Ideally yes.
Hereās an update based on a few days of 'sperimenting. David at Focus Fidelity reminded me that if I make ANY physical changes - new equipment, speaker placement, even listening position - Iād need to start over and re-do my measurements, regenerate filters, compare to previous filters, etc. Over the past 3 months I had updated my digital philosophy from: MacBook USB >> Schiit DAC >> preamp. to MacBook running Roon, accessing data from NAS server / streaming >> PS Audio AirLens >> Stellar Gold DAC >> preamp. Iād also upgraded some cables and added a PSA PowerPlant. I heard improvements, but had never (lazy) re-evaluated everything by going back to square one on speaker/listening configuration. I went back to Paulās The Loudspeaker book and carefully re-did everything. I made two changes that without room correction filtering were quite big: position of speakers remained the same, but toe-in was about a degree more and listening postion moved forward about 6 inches. The center channel was clearer as was the entire soundstage. The increased toe-in might have sacrificed a touch of soundstage width, but I only have a few recordings where the absolute outer extremes beyond the speakers are featured, so maybe they came in a few inches, but the clarity was improved.
So on to re-measuring with the UMIK-1 and I did this a little differently. I moved my chair back about a foot and using a boom mic stand, was able to measure 8 positions, in addition to the central āhead", all within a 2-foot square āboxā around where my head would be. This allowed me to actually SIT in the chair with the mic positioned in the actual plane of listening and closely mimic the effect my body (which Iām sorry to say is rather large) would have on the sound reaching my position. Looking at the graphs as I was recording, I could see they were much more consistent with each other than before. You might wonder why Iād take measurements within such a tight box, but I know from experience that my Vandersteen 2ci speakers are āhead in a viseā as far as āsweet spot,ā and recent readings on this say that when that is true, measure tightly.
I regenerated filters - the one Focus Fidelity calls ābest fitā (essentially flat) and the Harman curve.
The results: ASTOUNDING. From the get-go, the Harman was better to my ears, not really a bass ābumpā as much as a slight decrease in everything else so the bass is more āsensible.ā Much more uniform. The center channel had been shifted the the left a little in my first experiment, but is now dead center and a touch wider, but very much more defined. The biggest change is that the entire stage grew in depth, in 3-D. As far as realism, space between instruments, etc., nothing lost from the improvements Iād made in the adjusted setup.
This stuff is really good, equivalent in noticeability to swapping out tubes in my pre-amp. This was a great project with real results.
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