Monday 18 March 2024

Video clips of interest ... 760

 Recorded by a What's Best Forum owner,



So much right here ... sense of the acoustic, space, tone ...

Sunday 25 February 2024

Video clips of interest ... 759

 Just saw this clip being "reviewed" elsewhere,

 


 

Umm, no. The 'smell' of the playback chain is too severe - all I can hear are all the obvious giveaways that this is a hifi system in operation; whether it's vinyl or streaming are, for me, irrelevant - because the signature of the rest of the playback rig is too much in my face ... and I no longer care what the source is, for the examples ...

Interesting Conversations Elsewhere ... 4

 

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/visit-to-mike-lavignes-house.1196092/

 

Yes, just another thread talking of what it's like with a rig where the owner has done everything that he's comfortable with to achieve best sound ... the interesting bit for me is the comment of how vinyl compared to digital, where commensurate efforts are made:

The result is more or less same.

Yes. Accurate replay provides an almost identical view onto the captured event, between different source media ... why? Because, the 'coloration' of the mechanism used to store the data becomes invisible; your ears "hear through" the 'distortions' of the playback chain - and you connect to the event that was captured; that is what is uppermost in the experience.


 

Wednesday 21 February 2024

The Purpose of Audio Reproduction - 21

 Am I in my own world, in the realm of audio reproduction? 😀 Not really ... there are plenty of people who want to be immersed in the 'reality' of the captured musical event - the difference between me and the others who explore this 'universe' is that I've gained a great deal of experience and understanding on how to make it happen; there are those who have lucked on it, as I did originally, and others by sheer persistence who have made it come to life - and who are happy to just enjoy the "fruits of their labour". I OTOH want to understand exactly the mechanisms and procedures needed to create this experience; and to communicate the type of thinking needed to approach the exercise.

This thought came about from noting this thread, https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/69441-choices, the poster is chasing "epic imaging and that 3d space i keep hearing about". The latter is of course what occurs when accurate in the right areas reproduction is achieved, completely automatically. Unfortunately, nearly all the influential people is the audio community believe strongly in alternative ideas such as "money maketh the magic", and that recordings are on the whole rather a miserable bunch that have to prodded and cajoled into generating a truly enjoyable experience. Which means the advice given on forums like that is of relatively little value - and the enthusiast is no closer to reaching his goal.

A great shame ... the vast archive of recordings is very rarely heard at anything like the standard of excellence which is possible; this impasse of not wanting to develop better understanding rears its ugly head, seemingly without end ...


Monday 19 February 2024

Step by step surgery - 31

Again, a continuation of a thread on an audio forum, which I can no longer add to ...

This is the next chapter of what occurred during my irregular visits to who I call N., a fellow audio enthusiast up the road ...

Got a call, he's been busy with life, so not much had changed - main thing in the interim was altering the mains feed to his 'stereogram' unit, a Ruark R7. Previously, various bits of electronics which provided noise filtering were in the path, and they definitely made a difference ... but, in an attempt to reorganise the items he managed to damage a major coil, from drilling. So, this gave him the excuse to do a major comparison of various strategies ... and ended up with nothing but an 'audiophile' power cord, as best option! You know the type of thing - very blingy, thick cable, flash connectors at either end - if looks meant everything, this would be a clear winner! 😊

Well, to his ears, it happened to work best - relatively low cost, an ebay thingy - well, when I arrived, the SQ was not there. But, there were some fairly obvious experiments to try - removing all other power cords in the room, adding some electrical damping by having a simple incandescent bulb also running, in parallel; and improving the mounting of the quite heavy mains connector at the cabinet end, so that vibrations against the case were damped. Finally, the front legs which were raised up by some cork material, were sat back on the floor again.

The combination of all this moved the sound to a pretty good place. And we stayed with this for the rest of the session. The biggest, clear remaining weakness was the CD player mechanism - just like for my DVD player, an ejecting and remounting cycle, many times would change the quality from a bit mediocre to highly pleasant; at its best there was nothing I could complain about.

Second round was the main rig, in the lounge. Running this was almost a throwaway, because zero had been done to tweak it, in the interim. And, it immediately made a good impression!! A CD I brought which could be tricky, was subjectively spot on; and this "good news" continued! Disk after disk went on, and the SQ continued to tick most boxes. Most telling, some albums of the band Rainbow, who I was barely aware of, a breakaway from Deep Purple, which N. had tried earlier on the radiogram, and which weren't coherently enough presented to allow me to connect to the tracks, now made the grade!

But, it couldn't last ... the "old enemy", build up of static reared its ugly head, and an album started to sound rather sorry for itself. Resetting helped, but now the ease with the listening had been lost - persevered for a bit, but then moved to vinyl, as last round. The 'analogue' qualities stood out; simple, single instrument moments were completely in the zone - some setup tweaking helped a bit more; it ended in a satisfying full listen to Carole King's Tapestry.

So, what lessons? Both setups were capable of giving top notch sound: the Ruark had a weak spot still in being too sensitive to the CD player's operation - solutions were either to go inside and work on isolating the power supplies, etc in that area, or, bring in a better CD transport, which he had and was used in the main rig ... something for another time. The main rig showed the ability to do excellently from cold; but, was suffering from that particularly annoying gremlin of "going off the rails" after a certain period of operation. This often is very frustrating to troubleshoot, because the cause can be something "so tiny and minor" - yet hard to pinpoint.

Overall, a good round. As nearly always, not all the ducks were in a perfect row; but they showed the potential in recordings which on most systems would be dismissed as not being, umm, worthy... 😁.

Saturday 17 February 2024

Interesting Conversations Elsewhere ... 3

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/wadax-server-psu-unit-has-now-arrived.36722/

 

Yes, this is about an ultra high end DAC unit being 'enhanced', by getting a 'better' power supply ... to those who are disturbed by, or find it ridiculous, the fact that huge amounts of money being spent on improving already absurdly expensive audio gear, the question is, why is this interesting? Well, even though purchasing such "grotesquely" pricey stuff  is completely off the agenda for me, what it points out  that those who wish to "buy a stairway to heaven" are seemingly following a never ending road - so, again, why?

Well, it's a combination of the facts that extracting subjectively top of the line SQ from digital is a highly precarious operation, AND that the better the playback chain gets, the more you can hear the subtleties that went completely missing before, AND that even the best audio designers don't have a really good grasp on what's going on, when it still misses hitting the mark. The last part is the killer - which is why the rave model from a few years ago now no longer cuts it; it's fallen off the perch of being SOTA

Friday 16 February 2024

Video clips of interest ... 758

Was is just that recording? ... No. A completely different genre, on the same rig, showing the same symptoms,


 

The right hand of the piano makes it fairly clear ... there's so much good in the SQ here, but it's dragged down by a "boringness" to it - I lose interest in following "the action", of the piece, as music.

Again, so typical of the digital 'drabness' that is so hard to eradicate ...