A Search for Truth and Tonality

fas42

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I won't be posting pics of my setup: it looks a mess, and just about everything you can do wrong aesthetically and soundwise, for many people, will be painfully apparent to all. As an example, speakers are just plonked onto surfaces at different heights, pointing lopsidedly into the room so that they fit reasonably around the flat screen which is to one side of the living room

However, my intention is not to win beauty awards, but to get somewhere in my understanding of what counts and what doesn't in this business of extracting good sound from recordings. The title of this thread matches a thread I kicked off some time ago, which has now died a natural death, but my desire to achieve worthwhile results which match the aspirations outlined in the original post has not waned.

Many people reading this will be well aware of the somewhat peculiar angle I appear to be coming from, saying strange things like "all systems can sound excellent" and "even bad recordings can sound excellent", and probably wonder how much of a loony I am. Well, hopefully not too much of one, though in getting older you can feel yourself sort of teetering in that direction at times!

Anyway, for some reason I have been suddenly inspired to set down a bit of a record of my adventures past and current, good and bad, on this audio journey of mine here. This will be out the way of the normal to and fro of conversation on the forum, so won't disturb the good people who have better things to read about. A fair bit of what I will relate I have already alluded to in my posts here and there on the forum up to this point, so prepare to be bored at times. With luck, some of this will be of interest and possibly even benefit to others.

I'll do this Charles Dickens-like, in installments when I'm in the mood or the thoughts occur to me. (Gee, that sounds like I really have tickets on myself! Oh, well ...)

Cheers,
Frank
 
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fas42

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Chapter 1:

Why not do a first installment straight away, hmmm? I'll bounce around in time, depending on what I'm talking about, this is not going to be a chronological exercise ...

First up, what I've got now. As described in my profile, this is about as far away from what, for example, JackD201 or Steve Williams have got, as you can get and still be talking about the same topic! It's a Philips DVD Receiver MRD2000, an all-in-one home theatre system dating from 2002, that's what it says on the service manual. It comes from my step son, who bought it for his first entertainment setup for digital TV many years ago. Actually, I lie, it was a freebie (yeah, right!), thrown in with the TV and HD tuner as a package deal. Did well for some years, then the player started taking a dislike to the movie disks, and a rear speaker developed an intermittent connection.

Rather than throw it in the bin, we agreed that it might be worthwhile for me to have a play with, since we had nothing in the way in the surround sound electronics to play DVD's on, ourselves. Fixed the rear speaker, the laser was a bit dirty, cleaning it made things somewhat better, but still touchy to this day on DVD's. Tried a CD, not too bad, quite listenable to, standard electrical retailer equipment level sound. Interestingly, fairly recently I had a look around at what's on offer new at the moment in these type of systems, and the quality in many areas has dropped dramatically. In the typical Sony, Yamaha, etc, setups the dynamics are truly appalling, and the so-called subwoofers are a complete joke! At least on the Philips the subwoofer is true to its name, relatively solidly built with inbuilt amp, decent linear power supply, small but reasonably substantial driver. Gainclone enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that a classic National LM3886 was used to do the work here!

Anyway, the idea started to develop of using this fellow to start exploring things in the audio area to a further level. To backtrack in time just a touch for the moment, I have been steadily going down market over the years: started with pretty good hifi store gear, tried DIY, and now this. With my earlier efforts I had made progress but still didn't have all the answers: I now had something I could well and truly rip to shreds if necessary to find out what made things tick, in terms of getting good sound.

Why on earth start tweaking something so low end? Because, if you can make this baby hum then you're well on the way of getting just about anything to perform well!
 
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cjfrbw

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My setup, a kind of scattered ongoing experiment, looks a mess, too. I couldn't see how somebody could change things around to try different things unless things were a bit messy with cables etc.
A consolation is that the listening rooms I have seen of the rooms and rigs of a lot of audio critics tend to look even worse.
 

garylkoh

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My setup, a kind of scattered ongoing experiment, looks a mess, too. I couldn't see how somebody could change things around to try different things unless things were a bit messy with cables etc.
A consolation is that the listening rooms I have seen of the rooms and rigs of a lot of audio critics tend to look even worse.

Actually, getting messy with cables is far better than being too neat. If you had all your wires and interconnects, etc. neatly tied in parallel and everything, you will increase the possibility of coupling, noise, crosstalk, etc.
 

microstrip

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Actually, getting messy with cables is far better than being too neat. If you had all your wires and interconnects, etc. neatly tied in parallel and everything, you will increase the possibility of coupling, noise, crosstalk, etc.

There is a danger with messy cables - making closed loops with interconnects around power cables! You should have two separate messy zones - one for power cables, another for interconnects :)
 

fas42

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Chapter 2:

Time for another round, I think ...

Philips-DVD_Receiver_MRD200.jpg

Here's a pretty image of what the DVD setup could look like if not all messed up, taken from the service manual. It says copyright, but I don't think they'll sue me over this! Yes, the finish is a silvery grey, probably makes the sound a bit brighter :D! But the speakers are just what you might guess them to be, tiny plastic enclosures barely big enough to wrap around the drivers -- did I hear someone whisper, Bose ... . At least the main chassis is an all metal effort, has a bit of weight to it, courtesy of a decent laminated core transformer

And at the moment the only bits from the above that are part of the action are the chassis and two of the dinky speakers! Yes, not even the subwoofer is running -- Basspig would suffer apoplexy! The reason for leaving that to one side for now I will explain further anon.

Staying with the cute baby speakers for a moment, there is a directly connected 3" full range driver which is quite surprisingly substantial, bit of a Tangband sort of thing, so no nasty crossovers here to cause problems. I would guess a usable frequency range somewhere about 150Hz to 14kHz or so. To give the top end a bit of a hand, and to look more impressive, a throwaway piezo (super?)tweeter in parallel; leaving it in doesn't hurt and it certainly helps, when putting an 18kHz signal through after thorough conditioning you can hear it working well. The main problem with the piezo is that you have to drive it hard for some time before it adds something significant, and positive to the output, and it cools down quickly, I have to keep a decent signal up to it virtually all the time to keep it on song.

Some of the key components in the main chassis are close to reasonable, perhaps the best is that the DAC is by Cirrus Logic, a CS4360 chip, a distant, poor cousin of the unit in the French EERA player mentioned recently; also a Mitsubishi electronic volume control, as part of a very basic sound processor chip - this is good because I am now very sensitive to the audible problems of conventional potentiometers; and chip stereo power amplifier by STMicroelectronics, TDA7269A. If you glance at the very sparse and minimal spec sheet for these, they would make pretty miserable Gainclone amps by most people's estimation: two 14 watt amps in one chip, at 10% distortion into 8 ohms, even the manufacturer doesn't believe in them much! Looking closer at the characteristics table shows better behaviour: decent distortion up to about 10 watts, and at high frequencies -- good. Very similar performance to a well rated tube amp, in fact! The big plus is that the little full range speaker drivers are quite sensitive. Finally, all the key audio components apart from the DAC are close together on one board, this will help quite a bit.

Frank
 

fas42

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Chapter 3 (sort of ...):

Well, this interesting. I never got further in this exercise of telling the story of the system, and just in the last day or so it looked like it was all over for the old girl. I used all the best techniques employed by experienced technicians to try and resuscitate a mute audio setup, like whacking it repeatedly with a mighty big mallet, cursing it to the point of spittle threatening to short circuit vital parts, dropping it onto the concrete floor, etc, but to no avail!!

So I was at the point of admitting defeat, that it was going to be too troublesome and fiddly to try and sort it out, there were too many parts probably getting to the end of the road. And that it was time to move on ...

And because the message had finally sunk in, the old girl then relented and played ball! Yes, it's back on air, so far at least, but I realise that I am really going to have to now seriously look at how to tackle the whole situation, the HT is just too fragile to play with for much longer. Decisions, decisions ... !!

Frank
 

Phelonious Ponk

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Chapter 3 (sort of ...):

Well, this interesting. I never got further in this exercise of telling the story of the system, and just in the last day or so it looked like it was all over for the old girl. I used all the best techniques employed by experienced technicians to try and resuscitate a mute audio setup, like whacking it repeatedly with a mighty big mallet, cursing it to the point of spittle threatening to short circuit vital parts, dropping it onto the concrete floor, etc, but to no avail!!

So I was at the point of admitting defeat, that it was going to be too troublesome and fiddly to try and sort it out, there were too many parts probably getting to the end of the road. And that it was time to move on ...

And because the message had finally sunk in, the old girl then relented and played ball! Yes, it's back on air, so far at least, but I realise that I am really going to have to now seriously look at how to tackle the whole situation, the HT is just too fragile to play with for much longer. Decisions, decisions ... !!

Frank

Pity. I was so looking forward to the many chapters (with pictures) that were going to chronlicle your building of a 2500 watt amp.

Tim
 

fas42

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Chapter 4:

Another round was promised not that long ago, but then the machine started playing up, and the amplifier project was taken on. The latter is still happening, don't worry Tim, but the HT is now behaving itself consistently, apart from the DVD reader going nuts sometimes trying to initialise, or do a first read, of an inserted disk. Anyway, the point of this is that a milepost was reached just recently with the little fella, and it will be worthwhile spelling out a bit of what I'm talking about now.

As mentioned many times, this is a pretty basic machine but quite well engineered, it is Philips after all. For a start, there is a proper service manual, two in fact: one for the main box and one for the subwoofer. And these documents are extremely well put together, with all the information that counts. If I got this level of documentation for a $100K piece of gear I would be very pleased ...

However, it is now fairly fragile, so I am not game to leave it powered up overnight, especially as many of the bits fiddled with are very rough and ready, can be easily dislodged and the soldering in areas is pretty dodgy: things connected, disconnected, connected, over and over again. The end result is that it has to start afresh every day, be powered up from cold, and when you're looking for getting the last level of performance out of audio gear, particularly budget solid state, this is not a smart idea.

So, as I have found over the many years of playing with audio gear, and most other more critical users have to deal with, there is a cycle of behaviour and performance from the gear depending on how long it's been running, and how hard I've been driving it. Which at times is very frustrating. But also good, because it keeps me on my toes: I can't get sloppy in my expectations of its performance, because every morning it don't sound too brilliant, depending what I put on first thing ...

But the biggest headache, and the one I have had with all the equipment over all the years I've been more fussy about getting good results, is that there has always been a cycle of, from cold, passable sound that's not offensive and actually very pleasant on the right material, which steadily improves over minutes and hours, depending how aggressive I am with the volume control , to become more detailed, dynamic, intense, musical -- all the usual things people go on about. But, and the really big but, is that after a certain point it all becomes too much, the musical intensity starts to degenerate, there's a lot of what people would call SS detail, but it is harsh; in real language, audible distortion is increasing and it's irritating, offensive. Now this is the sort of stuff that normal measurement techniques never pick up, who's going to hang around for several hours until these issues arise and use the right source material and precision instrument to then trap what's going on?

This is the battle I've been having for years and years, trying to get this under control, and the milestone I referred to above was finally getting the HT to the point where the quality of playback didn't start to drop towards the end of the day. It stabilises, and in certain areas probably keeps slightly improving, depending on how hard I drive the system.

This sort of misbehaviour has a lot to do with second order effects, not simple R,L,C stuff or things that you can stick in a Spice model, but behaviours of materials in themselves and interacting with each other. And it's very hard to track down and ameliorate their impact on the sound. I still don't understand in the way a good scientist or engineer would like to know what the underlying mechanismsexactly are, or why they affect the sound precisely in the way they do: the main thing is that they do interfere with the sound, change it, and that's distortion, pure and simple.

I acknowledge that the drivers in the speakers are fairly low end, especially the piezo supertweeter, and the biggest problem with that is the opposite of what most people would think: they have to be thrashed, driven really hard to loosen up, "lubricate", the suspensions to get the best out of them. And once warmed up you have to keep driving them, if you drop the volume they quite quickly lose the good edge that they're capable of. This is where higher quality speakers put you in front, I can certainly hear the benefits in this regard with my friend's Naim Ariva's ...

'Nuff for now ...

Frank
 

NorthStar

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TIP: Get rid of all unused interconnects. Just keep the ones you are using at the strict maximum.

Keep your system extremely simple. ...Even listen to Mono music! :)

...And solo Piano.
 

fas42

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TIP: Get rid of all unused interconnects. Just keep the ones you are using at the strict maximum.

Keep your system extremely simple. ...Even listen to Mono music! :)

...And solo Piano.
Thanks for the advice, Bob, but don't worry, I've been through all that sort of stuff already: it's been simplified to its fingertips by my efforts so far :)

As regards the music, that's where I have problems! I like very complex, interwoven music, that's why I echoed your thoughts on Jarre, etc. Textures of 10, 20, 30 sounds built on top of each other, in massive soundstages, a good test of a system's capabilities ...

By the way, the spacebar on my laptop has just started playing up, going all "clacky" and unpleasant on me; anybody got handy hints on a simple fix??

Frank
 

NorthStar

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Yeah, just do a Restart Frank.


* You can also unplug all Digital cables; only leave the Analog ones plugged in! ;)

** Jean-Michel Jarre; he is quite extraordinary Live! ...With all those laser lights on those huge skyscrapers, and his invisible and magic touch!
He is reaching new dimensions with his complex music from a new universal frontier!
 
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fas42

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Chapter 5:

A very short gap to the next round, because of 2 thoughts that have just come up:

First, some people are taken aback that a 20W per side system can deliver the sound levels and quality I speak of. Well, there are any number of users out there using very low powered but high quality amplifiers coupled to good speakers of quite reasonable sensitivity, and they are not complaining about any shortcomings: there are watts and there are watts ...

As mentioned earlier, my system is stacked in reasonably haphazard fashion, around the flat screen TV. Now this TV has class D amplifiers hooked to the tiny, tiny inbuilt speakers with zero bass and precious little treble, and are rated at 10W according to the user's manual. Now, I have no reason to doubt those power ratings, amp chips with those number of watts are cheap as dirt these days, so I can assume there's 10W of power going into the miniscule speaker drivers. So how sensitive are these drivers? Lets assume they are of the lowest order possible, and miserably inefficient, at the bottom of the barrel in this regard. The worst I've ever seen for drivers of any sort is of the order of 80dB, so lets's assume for a moment they are that bad.

So the HT has 20W, that's 3dB more headroom than the TV, and the speaker difference would account for 10dB difference in volume as a worst case. A grand total of 13dB that the HT should have over the TV.

But there's a little problem: I know how loud the TV can go before obviously compressing, it hits the bump stops and don't go any louder, and I know how loud the HT can go. And I know what 13dB of volume difference is, having used a CD player with marked settings on its inbuilt volume control, and 13dB is reasonable but nothing to get excited about if no distortion enters the picture. The point is that subjectively the HT appears to go of the order of 30dB louder than the TV, without any trouble whatsoever. When the system is playing at a decent volume, I can wind the TV up in volume to way in the red region, it's distorting like crazy but I can't tell that the TV sound is going: its "sound stage" is completely obliterated by the audio system. And that's the point I'm emphasising now: there is only a doubling of audio power between the TV and audio, but there is an apparent massive disparity between the level of sound delivered to the ears ...

And the second thing was a reminder, as if I really need such, of the need to get fussier and fussier as one narrows down to getting the best sound. I wasn't happy at the end of yesterday, it was sounding stale, tired, lacking sparkle. A good fun piece to put on is Canned Heat's "Let's Work Together" at max volume, as classic a piece of down and dirty, swampy boogie rock as you can get: it just oozes through the whole house. But it wasn't working at the end of yesterday: cymbals weren't there as they should be. This turned out to be a subtle problem with the earthing arrangement, that I had altered recently and had not taken enough care to tidy up every aspect of the new connection. Nothing had to be altered electrically, merely the combination of insulating materials and how they were incorporated into the setup at the point of connection. This is typical of the degree of fastidiousness that's required if you want really good sound ...

Frank
 

NorthStar

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I enjoy full emotional impact at low listening level. :)

Not all systems are created equal in that regard. And that has to do first with the reproductive transducers (the drivers in the loudspeakers).
And then their internal electrical crossover (none is best, IMHO).
 

fas42

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What I aim for, Bob, is that the system sounds the same irrespective of the volume. At the moment have on a collection of Mozart tidbits at very low level, as you say, about that of a bedside clock radio. Still sounds spot on, but should be able to go to max volume from there without any change in tonal character or perceptible hardening or compression ...

Frank
 

NorthStar

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Music in true form...

What I aim for, Bob, is that the system sounds the same irrespective of the volume. At the moment have on a collection of Mozart tidbits at very low level, as you say, about that of a bedside clock radio. Still sounds spot on, but should be able to go to max volume from there without any change in tonal character or perceptible hardening or compression ...

Frank

I agree Frank.
If your system can do that then it's all very good in the life of a musician and also in the life of an audiophile.

- The messenger through the intensity of his message to the listener, regardless of the volume setting/raising.
No diminishing return whatsoever, on the way up or down. :)

No upsetting, no obsession, no interlude, just plain naturalism.
 

Phelonious Ponk

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A good fun piece to put on is Canned Heat's "Let's Work Together" at max volume, as classic a piece of down and dirty, swampy boogie rock as you can get: it just oozes through the whole house. But it wasn't working at the end of yesterday: cymbals weren't there as they should be. This turned out to be a subtle problem with the earthing arrangement, that I had altered recently and had not taken enough care to tidy up every aspect of the new connection.

In that vein, I prefer the Stone's "Shake Your Hips," but the other day, when listening to it in the car, the drumsticks clicking on the rim of the snare drum were ever-so-slightly ahead of the beat. I was confused until I got frustrated, switched over to National Public Radio and realized that the earthquake in Washington DC had throw a mojohand into my flux capacitor, driving huge waves of bad audio joojoo back through time and into the precision of Charlie Watts' playing. This morning, thankfully, all is back on song again.

Tim
 

fas42

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Not really another chapter in the saga: just another update. Some good news and some bad news ...

Bad first. The HT definitely is feeling its age, and the problem I had before has resurfaced, which means zero sound out. I'm not 100% sure but there is an all in one chip that does volume, tone, etc and I fear it has internal problems. Every time I power down now it's a major struggle to get it back to life, nothing, nothing, then suddenly, pop, it's fully alive again. Very irksome to get to the chip, the usual tapping exercise doesn't help. This is a pain because I'll have to transfer all my latest thinking to another lot of gear to get decent sound back ...

The good news is the friend I've been helping out with is really on a roll now, just had a long chat on the phone. He's really got the message on how to progress his sytem and he's very excited by how much he's moving it forward. Particularly on using the worst recordings to give feedback on status of tweaks. His comment was that well before the major tweaking about 70% of his music collection sounded good, and since then he's moved up to 80%, and now is at 90% of recordings making the grade.

The good thing is that he's happy to get under the hood, he's using a separate phono stage and this has practically been completely rebuilt to improve his LP sound. Lot of work isolating motor inteference and vibration in the TT, and is currently doing major experimenting with damping of vibration in the the cartridge/ tonearm interface. His comment was that doing the most subtle thing in this area made a huge difference in sound, which echos what's being discussed in the Durand thread: the control of extraneous vibration is absolutely crucial for good vinyl sound.

He's also doing major work on his Quad CD player, improving the wiring configurations within, and worrying about quality of connections and interference effects, with significant improvements still occurring. At the moment the two media are probably neck and neck in overall quality; the main thing is that he's making major strides forward.

Frank
 

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