2.1 stereo bi wiring cutting out frequencies? - Page 2

Certain frequencies are actually absent? I'm not sure how that's possible while simultaneously "sounding amazing".

Are all 4 drivers making noise? If you've got a non-existent connection on a bi-wire, or a driver is non-functional; that would do it.
Is your receiver in some mode other than "stereo"? It might be trying to pipe to non-existent speakers.

plug headphones into your source see if it sounds right. If it does, plug them into our AVR and see if it sounds right.

Where did you hear it not sound this way before? What equipment is the same from then and what has changed?

If that Dragonfly didn't do it--which is a really good DAC--it's most likely the difference between the frequency response in your headphones and the speakers/how they are interacting with the room.

What headphones do you have? My Grado SR225i phones emphasize instrumentation quite differently from my Ultrasone HFI-780, and both are different my home audio speakers. Then my Energy RC-10 speakers on the same amp/source setup tend to emphasize the growl of a guitar a bit more than my Energy V5.1s, even though overall the latter are better.

Annoying right? Almost as annoying as when someone comes on asking for help and responds as a judgmental know-it-all to attempts at assistance.

I base that on having ripped my entire CD collection to FLACs which I use to listen to on my 2.1 living-room system...

...these have all been converted to MP3 to go on an iPod for my car. Most sound OK, some sound crappy in some parts. There will always be instances where compression algorithms don't work great.

And since the OP described a situation where most things sound OK but some parts of some songs don't, poor compression sounded like a good candidate.

Besides, unless you are loading an iPod or similar and need to conserve space, why wouldn't you go lossless - hard disk space is cheap.

I would have expected more widespread issues for a motherboard audio problem. Not to say that I wouldn't make sure it was digital out from the PC, going out to either a DAC/pre (like the Beresford Caiman i use in my computer setup) or to a receiver with an onboard DAC. I'd also make sure to be using an ASIO driver.
Edited by rick240 - 1/31/13 at 4:11pm

You sort of missed the point of what I said. Without ABX (not AB) testing, you cannot know for sure how much there is an audible difference. Too many people "think" they can easily hear one, but then have great difficulty discerning one in a proper testing situation. Most people that have done such ABX testing are not so quick to make statements such as "Garbage in - garbage out" as you did earlier.

That being said, I do like to use lossless, even for the minor difference. And I do think that a high end system would be more likely to show some difference than a lower one. So I'm not against the idea, but there is a lot of hype about the benefit of lossless over high bit rate compressed files.

Don't go looking to receivers for power. You should look at "features" for deciding on receivers.

That's awesome, dude. It's always great when it's a very low cost solution that is the problem

So I was heading down the right path in starting troubleshooting of the source chain? It's nice to have a site with helpful people.