Snakecharmed

Sounds like a plan, @Storm-Chaser. That's good that it's sounding better now than when you first connected everything. I'm trying to piece together the room between the picture above and the videos, but where is the "hood" you mentioned where you'll be mounting the left surround channel? I'm having a challenge figuring out what I'm looking at with the glare of the light in the picture. It took me a bit but I figured out the Israeli flag is covering the window. The way things are stacked along that wall behind your desk is also messing with my depth perception.

One thing I will say though is to not get too caught up on the wattage of your system. It alone will not tell the whole story. Also, if you put together your own system, know that unlike overclocking, you can't always use all your power in an effective manner if you go way above and beyond the drivers' rated specs. It's good to have additional power on reserve, but it's more important to not underpower your equipment at your desired listening levels and cause clipping. If you're buying an active sub like most home subs are, you're trusting the manufacturer to have sorted all that out already. My 15" Rythmik only has a 370W amp, although there is a 600W option available. In my other car, my JL Audio XD700/5 amp's subwoofer channel only delivers 300W at 2Ω. But that will get the job done for the pair of Kicker CompRT 10" dual coil 4Ω subs I'm considering for a pair of very small custom sealed 0.75 cubic foot enclosures. They will replace the single Kicker loaded enclosure with a CompVT 8" I have now. I got that for cheap several years ago, but it is not getting the job done. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in front of my computer in my 12' 6" square room with a 100W TSC 10" ported sub with the gain slightly over halfway and it's well-matched with my speakers. I don't really need much to hit my upper limit for comfortable extended listening, which is roughly 75 dBA. So yeah, when I see that the Z-5500 advertises 505W RMS total and 188W on the sub for a system that relies on 3" satellites and cost $400 new back when it came out, my gut reaction is unsurprisingly, "FOH." Then I see that the total harmonic distortion listed for the Z-5500 is 10%. Well, I guess that's one way to sell those power numbers.

No problem, and that was me, not UltraMega.

I can't keep up with this thread. Room size and construction Are there other seating positions you want to consider optimizing other than right in front of your computer? Obviously, with the size of the room being what it is, if you want to optimize bass response in more areas than just in front of your computer, then perhaps another sub does make sense if you're using the whole room. You wouldn't need to buy two subs at once though. You can start with one and see how it performs. If you just use the area in front of your computer, then one good sub is all you'll need. As far as bass response, there's a few things to note. The floor being concrete may make your sub not feel as full even though the sound waves are bouncing off a harder surface, but you would benefit from the sub being placed closer to a corner rather than it basically being out in the open and far from any reflective surface. That's basically what's happening when you describe that secondary enclosure. You don't really want all the surfaces around you to be hard either. Some surfaces around the immediate listening area that can provide some sound damping like an area rug, acoustic panels, or corner bass traps would be beneficial to tame some of the extra wave reflection. From what I can perceive in the videos, keeping in mind that recorded video and YouTube compression doesn't provide a pure representation of the sound in your room, there seems to be a bit of a boomy or hollow character to it currently. For me, the main reason to get the subs off the tables is because anything on the tables including the table surfaces themselves are going to be potential sources of unwanted vibration if you put the subs on them. In a room with all hard surfaces, you might not necessarily want the sub literally on the floor, but on the ground sitting on an isolation pad like the Auralex SubDude would be an improvement. They're not miracle cures, but they'll further isolate the sub and prevent vibration from other nearby hard surfaces that are not secured. Kicker I like their subs as a budget-oriented solution that are a significant improvement over factory equipment in a car. I have a 10" Kicker CompC replacing a stock subwoofer on the rear package tray of one of my cars, so it's effectively in an infinite baffle type of enclosure. With heavy application of Stinger RoadKill Ultimate on the tray around the sub and being driven by bridged rear channels of a Kenwood Excelon amp, it sounds great. As part of an effort to replace all factory audio gear and keeping all of it in the factory locations, it's perfect. Once you start spending a bit more and think about building an enclosure though, I think there are better options than Kicker especially if you're looking at closer to $200 per sub. However, I will say that I do like their shallow-mount options, which the Kicker CompRT is. That shouldn't be much of a consideration for home audio though.

Since the subs keep coming into focus, please get them on the floor. They're a problem on the tables, and I don't think comparing their performance in their current locations is all that meaningful. I didn't directly mention it in my post although several others weren't hesitant to point out the Logitech speakers aren't it. Assembling your own system is going to yield far better results than strangely tuned Logitech speakers. Not only do you get to put together a custom-tailored system to meet your needs, you get to learn a lot more about audio equipment and how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together. You'll also get to experience bass below 33 Hz, because you don't know what you're missing with the Logitech subs. Audio equipment isn't quite like computer hardware. The difference is that upgrade paths are created through your hearing ability rather than newer and faster CPUs and GPUs and the hungry apps that demand their processing power. I would sell all the Logitech stuff as the two complete speaker sets they are and start over entirely. Given your desk and side table arrangement, I would also go with a receiver because you don't have desk space concerns like I do, which is why I have a small SMSL amp on my desk instead of something the size of the Onkyo receiver in my family room. As far as one sub versus two, two subs are beneficial when you have multiple desired seating positions in a room and a need to level out the bass response in those locations. However, the two subs should ideally be the same or at least be carefully tuned for a balanced response, not two un-tunable subs from a powered speaker set. How big is your room? My downfiring sealed 15" Rythmik is for filling an open floor plan that's effectively 40' x 16' x 9' comprising of a kitchen, breakfast area, and family room. It replaced my downfiring ported 10" that's quite honestly a bit too much for the 12' 6" square room it's in now. It's unlikely that two subs is something you need for volume (in either sense of the word).

Your video appears to be set to private. Okay, so going back through the last several posts, here are some loosely connected thoughts of mine across those posts. I never thought I would see the day when Winamp would need an introduction. I don’t know if that means Storm-Chaser is young or Storm-Chaser thinks pioneerisloud is young. I’m not sure if a small third sub is going to offer much. The Z-5300 sub is just 6.5”. You’ll have a legitimate-sized sub at 10” from the Z-5500 that in theory should do the heavy lifting, a Z625 sub for which I can’t find any published specs, and the Z-5300 sub will be a toy. Also, since they’re all going to be tuned differently, I don’t expect them to be very harmonious together. There’s going to be an artificial bump starting at the bottom end of the weakest sub’s frequency range. Aside from the tuning issues of three non-tunable subs, I don't think the small sub will be able to provide anything other than the ability to show off. A 15” sub is not only able to hit lower frequencies, but has more surface area than a 10”, 8”, and a 6.5” combined. Meet my servo-based 14 Hz end table. Forget about the pounding in your chest. The real pounding is between your ears. As far as a DAC, there’s no need to get both a sound card and a DAC. The DAC would create an entirely different connectivity path than what you have now and be recognized as a separate sound output device by your operating system. It completely bypasses any internal hardware. It goes: Motherboard > USB DAC > Amplifier > Passive speakers/active subwoofer The DAC and amplifier can be the same physical unit if you opt for an integrated solution. Like other active speakers, the connectivity path for the Z-5500 is simple: Onboard audio or sound card > Active speakers The Z-5500 just gives you more options as far as what cables you use to make the connection. As for onboard sound, a lot of onboard solutions are decent these days, but even those that have a dedicated audio path that measures well when the system is idle won’t stay that way under load. Noise and distortion levels will increase when the CPU/GPU load increases. To what degree and whether it’s noticeable to enough people is another matter, but a motherboard isn’t going to devote enough PCB space to audio hardware compared to a dedicated sound card. A sound card provides better separation from the EMI coming from the motherboard, but to reach a palatable price point, most sound cards aren’t going to feature top-notch hardware either. The other issue is connectivity. USB has and will outlive ISA, PCI, and PCI-E slots. However, sound cards are the most straightforward add-on solution for active speakers. Theoretically, external DACs would provide an even cleaner signal. They're far removed from the source of the EMI and aren't constrained by space restrictions imposed by a single motherboard slot when only video cards have de facto acceptance for being extra large. The next level is to separate the DAC and amp so they both have their own chassis and not be bound by sharing one smaller chassis. Since the Z-5500 can do its own sound processing and has an optical input, I would initially be inclined to run an optical cable from the onboard audio S/PDIF out and let the speakers handle the rest. However, that would mean less fine tuning control and Logitech's hardware is almost certainly going to color the sound a certain way for better or worse. You can run analog from a sound card instead, but that would introduce more noise than a digital connection. Ultimately, the conclusion is the same as what pioneerisloud said. If you’re happy with the sound, then that’s all that matters. But if you want, we can help fill in the technical background for the how and why.

I finally won a Newegg Shuffle and I couldn't be more disappointed with such a garbage deal. Part of my disappointment does have to do with their recent BS with Gamers Nexus, but card-wise, this is just such a bad value compared to my 3060 Ti and it takes up way more space in my case than I would like at 12.6" long. I could ignore all of that though if Newegg hadn't clearly jacked up the price of this card. It's not even worth trying to profit from this. Of course, they're proudly and blatantly profiting from it with this ridiculous markup: The exact same card at Best Buy and B&H: Newegg hasn't done this with every product in the shuffle since some are listed for the same price as Best Buy and B&H, but the gouging on this particular Gigabyte card was scummy as hell. They priced the damn thing higher than an Aorus 3070 Ti. Also, no, I didn't know about this before I entered the shuffle this morning. I didn't check the retail prices of every single card until now because I wrongly assumed that Newegg wasn't going to be price gouging. I selected all the non-bundled cards up to the 3070 Ti except the 3050. Keep your gouged Gigabyte card and suck an egg, Newegg. Hope the person who was next in the selection line behind me also sees this for the scam it is. Out of curiosity since I haven't done this in years, here are the scores for Newegg and B&H on ResellerRatings and Trustpilot: Newegg ResellerRatings: 1.82/5 Trustpilot: 1.4/5 B&H Photo Video ResellerRatings: 4.7/5 Trustpilot: 4.9/5 I remember when Newegg used to be 9+/10 on ResellerRatings back when they were on a 10-point scale. I'm only now getting caught up on what happened to Newegg. I wasn't aware of how far they've fallen since 2016 when they sold out to a Chinese software/media tech company. Since I'm also into photography, I was rolling with B&H long before they gained more traction in the computer electronics space, so I'm glad to see they still take care of their customers. That certainly hasn't held true for Adorama, another former online camera retail giant I used before their customer service slipped hard.

I just played a song in my library that I haven't listened to in a few years on the SA300 and I didn't even recognize the intro. I might be taking another listen to much of my music collection now because I was not expecting to hear so many details I've never heard before in so many songs. Some of these first plays with the SA300 have me truly shocked, and that generally doesn't happen with music I've heard many times before. I took another look at outdoor subs and it looks like a lot of them are passive since they're basically mobile audio units in a waterproof housing. So that does constitute a logical use case for the Dayton amp. I hadn't ever thought about how outdoor subs are built before because I always mentally grouped them as home/active and car/passive, although powered car audio subs are not uncommon. Also, I just found out that the Q5 Pro and AD18 have the same chips for amplification, which is the TAS5342 and not the TAS5508 I mentioned before, which is the PWM processor. The Q5 Pro's rated power output was halved and I presume its inputs are noisier than the AD18's. I think the AD18 being housed in a larger chassis and shipped with a bigger power supply gave it more room to reach its potential than what I now suspect was a thermally limited Q5 Pro chassis design. The chassis of the SA300 is at ambient temperature while the Q5 Pro was usually running at what felt like a good 10-20° F above.

If Bluetooth is a must, then the Q5 Pro would be out of the running, wouldn't it? It doesn't support Bluetooth. The Dayton DTA-2.1BT just baffles me. I don't know why the sub out is powered when most standalone home subs are active. I can't even name a passive sub for the home. At least the updated DTA-2.1BT2 model has an adjustable low pass filter and costs only $90 on Parts Express instead of the laughable $125 you see it for on Amazon. I don't think it's worth it once you cross the $100 threshold where you have many more logical options. I also didn't catch the edit on your previous post until now. The Q5 Pro is 45W x 2 at 4 Ω and 25W x 2 at 8 Ω. The SA300 is 80W x 2 at 4 Ω and 40W x 2 at 8 Ω. My Wharfedales are 6 Ω, 15-75W recommended. It's obviously better fed by the SA300.

I mean, if you're actually interested, I am planning to sell it! I usually don't keep old PC hardware around. I didn't know what to expect with this upgrade. I just figured if I could get it for a better price than normal, I would have half of my future PC audio upgrade taken care of with the SA300. The only reason I'm not getting the Schiit Modius now is the same reason I'm not using the DAC on the SA300. None of these newer USB DACs support Windows 7 and I'm in no mood to upgrade this machine to Windows 10 with a new build close enough on the horizon. All this started because after my 5 GHz bench earlier this week, I was getting audio stuttering every few minutes even after going back to 4.6 GHz. During that process, I switched out the All CPU Meter Windows 7 gadget for Rainmeter. Since the Rainmeter gagdets I'm using require HWiNFO64 for improved reporting, it turned out that HWiNFO64's sensor polling was causing the audio stuttering. I resolved that through changing some HWiNFO64 settings and upgrading Intel RST, but I also looked into a new amp after researching new audio equipment and noticing how badly the Q5 Pro tested by the numbers in that ASR review. Not that it's a bad piece of equipment overall since it was decent at lower volumes, but it didn't have enough clean power to make these Wharfedales shine. I haven't tried a larger power supply with the Q5 Pro, but here's a post from someone who did and reported better results: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/smsl-q5-pro-mods.293722/post-5148268

I'm replacing the Q5 Pro with the SMSL SA300. This is a precursor to getting a Schiit Modius DAC to go with my next PC build which will bypass all internal sound hardware, but this upgrade alone has made a significant improvement in sound quality for my current system. The Q5 Pro was never particularly impressive to me. "Unremarkable" is how I would describe its sound. I didn't really enjoy listening to music with that setup. While it wasn't a muddy mess like the Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers connected to onboard audio on my parents' computer, the Q5 Pro was just there. Also, you can see the LED segments on the Q5 Pro suffer from severe brightness degradation over time. The lower segment of the "1" and the middle horizontal segment of the '9" are brighter than the others because I usually kept the volume at 20. With my home theater setup, what stands out is the richness and the depth of the sound. On that, I can pick out instruments at will and follow them as separate layers on "Listen to Your Heart" by Roxette which I guess has become my de facto go-to test track over the years, followed by several others. On my desktop, the Q5 Pro never really enabled that kind of spaciousness, but the SA300 brought life to my Wharfedale Diamond 10.0 speakers that the Q5 Pro couldn't provide. It's obviously still not on the level of my home theater setup, but it's significantly better than it was and probably better than what I remember of my old Virtue TWO.2. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/smsl-q5-pro-dac-and-stereo-amplifier-review.10719/ As it turns out, according to the measurements, the Q5 Pro is objectively not a very clean nor accurate piece of hardware, but I was surprised that the SA300 subjectively sounds so much better. I imagine a good part of that has to be due to the Infineon MA12070 chip in the SA300 versus the older and less powerful Texas Instruments TAS5508 in the Q5 Pro. Aside from the sound quality, the SA300 is more attractive, takes up less space horizontally, has a much nicer display, Bluetooth 5.0 and aptX support, more EQ settings including a direct mode, 80% more power output, better technical specs in every category, and I got it for only $11 more than what I paid for the Q5 Pro in 2017.

NBR is where discussion on eGPU setups for laptops first originated. I don't remember if I had an account there, but I got a fair amount of valuable info there trying to get my Lenovo ThinkPad T500 working with an ExpressCard-based GPU dock and my old GTX 560. I never really got it fully working before I got my ThinkPad W520 which had the Quadro equivalent of the GTX 480M. Anyway, the eGPU discussion got so in-depth that it actually spawned a new forum on another site. There were definitely some good enthusiast DIY projects documented at NBR especially considering you would think laptops don't have that much going on for them in terms of modding and customization, so it's sad to see that go. I was doing more reading on Reddit prior to buying my most recent laptop and there are some S-tier idiots in some of those subreddits. The quality of discourse wasn't comparable to a place like NBR, but there wasn't as much info or discussion on NBR for the Eluktronics RP-15 that I eventually bought. I didn't realize stanning for garbage laptops could be a thing, but there was one guy who polluted every AMD laptop thread in a couple of subreddits proclaiming the thermally-terrible 2020 Dell G15 SE to be the best AMD Ryzen 4000 "gaming" laptop. No, it really wasn't, not by its benchmarks nor its specs, and its materials and build quality were below par even for Dell. This is the sad state of long-form discourse to succeed enthusiast forums.

I've been fortunate over the years to not have any damaged shipments from Newegg, but a number of things made them fall out of favor from a personal perspective. When they were one of the earlier outfits to collect sales tax nationwide, their price advantage went out the window. I don't remember how long it's been since they started instituting the restocking fee, but that also lowered them a few notches in my book. I live close enough to a couple of Micro Centers, and even though it's been 11 years since I built a new machine for myself, they get my business for CPUs and motherboards. They were excellent when it came to returns because I went through two Gigabyte Z68 boards that bootlooped in (and out of) my chassis before settling on the MSI I have. I remember the last time I ordered a new hard drive from Newegg and there was no package support other than some crumpled up kraft paper that wasn't substantial enough to do anything. Granted, hard drives aren't as high risk to shipping damage as they're perceived to be or used to be, but the packaging was really lazy and pathetic. Amazon generally at least tries to fill the empty space in a shipping box. I like the organization of the specs tab on Newegg's product page template, since we all know Amazon's product page can be a disaster with its lack of structure. Besides that though, Newegg is usually a third option at best when it comes to shopping for computer parts. I haven't bought anything from there since 2020 when I got an ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro PCIe SSD, and that was actually sold and shipped direct by ADATA themselves. Generally though, if I wanted to deal with third-party resellers, I would much rather do it on Amazon or eBay where their policies are consumer-friendly.

They're an American company. They knew what they were doing. About | Schiit Audio WWW.SCHIIT.COM

I've been shopping for a new audio solution lately to replace my SMSL Q5 Pro amp since it's not all that great. My research and feature shopping has led me to currently favoring a Schiit Modius DAC and an SMSL SA300 amp. Schiit wasn't even on my radar last week, but they seem to be adapting rapidly and making better audio equipment with each successive new product release. Schiit gear also doesn't look like * (quite the opposite actually), which is a big plus considering an ugly piece of kit is a nonstarter for me regardless of how well it performs.

Wow, you more or less have two of my old builds still functioning. After my 1.46 GHz Thunderbird, I got an Athlon XP-M 2400+ Barton running at 2.4 GHz. I miraculously used that all the way up to 2011.

At this point, I'm just benching whatever is still available to be benched. My file server, an 8th-gen Core i5 Intel NUC. Also, I finally benched my sig rig and it still has the 5.0 GHz magic in it. It was a golden chip that I bought used in 2016 when I wanted to move on from the i5-2500K. This i7-2600K was confirmed by the seller to run at 5.0 GHz, but I always ran it at 4.6 and never tested it at 5.0 (or 4.998, whatever...still more accurate than Ford calling the 302 a 5.0) until now. Air cooled and the voltage speaks for itself. It's high.

For me, it bridges the gap from 2020 until whenever I choose to build a new machine again, hopefully later this year or early next. I got it because it's lightweight which will be a welcome change for traveling, whenever that will be, after using a heavyweight Lenovo ThinkPad W520 on trips since 2013. It just so happens that the Eluktronics is the fastest machine in my house right now and it's good for a fairly inexpensive gaming laptop, but I mostly just park it on my kitchen table. I've still yet to play any games on it since buying it.

I'm not very familiar with Asus laptops, but I can say that in 2020 when I was laptop shopping, their TUF 15 Gaming A15 and Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 4000 laptops were space heaters with poor cooling and ventilation. The TUF 15 Gaming chassis was so badly designed that some people took to cutting their own exhaust vents in the bottom panel because some of the vents were blocked off from the factory. Asus made some excuse about them being blocked off to better distribute the heat, but users reported less CPU/GPU throttling and lower temperatures across all the thermal sensors with their DIY chassis mods. I don't think very highly of Asus when it comes to laptops these days. I'm currently a fan of Tongfang chassis resellers (Eluktronics in US, XMG.gg in EU). but I don't know if any of the resellers are native to Canada.

That's nice. Can we get comment from a company that actually has some credibility?

This sounds a bit like the whole i3-6100 situation all over again. Don't be surprised if they start pushing motherboard manufacturers to issue BIOS updates to lock out the method der8auer found. Could Intel pull their heads out of their asses for once and shut up about their disdain for the consumer and stop shooting themselves in the foot PR-wise? It's incredible that a company can be so consistently brain-dead when it comes to the optics of their communications.

Is 6.5" and 45 Hz what passes for a sub these days? Sheesh, lame. My HT tower speakers can do 46 Hz.

Posting an update to reclaim a narrowly-lost rank. I'm getting this 4800H over 6000 points.

Just testing an old laptop that will be put up for sale. This one is almost in no man's land with an i5-3337U, but the overall score would place it on the slow-mo board. I'm also not so sure that Avacado's QX6850 belongs on slow-mo when its aggregate score is higher than the two slowest CPUs on the main leaderboard. It's more viable than an i5-4460.

Nice! I've been around ThinkPads since the mid-2000s because a friend had a T42 and a T43p. I eventually got a ThinkPad myself in 2009. It was a T500 that I upgraded from a Core 2 Duo P8400 to a T9900. I think the fastest CPU that came with the T500 was the T9800, but the BIOS supported the entire Penryn family. I had that laptop until last year when I finally sold it after it had been collecting dust for a long time. It had the Radeon switchable graphics and I maxed it out with 8GB RAM and installed a 500GB hard drive. The whole package fetched over $400 because it was in near mint condition and I had all of the original packaging. I still have a ThinkPad W520 that I bought in 2012 and have also extensively upgraded and used daily until 2020 when I bought the Eluktronics Ryzen 7 laptop that I submitted for the leaderboard. The W520 is now an HTPC but I almost never turn on my TV and home theater in the family room anymore. Like the T500, I upgraded to the fastest CPU for the platform that I could get my hands on, which for the W520 was going from an i7-2720QM to an i7-2860QM. The T43 was a used laptop that I picked up for my parents back around 2010 or so. It hasn't been used since around 2013. They then got a 3rd-gen i5 laptop before now using a Dell SFF PC with an i5-6600. The T61p in the freezer looks about right to me! I remember it was notorious for running hot because of the Quadro FX 570M. I chose between the T61p used and the T500, but ended up with a better deal on a new T500. They had the same body, so one of the things I did later was replace the T500 keyboard with one from a T61. Lenovo used a perforated backplate on the T500 keyboard presumably to save weight, but the T61 keyboard had a solid backplate that didn't flex as much. When Lenovo switched to the chiclet keyboards for the T/Wx30 series, I was done with them. I miss the TrackPoint as well. I always thought it was far better than the touchpads from the 2000s and early-2010s because the nub was easier to use left-handed while I could use a wireless mouse right-handed depending on which hand was free when I was eating. I will say that multi-touch touchpads in modern laptops mostly took care of the issues I had with older touchpads though.