audio-luddite

[audio-luddite]

The more things change.

My system is at a point where any changes are so subtle and tiny that I sometimes doubt they are real. I have asked here the question of how much more can you extract from media. Lips parting is only an indicator and does not contribute to the art. The mechanical sounds of the levers and stuff in a piano are actually annoying.

All this detail and high performance is with equipment 30 and 40 years old. I am certain that things have not improved in any real sense since then. The State of the Art is not a goal or standard as really nobody knows what it is. New stuff is marketed as if it is revolutionary and their weaknesses glossed over.

When I started out in this hobby The best stuff was truly better than ordinary consumer stuff. But only a bit better. Music came out. Bigger speakers had better Bass. Bigger amplifiers got louder. This was the time when new parts like high power transistors became available. It is that which allowed the creation of the Phase linear 400 and the Dynaco ST400, and the Crown DC300. It was parts, not design skill.

The sound of those things was secondary to power, but they did sound pretty good all told.

The iconoclasts at Audio Research said tubes were not the past, but the future. The Magneplanar speakers were very different, but the principle behind them was high school physics. They became important because they were different and worked really well. Those two companies still make more refined versions of what they made 50 years ago. Where they better? I thought so.

From 50 years ago to 30 years ago there was progress. Designers got comfortable with the methods and had ideas. Some ideas were so clever they keep getting invented over and over. My contention is that progress is asymptotic. That is where a curve on a graph rises or falls steeply then flattens out as it approaches and value getting closer and closer, but never actually getting there.

I am sure that 30 years ago the equipment got really close to the line and has stayed close, but we will never quite get there. I mean really how much more can you extract and reproduce in an audio system? Business and obsession requires things to be bought and sold and tried out.

The person I bought Naka-San from is going down the vacuum tube rabbit hole. I know that hole. It is nice and warm. Yet his attempt is with a 70 year old amplifier. That he let go of the Nakamichi is my gain for his new experience. Is he getting better? If it makes him happy, yes.

That really is the whole game. Different or better? Different is better?

I think I know the difference in that condition. Naka-san is from a different philosophy of design. It uses a different idea. That is what made me curious. That it exposed more detail and removed a very slight haze was almost a surprise. The reason it did that is explainable, which for the scientific mindset is a comfort.

I think Naka-san is a 9.7 if the asymptote is 10.

Last night I played my Loreena Mckennitt album "The Mask and Mirror". Heavy vinyl LP limited run noted on the cover of 10k and my copy is around 4k. The music is new age / folk / world, or whatever box you want to put it in. I like the interesting and unusual instruments from medieval winds and drums to synthesizers. Clean recording and a haunting soprano voice.

The music has texture and richness. I do not care if it was recorded digitally or not. The credits are complex with contributions from several studios across the globe listed. It was first released 30 years ago. It sounded great. If digital helped keep the sound intact flitting from place to place thank you for that.

It is a clean recording and it suffered little if any compression.

The next album I played was K.D. Lang "Hymns of the 49th Parallel." It is a Nonesuch LP. It is a selection of songs written by Canadians. Ironically recorded in the US. We got good songwriters. I had to turn it down a couple clicks as it was louder and may have been compressed a bit. The vocal is the feature. It included "Hallelujah" my wife's favorite song, by her favorite singer. She has heard that live twice and it is transformative. That is what art is for.

I have a great stereo, and this is what it is for.

Phase Linear 8000 a TT with Audio Technica AT7V

Audio Research SP14 (russian tube in phono section)

Nakamichi PA-7 Amplifier

My Stealth speakers.

Loreena Mckennitt

KD Lang

[audio-luddite]

Media madness

I was bouncing around YouTube and saw a couple rants. One was Micheal Fremer about "Vinyl is always better blah blah blah." In that he mentioned an LP I had heard about. Last century there was a singer named Dusty Springfield who made what was called blue eyed jazz and blues. One song she was famous for was "The look of love" which was written for a rather dumb Hollywood movie. That song on one of her albums was a favorite of the founder of The Absolute Sound magazine, H. Pearson.

That is not the album Mr Fremer was talking about. A more recent Blonde singer named Shelby Lynne did an homage album to Dusty Springfield, "Just a little Lovin". Mr. Fremer went to some length about how Ms Lynne insisted on that album being pure analog from microphone to LP. She was an audiophile and wanted that sound.

I played the Apple Music version of the album on my way home from work. Its nice bluesy / country music and Ms Lynne has a very nice voice. I have listened to it before and frankly I preferred a different blonde blues singer I first heard from Post Modern Jukebox.

When I got home I fired up the system and played it again as a warm up.

When I bought Naka-san the guy selling it said, "Wait till you hear women singers on it." I have played a few since he went on line in the rack. Yes very nice.

There is something about the sound of a person in the same room as you. My wife was away visiting the Grandkids. I was putting something away while Ms Lynne was starting another song. She spoke a few words. I was startled, thinking my wife got back early and spoke to me from behind my back. No it was the album. Spooky and very natural.

Pure analog recording via a digital Stream of an audiophile grade production through my system and it sounded absolutely real and in the room. I do not recall any experience like that before with either the ARC or the Franken-Amp.

There is something about pure analog, and there is something about pure digital when either are done with care and a minimum of fiddling. I think it is the not fiddling part that makes the big difference. A digital example is any TELARC CD. Analog has numerous examples. I am lucky to own a few. Here is a link to one of Mr Fremer's rants about that. It is long so come back and look at it if you must. I spun ahead a lot when I did.

I think a reference to the Shelby Lynne LP is in there somewhere.

Mr Fremer is an enthusiastic promoter of pure analog, a respected golden ear, and has a million dollar system. He also has several tons of LPs. I do not doubt he can hear the digititus in a production even blind. He knows a lot of stuff. But he does go on a bit too much.

His taste in music is different than mine. But this hobby is about preferences aint it?

Bluesound Node Nano from Iphone

ARC SP 14 Preamp.

Nakamichi PA-7

[audio-luddite]

So I did some listening.

I got my bike ride done, had dinner while warming up the system on a stream of a couple of Italians singing opera stuff. It never sounds great without some thermal equilibrium in the boxes.

After eating I poured some nice red wine and put on some records. I played Paul Simon's "There goes Rhyming Simon" side one. My wife will occupy a comfy chair which is right beside one of the speakers normally. When Kodachrome fired up there is a clicking percussion thing in the far other side. She got up and walked over to the other speaker and said, "I never noticed that before". "What?" "That clicking sound." "Oh its always been there, but it is far cleaner now, sounds like wood." She nodded then went back to her chair.

For my part I was waiting for "Tenderness" and the Dixie Hummingbirds in the background. How that is portrayed is a key attribute of the system. One reason I like Tube amps is that group grows wide and tall and is an almost ghostly presence in the room. I know that is an effect, and not very real, but I like it.

So here with the Naka-san Amplifier the group sounded tighter and I could actually visualize them around a microphone. They sounded more real and natural than before, and normal size humans. That Baritone is impressive I tell you. I guess that is more correct, but I do like what the tube amp does there.

"Take me to the Mardi Gras" is a fun tune and the brass was clear and dynamic. I realized that this LP was over 50 years old, and I bought it new. By that I mean I have had it and played it for over 50 years. So much for wearing vinyl out.

Next up was side one of Tony Bennett's "Duets 2" this record was done very well and includes Amy Winehouse' last recorded song. There is a video of that you should check out. A who's who of singers, but my wife was waiting for K.D. Lang who is probably her favorite female singer, and a fellow native Albertan. Wonderful.

Next up was my new Famous Blue Raincoat. IMPEX 180 gram Bernie Grundman mastered. I was not blown away at it being so much better. It was better than the consumer version, but only a bit. I had just played the other disk with Naka-san a couple of days ago. The Bass was a bit more impactful, but only a bit. The LP was damn quiet too. But something that did impress me was on side two. One track had a backing choir. I could hear each voice clearly where before it was a bit muddled. So a better disk and Naka-san untangling all those sounds.

It was getting late and I was tired after the ride, and a couple (maybe 3) glasses of wine.

I realize that the thing about Tube Amps is they do have some magic, but like on a stage show it is an illusion. The Naka-san is more correct and accurate. What is real is what you get. The Franken-Amp is very good, but definitely not quite as good. It is a fair fight as they are both the same rated power. The differences are tiny, but that is what happens when you get to the pointy end of the curve.

Kudos to Mr Pass. I even forgive him for adding distortion to his later designs.

Linear tracking Turntable Phase Linear 8000a with AT7V cartridge.

Audio Research SP14 Preamplifier.

Nakamichi PA-7 amplifier

Stealth Speakers.

[audio-luddite]

Got home from work, turn on the system....

And fell asleep.

It takes a certain energy to engage the brain thing. Listening to music is not without effort. Certainly not heavy effort. I fell asleep, but it was a bit of a lucid dream where I thought of the next album to play....

I was warming the system up on a CD of Paul Simon's Graceland album. ( Also have an LP) It is a significant document on many levels. It occurred during Apartheid in South Africa and there was a bit of blow back from PS visiting and doing work in SA. But exposing the music of the Black artists of SA and nearby countries did bring the world's attention to the place. Look what happened soon after that. Also the tunes are cool.

Yes it was a vanity project and PS wrote all or most of all the songs. There was some lyrics collaboration with Ladysmith Black Mambazo still the impact was significant. I was reading the notes in the CD box just as I nodded off.

When I woke up to quiet as the CD was over I just had no energy to do anything. So I shut it all down.

I planned on what I would do in the next session. One of my go to albums is Paul Simon's "there goes rhyming simon". It has some remarkable tracks. I especially like "Tenderness" with the background singers, the Dixie hummingbirds. How they are spread about the soundfield is a measure of the quality of the system. It is also a significant document. I will try tonight after my bike ride.

I ordered a gourmet copy of Famous Blue Raincoat. I have two consumer copies, with one damaged on side 2. This is an Impex pressing, but not the crazy super expensive one, just the normal expensive one. IMPEX brags about having a special relationship with Jennifer Warnes with custody of her master tapes. We will see, I have yet to play it as it only just came.

FBR is an amazing work. First Leonard Cohen's songs are brilliant. Not just a singer songwriter, but a published poet. A world aware artist with an amazing life. I think his stuff will endure when people forget who Bob Dylan was. And Ms Warnes is an excellent singer. The arrangements and production are perfect. Oh and the recording is SOTA and originally digital. My old copy is extraordinary. What awaits in this new one?

I hope I have enough energy to listen tonight.

[audio-luddite]

What am I hearing, or not.

Testing people and listening people love to fight. It is a shame as it is all about enjoying music. (Or steam engines if that is your thing)

A common complaint about testing is what is the test actually measuring? The ASR elves basically pump high quality sine waves into a device, and run the output into what is called an FFT. That is a Fast Fourier Transform. It is a very useful mathematical process that generates a frequency domain spectrum. Anything that is not a pure sine wave appears as noise. The less noise the better. That noise is whatever else happens to the signal be it distortion, or just random noise. The ratio between the sine waves and the noise is the score.

It is a cheat, as all it measures is what is not a sine wave. Music is not as simple as a few sine waves. Math also tells us that any signal be it music or steam trains may be constructed out of sufficient sets of sine waves. Skipping a bit that is where the Nyquist frequency and digital recording comes from.

Ironically I thought of a new way to measure the imperfection of electronics. ( At least I think it is new) It is doable with fairly common equipment and a bit of computer programing.

You have two identical high resolution Analog to Digital converters feeding into a high speed computer. Place one at the input of an amplifier under test. Put the second at the output which is also connected to a real speaker load. Play music and record what happens.

You now have two digital files. The difference between them will be mostly in amplitude. One file has bigger numbers. That will be a few of the significant bits. With 24 bit resolution you can afford to throw some away. Measure the RMS values of each selection. Take the ratio of that between the two files and divide the larger by that, so the two files have the same gross amplitude. That is called normalizing. You now have two files of the same music at the same level.

There are now two possible conditions. If the amplifier is inverting one file is the negative of the other. If the amplifier is not inverting they should be basically the same. There may be a very tiny time difference, but an algorithm can be made to line them up in proper time. You take the two files and add them together but also subtract them. This is just simple math. The files are lists of numbers.

If the amp is inverting adding them will give you the difference. If it is not inverting, subtracting will give the difference. Whichever result is smaller is the file you want. What is that file? That file is everything that is not the original signal. It is the difference between what goes in and what comes out.

That file will be the voice of the amplifier, its distortion, and everything that is not perfect. The cool part is you could listen to it. It may sound very strange. You can also measure the difference from the original signal as a db ratio or percent or whatever you like. It will capture the response with the speaker if that alters anything too. I suspect many well loved amplifiers would not do well.

The best thing is it will be perfectly fair, and objective. Testing people cannot object (though they will try) as its a test. Listening people will have to back down too as it is testing exactly what they are hearing. The two sides will be trapped.

[audio-luddite]

Epistemology

I am faced with the problem of reality. I just read a message from the tube Guru who thinks the differences I heard with Naka-san were substantially due to the lack of global feedback. He avoids it in his designs. It will mess up the phase relationship from input to output. I have read dozens of arguments about how silly it is to avoid feedback. It is an assumed essential in audio engineering to those that subscribe to that faith. Feedback solves so many problems!

Many of those arguments were on the Audio Science Review website and forums. Recently they praised some new Class D amps as they had a global feedback from the far side of the output filter back to the analog input end. This was to compensate for the weird things speaker impedance would do to the overall frequency response at the output filter. From the far side of an inductor and capacitor filter back to the input. Solving a serious problem the worst possible way? So you have to choose between bad frequency response or kiss correct phase relationships goodbye in Class D amplifiers. Another reason to doubt those little boxes. I am smirking.

To those testing people the truth is in the graphs. Reality is a picture.

To me reality is what I hear.

Ironically the ASR's favorite A/B amp is one that uses what is claimed as Feed Forward. The AHB2 Benchmark. The description of that system is eerily similar to the old QUAD 403 and to the Naka-san. Patents, smatents.

So if the Guru is correct, and I believe he is, I have learned something new, or at least pushed it higher in the decision matrix. Phase coherence sounds different. Very different. My speakers are basically phase coherent and the placement in the room avoids secondary reflections so that coherence gets to the listener.

The clarity I hear may be those damn sound waves arriving in the correct space and time. The room sound on Trinity Sessions was enveloping much more than I remembered. Before I heard it was there. This last time I was in the room. Very spooky.

When I got my tax refund and then an unexpected bonus from my company I was in gotta buy something mode. I spotted several possible targets, all solid state. The basic choice was other more recent examples of basically what the Franken-Amp is, and this one outlier, the Nakamichi. It was interesting to me as it was based on a different design philosophy. The others were just different implementations of the main line approach. Some had big meters!

It was more expensive, but not much more. Actually the same price I paid for the ARC Classic 60. Nelson Pass is an iconoclast and as the song says he "goes his own way". I kinda like that bit. Today he has gone pretty far off the reservation, but you have to respect him.

I am glad I made the choice I did.

[audio-luddite]

Naka-san

After my last post I played a bunch of albums. No surprise there. I gotta justify the $$$ I just spent.

(In Japan the suffix of "san" added to a name is a sign of respect)

I find this very interesting. The Franken amp is supposed to have less than 0.1% distortion at full power. Run it at less than that and there is supposed to be even less distortion. Anything other than a bigger version of the signal is distortion. It can be noise, or fuzz or anything other than the original signal.

Naka-san has better numbers. Apparently less than 0.05% at full tilt, with my new toy testing at under 0.04% by the tech that worked on it. And both claim that the distortion is less at lower power. It has a stupid bandwidth too. The circuit does not have an inductor at the output which means it can go supersonic. Most amps need one to prevent disaster.

I honestly doubt distortion numbers in general. I use them as a guide. I mean bad means bad after all. A sine wave is not music is it?

Relative to the ARC Cl60 the Franken-Amp is cleaner and has more detail. Relative to Naka-san the F-A is not quite as good. Am I hearing one part in a thousand errors. Is Naka-san twice as good?

This is the point when the listening people and the testing people come to blows.

I am a listening person with testing person sympathies. I am enjoying the new toy. I know what I am hearing is different, and it feels better. When I switched from the F-A to the ARC in the fall it was different, but not really better. It was like going from Merlot to Cabernet Sauvignon. Both are good. Both experiences are enjoyable. It will be interesting this coming fall.

I played Famous Blue raincoat. It is a plain commercial copy, but damn it sounds good. I think it was clearer and closer to the perfect sound. When my wife commented that it sounded clearer than before I knew it was not a placebo effect. I may have to buy a gourmet copy, damn.

I played Diana Krall live in Paris. Lovely recording. I did not look for the lips parting thing, but there was the gentle intake of breath here and there. The mechanical sound of the piano workings was almost annoying, but it is on the record.

As far as space and depth and all that golden ear stuff it does a good job of communicating what is on the album. I dislike when it is created by the machine. When Steve the vendor was still there I played postcard blues from cowboy junkies trinity LP. He said that he felt he was in the room. A huge part of the magic of that album is the room sound.

I have a weird album from the soundtrack for the Kubrick Movie Barry Lyndon. Kubrick was famous for his soundtrack selections. This one runs from Irish folk to full symphonic with a few stops along the way with fife and drum bands recorded outside.

One track is from a Mozart Opera that has a fiendish crescendo that hits remarkably hard. The best track is the Sarabande Duel which is only double Basses and tympani drums. It takes power it does.

I have a lot more to run through. I need to play that Saint Saens Organ symphony I have with Zubin Mehta. It is amazing and yes it got that low organ note you cannot hear.

Everything is new.

Phase Linear 8000a TT linear tracking.

AT7V cartridge with microline stylus

ARC Sp14 preamplifier

Nakamichi PA-7 Stasis Amplifier.

[audio-luddite]

Its different.

I have a Nakamichi PA-7 in the Rack. The person I bought it from is a new friend, Steve. He is going to tubes with the entry level drug of a Dynaco ST70. I know that one. He "has a guy" who tweaked it and fixed it and it is love. He is leaving the Solid State world. My win for sure. His rabbit hole.

So we plugged the Nakamichi-san in and fired it up. It works. And it took no time to notice it was different. How to describe it escapes me right now. As everything warmed up it got better. Even Steve noticed its voice and started to look with desire to my ARC preamp. That's a nice one he winks. They come up from time to time said I.

We played some usual suspects for about an hour before he had to go to beat the traffic. Long trip home. A shame, we could have gone on for hours and said so.

One disk we played was Cowboy Junkies Trinity. Steve knew that one and did not care for it. Until he heard it here. If it don't sound good upgrade your system.

The background story is I am attached to the old Franken-amp, but he is a mongrel. I always had doubts. It can and does resolve tiny details that the ARC Cl60 misses. How would a true purebred do? Would it be, dare I say, better? The Nak is a rough contemporary of the ARC SP14. Its about 20 years younger than the Dynaco 400 the FA is made from.

Was there progress in the ineffable search in 20 years?

It is a licensed Japanese version of the Nelson Pass Stasis design. If the Japanese like something it must be special. It has more output transistors per channel than the Franken-amp has total. It also has no fan, and that does solve that problem.

But it sounds different. My wife calls it clearer. Aside from that instruments have more something. The human voice sounds more human, more real. It is subtle that is sure. It is not a big difference, but yes different. Yes more clear. Complex sounds have more complexity.

It is famous for being able to push current. So of course I had to put the TELARC 1812 CD on. I did not turn it up that far, but the cannons were visceral. The Nak did not flinch.

Fun fact the notes on the CD say that the amplifiers used for the TELARC recording monitors were Nelson Pass' Threshold 4000s. The uncle to this beast in my rack. Cool!

I have a lot of stuff to go through.

For those people who say any Solid State amplifier working within its rated power will sound the same. You are FN wrong. I now have four transistor amps and they ALL sound different. They have voices. The least good is the Carver which alleges to have the voice of a high end amp through fiddles and magic. Next is the Harman Kardon Citation 12, the nice one. Next is the Franken Amp cuz it has more power. The best one is Nakamichi-san.

So is it the magic Pass topology? Is it the zero global feedback (local FB yes)? Is it the care of the build and the huge custom capacitors. Naka-san is quasi dual mono so no crosstalk.

I don't know or for that matter care.

It cannot possibly get better than this can it?

Phase linear 8000 linear turntable.

AT 7V cartridge.

ARC SP14 preamp.

Nakamichi PA-7 (Naka-san)

[audio-luddite]

Digital versus Digital blah blah blah.

I think I have said many times that the media potential only matters when it is used properly. High Rez lossless can be great. Vinyl is comparatively poor, but more than good enough when done carefully.

But is my preference for vinyl because it is generally done better, and digital files can be just lazy and slipshod?

I saw a thing on ASR that linked to comparisons of one album with many issues on different media. A picture is worth a lot of word salad. If you have ever ripped a CD you have seen this kind of thing before.

This is a digital file taken from a MOFI 45rpm LP set of a Dire Straits song.

Here is a remastered CD of the same song.

The broader plot is from compression of the signal. The loudest parts are made less loud peaks are clipped and the quieter parts louder. Then the whole thing is turned up. That is dynamic range being thrown away. Why brag about better dynamic range when the producers do this?

Recall that the original recording is digital. But rendering it to a high quality LP with care and respect is just a better representation of the music.

I have that MOFI LP set. Double 45 skateboard trick. It sounds better than the butchered versions available in the other media reviewed in the source.

You have to shop carefully.

[audio-luddite]

Liars and damn liars.

It is a true shame that so much of the world is based on people agreeing on lies being actually true. The source of so many of the world's ills.

I am going to link to an Absolute Sound "article" about a couple of products that are full on absolute frauds. But first some background.

Decades ago during the Jurassic era of audiophile magazines The Absolute Sound published reviews of products that did nothing, were expensive and were sworn to make things better. This did not happen that often, but happen it did. They would apply funny little adhesive dots on speakers or amplifier chassis which would "open up the sound stage" or use a cable that unmasked a tiny detail on the recording. Rather than real effects this was a placebo effect at best.

I will not say they did not actually think these things worked. That really is the escape clause. They believed they worked. So many things. One was a green marker you would run around the edge of a CD to block extraneous laser light reflections. Funny hat racks to drape wires over. Any number of different and exotic materials to make wires out of or materials to insulate them. If they thought they may have worked they did!

Now to the guts of this nonsense. Wires are made from metal. Metal has a property called conductance. The better it conducts the better life is. The very best conductor is silver. Next is copper at 94% as good, then gold at 71% as good. These are for pure metals. Obviously the best wires should be silver. It is a shame it is a precious metal and rather expensive.

Silver has a downside in that it tarnishes or specifically oxidizes in the air or even worse in humid dirty air. Copper does too, but not quite as bad. The oxide is ugly and that does not conduct so well.

Gold is great in that it is very happy staying shiny and clean and does not oxidize under the same conditions. You could treat both silver and copper by plating it with a layer of gold which is sometimes done. But Gold is a less good conductor.

As an aside there are a couple of exotic phono cartridges that use gold wires instead of copper because they are "better." Though not better at conducting electricity which is what the job really should be. Looks good in the brochure.

So on to the bullshit. This article claims scientists and engineers made these remarkable products. Real Scientists and engineers, I doubt it. They are all to treat RFI and EMI noise, which is what the power supply of any given device is supposed to do. I am a real engineer. I have seen claims like this before, they would never pan out if the tests were blind.

Some of the effects they claim would be real at radio or microwave frequencies. Audio nope. Power all around the world is 50 or 60 Hertz. I wonder what they were smoking or drinking when they tested these things.

Oh well a fool and their money is easy to separate. Moon Crystals anyone?

[audio-luddite]

Up here on the high end.

Back when I was young, the term for good audio was high fidelity, Hi Fi for short. That is a good term, it captures the idea of accurate reproduction of a recording. That was usually music, but for a while there was a niche of sound effects like steam trains. Chug, chug, Chug. That is where Mobile Fidelity,now known as MOFI, got its start.

Then publishers of magazines (real printed on paper things) needed to distinguish themselves as one magazine was named "High Fidelity" and copyrights must be respected. So the term "High End" was created to capture "better stuff" and avoid the name of that other magazine. Several mags shared the term, as I do not recall any grabbing the name as their title.

Included in this idea was the character of the Audiophile. They were a type of person, and the target audience of these publications. Back in this era there was no online anything, so you had to actually print and distribute real physical things with printed words and pictures. The audiophile was a sophisticated, wise and charming person, and a man of course (sorry the 60s & 70s were a dark age). Old ads for stereos often had lovely young women sitting demurely on the shag carpet flipping through LPs while the audiophile mixed martinis from the drinks cabinet. Some ads went as far as soft core porn.

This was when men had to compete with slick haired rockers in hot rods. What to do if you did not know, what headers were, how to fix a carburetor, or tune a spark advance curve with a file. Get a stereo!

The term audiophile has a specific meaning, almost technical, of a person who loves sound. It does not denote anything to do with wealth, or foolish spending. That comes later.

I consider myself to be an audiophile without the foolish spending bit (or wealth). I am also a geek (an old one to be sure). I enjoy technical challenges and want to know why and how something works. And I love to listen for tiny details in music recordings. I love the visceral impact of heavy Bass. (Literally visceral!) I love the almost hallucinogenic dreamscape that can be created by the best recordings.

I consider my system to be high end. By that I mean it can find and extract information off of plastic disks with wiggly grooves, or digital dots and play them across my room. I get all of it off the source and most of it into the room. I have superior equipment, and I know how to use it.

It has limits of course, and nothing is perfect.

I also know how to avoid nonsense and fraudulent products. If they cannot explain how it works it is likely a con job. If they advertise real physical things that effect microwaves as working in speaker wires I know they are lying.

It is true that many people cannot distinguish between different and better. They may try something like a new phono pickup and hear something they had not heard before. Oooh that must be better! The idea of a slightly different frequency response is too technical.

So they chase the rabbit all over the field always getting different, but mistaking it for better. Good for business as it sells gear.

I hope that my skepticism and technical background protect me from too many chases. But I am curious. I also have preferences.

A couple years ago I bought a relatively expensive tube amplifier of high pedigree for two reasons. I do like the voice of tubes when done with restraint. I also recognized good value and was willing to risk the age versus condition problem. Most tube amplifiers do not sound good to me. They are soft and fuzzy, and often have poor frequency response. There are very few people who can design tube amps properly. The Tube Guru says nobody can design front ends with pentodes anymore. If they are out there they are copies of units designed in the 1950s.

When a tube amp sounds right it is a joy. It is music. They have limits, subtle limits, but real ones. I hear when it runs out of power. Only transistor amps can push amps hard enough. I hear when it masks a sound.

(Aside here. Amps can refer to Amperes which is a measure of electrical current and is physically the number of electrons being pushed through a wire. It is also a convenient term to use for Amplifiers that have the job of making tiny electrical signals not tiny.)

I am buying another amplifier which has a pedigree. My main unit is a mongrel where I took a basically good design and fiddled it with a few trick ideas and parts. Yet he is a mongrel. Only my ear tells me it is high end. It sounds different than my tube amp and reveals sounds the tuber hides. In amplifiers it really can't be a frequency response problem, so I think it is very subtle masking from distortion products.

This new beast is different and comes from a different design philosophy of a different audio demigod. I expect tiny differences. I also hope it will confirm what my ear tells me of the quality of my mongrel. In dogs mongrels (or mixed breeds) are often better and more healthy that purebreds as there has been less messing about with the basic animal constitution, or at least the mixture alleviates some of the mistakes by dilution of the breeder messing about.

I electronics it is pushing an idea a bit too far, or giving it more credit than is due for it's differences.

Further I believe that newer ideas are pushed only because they are new. I have serious doubts about Class D amps as almost all come from a limited number of subcontractors with an even more limited number of integrated circuit factories. Different boxes with the same guts. I have looked at buying some of these guts, they are available to the public, and I cannot believe that such tiny wires can drive the Watts they claim to. Old School for this old guy.

High end man its really cool.

[audio-luddite]

ASR again (Another FEA wait)

I cannot help but want to see what other people think about audio. I hope that I keep an open mind about his stuff. That is my protest against people who hold to what I think are doubtful ideas. The testing people at ASR have a range of opinions. I disagree with many of them.

I was trolling their forums and found this:

Now this is one person's opinion. Kudos for putting it our there. The follow on and comments are fun. In his list he references other people and authorities including The Absolute Sound magazine. I saw several recordings missing, that TAS loved. Were they missed because you cannot stream them?

TAS went on for years about Jazz at the Pawnshop, not on this list. No mention of any Sheffield recordings, oh those were vinyl sorry.

I have a lot of these on LP. I guess that is my failing.

In the classical section I have more than a few of these. I have the TELARC 1812 on CD and a Mercury LP of Saint Saens 3rd Symphony. That one is simply not as good as another LP I have with Zubin Mehta of the same work. I have an excellent LP of Firebird on DECCA. So opinions and preferences and maybe limited experience?

I was intrigued with the mention of Getz/Gilberto in the Jazz section. No mention of Impex. The original recording was notoriously problematic.

Oh it looks like my computer is close to finished with the 1.2 million equations.

later.

[audio-luddite]

Waiting on that other computer again.

An FEA takes some time even at 3 gigahertz. So killing some time here.

So I have hooked the Nakamichi amp. Just have to reel it in. The owner says it has been gone over by a good technician and inspected and adjusted etc. We agreed on it being delivered if I put down a deposit. It will take a couple weeks, as he is doing the haul on one of his regular trips into my town.

So that is done. I did a lot of digging, which is dangerous on the internoise. So much crap. Apparently Mr Pass prefers the original Pa7 to the revised model. Apparently that dealer Skyfi Audio likes these a lot. Generally an excellent reputation. I am drawn to the Idea of Japanese construction and that they respected the Stasis concept enough to license it. I have some nice Woodblock Japanese prints on the wall. I like the vibe.

I just did a lap of the Audio Science Review forums. Even supposedly objective people can yell. They get so excited about things. Why vinyl when streaming is perfect? Why anything but Class D, though that Class A/B THX unit is nice. One comment left me chuckling. "There is no difference in sound between any solid state amplifiers!" Talk about rigid opinions. First as the ASR prefers only Solid state (mostly class D) amps, if there is no difference in how they sound, why rank them? Second is I can easily distinguish between my three SS amps (soon to be 4). I am not special, just experienced.

I am hoping I can hear a difference in this heavy black beast. I expect subtle things. Hey that is what this is about. The main reason is curiosity. The Stasis topology is about 20 years newer than the Franken Amp's. If the differences are significant, then there was progress over that time. My gut says there wont be. But I kinda hope there was.

[audio-luddite]

Cold on Cold Play.

I did the second half of the album last night, and a second turn of the first half this morning. I am done. Formula music and actually boring to me. So that will save some money.

Money I will spend elsewhere. I want to go ahead with the Japanese Amp. I have replied twice to the message I got, but no response. I offered a down payment. It may be my emails have gone to his junk file. He responded quickly to the email through the CAM site. If nothing by today I will send another message via CAM and see what happens.

I am contemplating what high end audio really is? Is it just expensive stuff or good stuff? My suspicion is that high end audio has not had a true improvement or movement to perfection in decades. My motivation is to find out if there is really a difference between a recognized unicorn amp made with quality and my admittedly amateurish modified Franken Amp. (Admittedly a 40 odd year old unicorn.) Good thing about unicorns is they hold value.

I got another email from my main Vacuum Tube dealer for a discount on a tube first made in 1938. Now being made in the USA in a new factory. I am sure the original tubes sold for the equivalent price of 30 today's money bucks back in the day, so now $1200 US is just too damn much. But the marketing material claimed that perfection was reached 80 odd years ago. That is for the Single Ended Triode Cult. When obsolete methods are claimed as the best, it aint about absolute quality. Enough cult members to make the business work.

There are a couple of manufacturers who stubbornly keep making the stuff they have for decades. I think of McIntosh for one. Who needs new ideas? The rest need to create excitement and interest by claiming this or that is a revolution or breakthrough. Buy our new stuff!

Another example is Bryston in Canada offering a 20 year warranty on their products. That is confidence. Send them a 40 year old lump and they will fix it up factory fresh, cuz it is still good.

There have been new ideas. I mean the Franken-Amp is a early second generation concept of transistor design. Nelson Pass came around and tried other ideas. Though I think this "Stasis" concept was not new to the designer of the QUAD 405. Hey it's OK to copy good ideas right?

Some semiconductors are far better than the old stuff. I mean Electric cars are not due to some battery breakthrough. They are due to high current semiconductors for motor control that have come on stream in the last 20 years. Those Tesla motors are controlled by effectively many kilowatt sub-woofer amplifiers. All about the Bass.

One reason that new high end stuff is so expensive is that there are many people who can afford it, and simply do not know any better. And maybe that lets good old stuff slip through the cracks.

So I troll for treasure.

Lets see if I land this fish.

[audio-luddite]

Plastic.

My wife needed some hand cream or something, so we went to a store that had many things including the brand she was looking for.

I wandered to the back where they actually have TVs and Audio equipment and LPs. I flipped through the stacks, for a few minutes. I saw this album from Cold Play called "Moon Music". It is geek notable as it was injection molded in Germany from PET plastic rather than PVC.

Lots of initials. One is Poly-Vinyl-Chloride shortened to Vinyl which is what pipes and LPs are usually made from. The other is Polyethylene-Terephthalate. That is used in clear plastic drink bottles and is the most recycled plastic out there.

I work in plastics and composite materials so I know that PET is actually a stronger material than PVC. That is why fizzy drink containers are made from it.

The idea of injection molding LPs is far more energy efficient and using recycled plastic is good for us all. I heard an audio comparison between two albums of the same music, one vinyl the other PET. I thought the PET one sounded better.

I do not know anything about Cold Play other than the lead singer was married to some big name actress for a while. I probably have heard a song or two. I played the lead song from this album on Apple music and it was OKish. I read a review of the album, and it was not enthusiastic. Hey that is what streaming is for. If I like it I can buy it.

I listened to the first half on the way to work. Some stuff sounds good, but frankly the lyrics are not great. I mean when do these people actually become adults? He is approaching 50 and sings about finding himself? Oh he was married to Gwyneth Paltrow, she was a babe as was her mother. She has a lot of that new age crystal happiness stuff in her belief system. Oh well, wealthy celebrities are not like real people. Does that explain my not being impressed with the songs? Everyone cannot be Leonard Cohen.

So I will listen to the second half going home. Then I may fire it up on the home system. I am intrigued by the PET tech, but I have to like the music. Hopefully other artists will sign on.

[audio-luddite]

Driving to work

I had the radio on. It was one of those easy listening stations which defines easy listening as Fleetwood Mac and such. Then they announced a song from Maroon 5. What came on was a song using a baroque melody. At first it was just familiar then I realized it was not just that it was a full on rather well done note for note quote of something very familiar. They even played the Bass line on a bass guitar. Lots of words, but the frame was something I knew.

Was it Bach? No not Bach, but certainly baroque. Pachelbel's Canon! Decades ago I bought a Musical Heritage Society LP of that after it had caused quite a stir on some TV program in New York. Lovely tune and catchy. Maroon 5 wrote their song in memory of a friend who passes away a couple of years earlier.

As it ended I wondered how many pop songs use classical music for inspiration. There are many lawsuits over pop songs that use or quote melodies either accidentally or deliberately. Going far enough back you can avoid all that. Paul Simon's song "American Tune" was a quote of an old German Hymn which was originally a Bach tune.

I know that many singer songwriters are closet classical music fans. I saw a Sting interview where he praised Bach as his teacher.

In totally unrelated news I have not bought another amplifier. I found two potential treasures though. Hopefully the tension between them will cancel out my urge to buy.

One is a Nakamichi PA-7 a 200 Watt per side, 60 pound beast that uses a license of the Nelson Pass Stasis topology. It bears a striking resemblance to the old Quad current dumping idea. The Japanese were impressed enough to buy it, and use it. You get a crazy California engineer with Japanese build quality. Good combination.

The other is pure California Muscle an SAE 2401 super amp. 250 Watts per side. Brute force and designed to drive "real speakers" as opposed to pure resistive test loads. It claims similar high current capacity to the Nak. Dates back to 1980.

Either have more power transistors per channel than the Franken Amp has in total. The SAE is from the original owner and has boxes and manuals, is less expensive and is farther away. It is a buy it sight unseen situation.

The Nakamichi is closer, and the owner may deliver it such that I could hear it run before I put down cash. $500 bucks more.

There are restoration kits on Ebay for the SAE. The Nak is rarer.

Both could be fun, but I suspect they would not be actually better than the FA.

[audio-luddite]

Disinformation and Datinformation.

It is no wonder AI bots are so stupid. They comb the internoise for stuff and assume it is all true. I am often on sites or watching a You Tube thing and just have a WTF moment. What they said is just plain wrong!

There is a forum on the Audio Science Review (ASR) that discusses old stuff. I linked to it ages ago in a previous rant. I checked it out again and it is still chaos and confusion. And this is with testing people. They are supposed to be the rational ones.

I was flipping through it to see it there was any information in all the discussion / arguments / insults / and even snake oil. I mean I am still thinking of getting a piece of hardware. Are their brands and models I have not considered?

The forum premise was what of the "old stuff" was as good as new SOTA stuff. (SOTA being state of the art for you newbies) It is my opinion that there is no SOTA as nobody knows what that really means. Does is mean tiny distortion figures on a test? Does it mean a good reputation with the experts? And actually much of the problem with the forum, was just that. What are you looking for? How do you describe it?

It is fact that some people prefer the sound of some types of distortion. Nelson Pass has made his reputation on just that. Give them low order even harmonics and it will be fine. The entire charm of most Tube amplifiers is exactly that. I like tubes remember, but not all tube amplifiers. Some are crap.

Is there a threshold of low distortion of any type below which even experienced listeners cannot discern improvement? I think that is a definite yes, but I do not know what those numbers are. A huge aspect of testing is the "listening people" say you are not testing what we are hearing. You need some other test. I think that is silly.

One reason I am still considering a new amplifier is I wonder if there was any real progress in the 1980s to 90s. Designers and manufactures claimed all sorts of breakthroughs in that era. At least the marketing departments said so.

My Franken-Amp is a 1970s vintage with a few tweaks. My ARC tube amp is 1989 vintage, stock, and is very nice. It does not do the tube amp warmth and false space thing. It does nice textures and a certain modest richness. The Franken-Amp however lets me hear tiny stupid details that are of no importance aside from telling me that the tuber is hiding something.

The Franken-Amp is basically a Dynaco ST400 with extra output transistors (16 rather than 8) a split power supply right and left, bigger capacitors with film helpers in the power supply and a few film capacitors in the signal path. In late 1973 Stereophile magazine praised the stock ST400 as "the best solid state amplifier we know of for any price" (Stereophile magazine winter 73/74 page 11).

Since then Mosfets came out and many features touted that my old beast simply does not have.

I would really like to see if I could hear an improvement with a good newer amplifier. I was genuinely excited about that ARC Class D amp. It ticked several boxes and was almost within reach.

Oh one thing that ASR forum clearly does is slag those tiny Class D amps as either poor sounding, lying about their true power output, or very unreliable. On the ASR rankings there are may class D amps on the top of the list. Maybe measurements are not everything.

Tonight I should fire the beast up and let sound wash over me. That is what it is for.

Solid State 400 Watt Franken-Amp

ARC SP14 preamp.

AT7V for vinyl

Yamaha CD player.

Stealth two way speakers.