The changes I made today require me to change my style of working entirely. But I gained a bit today in music. For the first 200 hrs with IO2, I had not listened, just went on nightly burn-ins. Later, as I wrote in another thread, my brain got burnt-in to the sound. At that point of time, I've been listening to the setup for over 30-40 days without a break. Funny thing this brain is - Even if you give it a EP-630 for a month, it will start 'liking' it until you show it what a RE0 is capable of
So, to purge all my audio memory, I went 20 days without any music, not even switching on the setup. A couple of days ago, I went back to my IEMs, Phonak PFE and RE0 and listened for a few hours.
Yesterday, before I began the exercise, I prepared a short playlist of two songs from Opeth. After each major step in the exercise, I stopped to listen. As Titus complained, there was no bass, no resolution of any sort in the beginning. By the time I went to bed, slight hint of bass was available, the mids had cleared up, but felt recessed. The vocals were still not clear.
In "Apostle in Triumph", an Opeth song from "Orchid" album, RE0 would give me a hint of how 'open' Akerfedt's throat is during the death growls. Also, towards the end, he whispers a line before launching into normal vocals. Both these were completely missing in my setup - the vocals were unclear and to hear the whispered line, I needed to make a very conscious and hard effect.
Actually, this song has two beginnings - the recording engineer mistakenly recorded the end of the previous song to the beginning of this song and then there's the actual beginning
. Today, after nearly completing my planned changes, the change was distinct the moment the song began (actual beginning) - the guitar was finally sounding alright. The mids had cleared up, bass was a little more evident and I started hearing more details than I have so far heard (or remember) with this setup. Though I still need the vocals to clear up a bit more and would still need a bit more width & slight depth to the sound stage, I did hear the whispered line clearly - both with STX -> TP20 and STX -> "Analog" of D1 -> D1 Line out -> TP20. I could at least get some hint of the change in growl dynamics, for lack of a better term.
Also, there was a biting harshness at certain frequencies, which shouted out. Now, from my limited time thus far, I did not notice that. Earlier, IO2s felt muffled, veiled or more like chained monsters waiting to be unleashed. Now, that has cleared a lot.
I still would need to test it with another Amp to see whether TP20, though it managed to drive Bala's Harmony ones, struggle with IO2. A bit of proper room treatment, may be an amp upgrade and hopefully, I don't need to think about selling the speaker setup and going back full time to IEMs
PS: I still need the "golden ears" to validate what I hear
