm not sure if that should be considered an enhancement or not though. I do, however, have problems with converting AR of a movie or game - I'd rather live with black bars than stretching/squishing the image to fit whatever display (and I'm glad to have LCDs for this, since there's no risk of uneven wear running black bars for hours and hours on end)).

Have an enhancement preference myself.

On the subject of enhancement, was happy to find HDNES and HiSMS today...
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9935
http://hisms.orgfree.com/
...NES / SMS emus that support tile replacement.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

WolverineDK wrote:

I think it depends on the music, and the game. Take the old (very old(ish) ) game Bubble Bobble. There I prefer the raw sound, as on the C64 and the arcade. But the Amiga version makes me a bit irritated, because I feel the music is too "soft". Just like with Gianna Sisters, there I love the C64 version of the game, because the SID chip makes me smile again. Where the Amiga version has that "irritation" again. But with Space Crusade on the Amiga, there I just fucking love that version of the music. Any other version of that theme is a bit meh to me. But as I said it depends on the game, or the musical media. But I do prefer quality sound none the less 😀

Then it's the opposite of me, because I actually like enhancements for very oldish games. 😁

Well, there are certain times. Where I do enjoy enhancements, sadly there has not been a (real) remake of OMF2097, but there are a few nice remixes of the main theme of that game 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

And the question of "how the designer intended", does this really help? Because that person could only do what technology at that time was able to do. Tale scanlines for example. What artist would draw the scanlines in their draft designs? It was really a lack of technology back in the day to display it another way. And in the actual memory the scanlines also didn't exist. Just the pixels with colour information 😀

Actually, it happens in audiophile world as well. The fact is it's impossible to perfectly re-create what the sound engineer intended, because in order to do so, your listening room needs to be an exact replica of the studio where the sound was recorded - exact acoustic environment and the likes. Not to mention different album may be recorded in different studio. Until we achieve Star Trek's holodek technology, I say this is simply impossible to achieve.

Some people even go so far to slippery slope fallacy, suggesting liberal use of tone control button to suit your taste and eschew fidelity altogether, simply because it's impossible to reproduce what the engineer intended at 100% accuracy. Me? I tend to stick with fidelity, but within reason. Of course it's impossible to make my room a perfect replica of the studio where the album was recorded; not to mention the 'which studio' question. But I leave bass and treble control on 'defeat' position, I don't use EQ, and I always aim for the straightest, most transparent equipment possible within my budget. I realize that the 120Tis are not TOTL (there are still 240Tis and 250Tis above it, not to mention the likes of Focal and such), but for the same amount of coins, I still prefer these used 120Tis than say, Wharfedale Diamonds or B&W 602.

Great Hierophant wrote:

I have a foot in both camps. I like my systems to be "fully stocked" with working floppy drives and CD-ROM drives, even though I may have seldom use for them. For a system before the 21st century, I always would have it displayed on a CRT. Hardware MIDI modules and real Sound Blasters beat software emulations any day.

Same here, except the MIDI and SB part. I didn't really miss FM sounds, y'know! 🤣 I'd always try to use MT-32 emulator or MIDI Sound Fonts as long as the game has it. 😀

obobskivich wrote:

On headphones too. 😀

In general though, I think "less is more" is applicable here - a lot of "enhancements" tend to either default to very exaggerated settings, or only work as an exaggerated feature, which to me strikes more of showroom appeal than usable feature. In general the feature should "add" or "enhance" the listening experience imho, not overshadow it (imho the point should be enjoying whatever you're listening to, not listening to whatever whizbang feature the gear/device has).

Same here. That's why I'm sticking to 4.0 instead of 7.1 or 9.2. 🤣

obobskivich wrote:

Outside of sound - I don't like it when I can't enable AA/AF in a 3D game, and try to ensure that my systems have enough GPU power on tap to deliver AA/AF at a reasonable frame rate (which usually means I end up playing games on "overkill systems"). I'm not sure if that should be considered an enhancement or not though. I do, however, have problems with converting AR of a movie or game - I'd rather live with black bars than stretching/squishing the image to fit whatever display (and I'm glad to have LCDs for this, since there's no risk of uneven wear running black bars for hours and hours on end)).

Precisely. That's why I love to try older games on newer video cards - and get pissed when the said video card has problem when enabling FSAA on older games. 🤣

kolano wrote:

Have an enhancement preference myself. […]
Show full quote

Have an enhancement preference myself.

On the subject of enhancement, was happy to find HDNES and HiSMS today...
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9935
http://hisms.orgfree.com/
...NES / SMS emus that support tile replacement.

I ain't quite familiar with console emulators, but do they smooth the pixels well?

WolverineDK wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

WolverineDK wrote:

I think it depends on the music, and the game. Take the old (very old(ish) ) game Bubble Bobble. There I prefer the raw sound, as on the C64 and the arcade. But the Amiga version makes me a bit irritated, because I feel the music is too "soft". Just like with Gianna Sisters, there I love the C64 version of the game, because the SID chip makes me smile again. Where the Amiga version has that "irritation" again. But with Space Crusade on the Amiga, there I just fucking love that version of the music. Any other version of that theme is a bit meh to me. But as I said it depends on the game, or the musical media. But I do prefer quality sound none the less 😀

Then it's the opposite of me, because I actually like enhancements for very oldish games. 😁

Well, there are certain times. Where I do enjoy enhancements, sadly there has not been a (real) remake of OMF2097, but there are a few nice remixes of the main theme of that game 😀

Regarding to remixes, do you prefer The Ur-Quan Masters with original themes or re-mixed themes?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Actually, it happens in audiophile world as well. The fact is it's impossible to perfectly re-create what the sound engineer intended, because in order to do so, your listening room needs to be an exact replica of the studio where the sound was recorded - exact acoustic environment and the likes. Not to mention different album may be recorded in different studio. Until we achieve Star Trek's holodek technology, I say this is simply impossible to achieve.

Some people even go so far to slippery slope fallacy, suggesting liberal use of tone control button to suit your taste and eschew fidelity altogether, simply because it's impossible to reproduce what the engineer intended at 100% accuracy. Me? I tend to stick with fidelity, but within reason. Of course it's impossible to make my room a perfect replica of the studio where the album was recorded; not to mention the 'which studio' question. But I leave bass and treble control on 'defeat' position, I don't use EQ, and I always aim for the straightest, most transparent equipment possible within my budget. I realize that the 120Tis are not TOTL (there are still 240Tis and 250Tis above it, not to mention the likes of Focal and such), but for the same amount of coins, I still prefer these used 120Tis than say, Wharfedale Diamonds or B&W 602.

You can really go quite mad with such ontological questions as "what did the artist intend" - and honestly they're questions I don't think matter at the end of the day, given that "art" is supposed to be subjectively interpreted (basically, you can't tell someone how they're supposed to feel about it - that defeats the point, and I've heard this repeated again and again when it comes to literature, poetry, paintings, sculpture, and even movies and videogames, but with music it's always "what did the artist intend?"). IOW I don't think it actually matters what the engineer, artist, etc meant for a specific album or song to mean, or how it should sound - it matters how you, the listener, respond to it (and the sound system is basically a vehicle/means to that end). And of course everyone will meet the same song/album/etc a little bit differently. But in recent years a lot of marketing has come about "hear the music the way the artist intended, in the studio, like a pro" to hawk some very expensive plastic baubles. 😵

Depends entirely on what mood I'm in.

Sometimes I plug in a pair of early-90s "OMG MULTIMEDIA BUNDLE" crappy, tinny-sounding little speakers, for some nostalgic bass-less Wolfenstein 3D.

Sometimes I power up my Luxman L-3 amp and Cerwin Vega CV123 speakers and indulge in some MT-32 powered Space Quest 3. Maybe boost the bass just a smidge.

I always listen to music on the latter though, with the EQ adjusted ever-so-slightly to compensate for my turntable's low-end weakness.

I usually just go with whatever is convenient, to be honest. That said, for music I generally prefer fidelity over "enhancement", and for games I can go one way or the other. I know I'm not going to have a completely 100% authentic experience playing SNES games with an Xbox 360 pad, but I'll still use an accurate emulator, and oftentimes a CRT filter as well, if I can get one to work.

With games on DosBox, well I've never really figured out how to CRT filters with it, but since the whole point of the emulator is to make it easier to play old games on a modern system, I usually just run with the whole "convenience" angle of it and set up seperate configs optimized for each game. About as far as I'll go with "authenticity" is using FM synthesis instead of General MIDI (because almost NOBODY I know who played DOS games back in the day actually had a proper MIDI device 😜), and of course setting the aspect ratio correction so that the games display in 4:3, since I can't stand seeing a horizontally stretched image. DosBox doesn't really go out of its way to replicate the feel of an actual DOS PC, but I don't necessarily mind that since it's hard to have that "feel" without period-correct hardware anyway.

obobskivich wrote:

You can really go quite mad with such ontological questions as "what did the artist intend" - and honestly they're questions I don't think matter at the end of the day, given that "art" is supposed to be subjectively interpreted (basically, you can't tell someone how they're supposed to feel about it - that defeats the point, and I've heard this repeated again and again when it comes to literature, poetry, paintings, sculpture, and even movies and videogames, but with music it's always "what did the artist intend?"). IOW I don't think it actually matters what the engineer, artist, etc meant for a specific album or song to mean, or how it should sound - it matters how you, the listener, respond to it (and the sound system is basically a vehicle/means to that end). And of course everyone will meet the same song/album/etc a little bit differently. But in recent years a lot of marketing has come about "hear the music the way the artist intended, in the studio, like a pro" to hawk some very expensive plastic baubles. 😵

Precisely. I've seen two extremes on audiophile forums. One is "faithfully reproduce what the artist intended", another is "use bass and treble button to your heart's content". Me, I tend to avoid two extremes, while leaning towards the "less is more" philosophy". For example, I prefer a pair of good stereo speakers instead of el-cheapo LCR speakers.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

kolano wrote:

Have an enhancement preference myself. […]
Show full quote

Have an enhancement preference myself.

On the subject of enhancement, was happy to find HDNES and HiSMS today...
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9935
http://hisms.orgfree.com/
...NES / SMS emus that support tile replacement.

I ain't quite familiar with console emulators, but do they smooth the pixels well?

I'm not sure if those two do or not. They seem more focused on supporting "enhancement packs" of higher resolution graphics (i.e. tiles/sprites) for games. Many years back there was something similar for arcade titles, but I have lost track of what became of that.

I run most of my other console emulation through RetroArch, which provides support for multi-pass shades that allow for fairly nice pixel smoothing via shaders like xBR. I also really like being able to clean up things like dithering/fake transparency with the the mDapt filter, or elimination of scanlines /w 4xSaL (though I really need to design an alternate shader focused on doing that specifically to correct for the reduced brightness 4xSaL applies due to blending the scanlines into other pixels).

tl:dr BOTH

How often do you know the "artist" had anything to do with the actual recording hardware and it's settings? How often do you know that the "artist" or their recording engineer was any good at making recordings or had a specific sound in mind?

Honestly, I am one of those people who aspires to have their system configured flat so that you get that true representation of how the recording was made, as you mentioned earlier. BUT there is a line at which you have to stop forcing yourself to listen to it that way, just because someone thinks that's the way it should be. For example: I love Ronnie James Dio's music, but there are several songs which seem like they are VERY lacking in low-end so a bump-up of their bassy tones makes the recordings much more enjoyable, in my opinion. I don't know why they were recorded this way, but I also don't care because they sound broken to me. What's the point of a heavy-metal track if the heavy guitar-work sounds light and distortion-filled, but with no low-end? It's like playing a concert with 5-1/4" loudspeakers.

So anyway, my point was simply that people shouldn't cling so tightly to the idea that the master-recording was done well or even right (regardless of your definition) and just worry about what they think sounds good. This would also free a lot of people from the illusion that they need to spend huge money on equipment, and allow them to buy what sounds good.

I believe a lot of people are also too afraid of what others think.