As of right now to run the perreaux amp since I'm all set with my tone controls, I just need to get a "tube preamp without" with just volume control or bypass switch if I may. The bass and treble control will overdrive and distort my output to the power amp.
In the Victorian era ladies sensitive noses were offended by the putrid stench of the city. So they carried around an extremely smelly handkerchief soaked in rosewater or violets or some other overpowering fragrance. Whenever they passed by a pile of excrement in the street they simply sniffed the "good smell." Reminds me a lot of an equalizer. Useful for when the room and the equipment sounds real bad. Remove the bad odor from your room and you won't need one. The only setup I use with an EQ in it is the downstairs discotheque. Where the main monitors cross over to the sub cabinets needed blending. And the horn tweeters were tuned a bit shouty for public address clarity and needed to be pulled down a couple of dB. The big problem with most EQ is it degrades the signal. EQ uses phase differences to cut or boost the band AND using a band affects all the nearby frequencies you DIDN'T want to "correct" so it screws up your linearity big time. It is always a bit of a one step forward two steps back proposition in my experience. Use only in an emergency is my take on the subject. As for using EQ with the RIAA curve on records---no. That curve is NOT an EQ in the sense that it IMPROVES your sound. It is merely the inverse of the curve used to press your record. The only way it improves your sound is by being CLOSER to the curve used by the recording company. If you "decode" an RIAA curve properly you get the original signal without affecting phase. Which is why the better phono preamps brag about their RIAA curve-ability. And some go to extraordinary lengths to NOT affect the response while decoding the RIAA tilt. The only EQ I know of that attempted to avoid destructive artifacts was the Mark Levinson LNP-2 Cello preamplifier and EQ section (1973) units that were expensive and of limited production way back when. Collectible and pricey today!
Assuming all recordings are perfect, right ? Try a black metal demo or a punk CD recorded on a shoestring budget, and tell me they don't scream for the help of an eq. You prolly only buy mainstream music recorded by reknowned engineers, with cost-is-no-object approaches.
I don't "repair" phonograph recordings. I don't "do" re-mastering. It is way beyond the scope of a graphic equalizer to remaster a recording that sounds that bad. If it is that bad you really need to stop listening to garbage on garbage equipment and go buy some decent well recorded stuff and some better gear. I don't purchase records to listen to your graphic equalizer. I purchase them to listen to what the producer and engineer were able to come up with. By the way there ARE a few stinky bad records out there but not too many are released without consideration to how the customer will hear them on playback. Even a little child running a recording session can make a decent sound if he or she tries real hard. You really think there are all that many stupid horrible awful engineers out there using garbage equipment and getting horrible sounds out of their rigs? Wow. Who do you hang out with?
Alright talks about EQ that turned into a warzone with veins poppin' out of the neck. I'm gonna grab me a popcorn and soda pop. I wont miss this for the day...
Accuphase still makes an equalizer / room analyzer: Accuphase Laboratory, Inc. DG-68 I think it retails for around US$13,000 ... so, no I don't use that. But I do use this: Accuphase G-18 Stereo Graphic Equalizer Manual | HiFi Engine Acquired it about a year ago, plugged it in, love it. Spent at least a year looking for one. Here in Japan, when they do show up for sale in nice shape on an auction site, they spark bidding wars every time and end up at prices somewhere between US$2,000 and $3,000. Despite being a piece of gear first sold in 1986. Based on my experience with it, I think there's good reason for that.
Congrats looks like a sweet promising unit! I cant wait for the pandemic to end. Me and the wife are going on a trip and were spending 10 days of our trip in Japan. I wanna get me a nice Nakamichi ZX model deck, some Japanese blank tapes and a battery operated pocket winder. Where would be the place to go?
Wow...Naks are perhaps harder to find here than in the US. I almost never see them in used shops. They do show up sometimes on auction sites like Yahoo: ヤフオク! -nakamichi zxの中古品・新品・未使用品一覧 You can see the nice ZX9 here only has one bid, but it's a bid for JPY220,000 which I think is about US$2,000. The listing says it was serviced at a Nakamichi service center last year, but also that it's 40 years old so caveat emptor. But people hold on to these things. I've only seen one Nak cassette deck here and that was 15+ years ago and I bought it. And new or NOS blank cassettes (aside from run-of-the-mill type I's and sometimes type II's) are also pricey auction items: There is an under-the-radar rtr craze going on here, too, I think, considering what people are willing to pay for used 40+ year old blank Maxell reels: KD25 ③マクセル/maxell オープンリールテープ 7... - ヤフオク! That's a big lot -- 100 reels -- and 61 people have already bid it up to almost US$1,500 and I'm sure it'll go lots higher. Right now...around $12 ~ $15 per reel, but sheesh I think those are '70s tapes. Someone wants this stuff bad. Truth be told, though, Maxell tapes even that old can perform very nicely. I know. And cassettes? Slim pickens, overpriced: ヤフオク! -maxell cassetteの中古品・新品・未使用品一覧 Honestly, you might have better luck searching the used market back stateside than hope to come across what you want on vacation: Used Nakamichi cassette for Sale | HifiShark.com But, if you end up in Tokyo to look around, I'd hit any of the Audio Union stores, probably a good bet is the one in Ochanomizu: https://www.audiounion.jp/shop/ochanomizu.html or in Shinjuku: https://www.audiounion.jp/shop/shinjuku.html ... or the Hi-Fi Do shop in Akihabara: https://www.hifido.co.jp/ Honestly, it has been 2+ years since I've been in to the city, more since I've been in an audio shop, so I'm short on good advice. Sorry...
Agreed; it's a band-aid. You can't remaster squat with it. But you can make it less bad (or better, depending on which kind of guy you are; the half empty or half-full glass type) I don't think my equipment qualifies as ¨garbage¨(but thanks for your opinion) , and while a lot of my recordings are garbage, I'd take them over any other perfectly-recorded stuff I don't care for on any given moment, because I love that music that much. It is what it is, and it's WAY more enjoyable through my 3 signal processors, one of which is...an equalizer. I indeed do. As I pointed out early, you listen to mainstream music, produced with huge budgets, and avoid stuff that you (might) like, only because it's poorly recorded. So much for ¨music first¨, but hey, it's your prerrogative. I rock out to all kinds of music, whether it's either so fantastically-recorded I can just play it flat through my floorstanders, or aided by my arsenal of band-aid devices.
Thanks for the info. All notes taken. Last 2015 I went there at Ikebe Akihabara and I took home a very nice Yamaha SG-2000 cherry red. 4 different ones from the 80's which I shipped to US but I hand carry the Yamaha. There were 2 more follow-up rare guitar that I bought in the same place. That guitar is one of my priced possession today. It shouldn't be a problem getting here but there are just so many dishonest sellers here that doesn't even know what they're selling. All they just wanna do it flip. Anyways you got it. I'm targeting a zx9-, zx7, or 682zx, I need it mostly for recording. I wanna get the Japanese released cassette tapes. I heard that the maxell UDXL are closely biased to the nakamichi type II stock settings.
Tales Of Hoffman: Michael Fremer Speaks with Steve Hoffman: Part 1 "It's hard to explain, sometimes in order for something to sound good you have to degrade it a little bit." ~ Steve Hoffman, 2004
I think I may owe everyone an apology here. I use a graphic EQ (you can see it under the preamp in the photo), but truth be told my system certainly isn't what anyone here would rank high end or audiophile or whatever. The carts maybe. I don't happen to think it's in the 'garbage' range, but I guess it might be. The preamp, power amp and speakers have all been recently re-capped, so there's that, for what it's worth. New tweeters and surrounds in the speakers. I should probably just junk it all. Why did I do it? Long Covid maybe. Messed up my head.
Beautiful Babieeh... Bro.. besides the "real electronic" shopping when I get there, I wanna bring my wife to the mecca foods of Tokyo.
Love Japanese food myself. Even ramen -- at a good, 'real' ramen shop that is. Some 'karai miso niniku' would sure hit the spot. Been a long time since I was at a good yakitori place but man I could eat myself a heart attack at those places. And don't get me started on maguro sashimi.
I want to do fresh captures in 24/96kHz of those Warner Brother Music Show radio shows on vinyl. Remember the Talking Heads 1979 Tour one from Cleveland and the Robert Palmer Band in Boston recordings. They just seem to be EQ'd or mastered with a slight dullness imo. I can bump up the frequency dynamics just a tad and I think get a more enjoyable playback. In other words, just a small smiley smile would do the trick. And I do not want to do it in the digital domain, but rather during the analog stage into the digital recorder.
Good luck. I can understand your wanting to do that, but I had to give up trying to re-EQ recordings long, long ago. I always found later I wanted to undo or re-do what I'd done, so now I just stick to adjusting playback if need be and that is very seldom. However, on a couple of recordings I found I needed to dial down the bass some. My speakers pull out the last ounce of bass on most any recording, so if the recording is bass heavy it can be too much and some adjusting can improve the sound. Ditto recordings where the treble has been goosed to the stratosphere -- some dial down is sometimes in order. In my opinion. As an end-user, a listener and non-purist who realizes I put something extra in the signal path and degraded the sound with my garbage set up. Do what you think sounds right and that you enjoy. In the end, that's all that really matters.
In my 20's I was dating a Japanese girl and she took me to this ramen place and that was my first time trying sukiyaki. That indeed was close enough till I tried it when we went to Osaka.. Not just the food but... Now this is really taking me back all the way to 1982. A close friend of my another studio musician was touring in Japan at that time. He came back home with this stereo called "mini component" I'm not talking about the boom box of the 80's which was all plastic and sound like its made of plastic/papercup materials. This is a real system all steel and aluminum chassis that looks like a mid-hi fidelity in a smaller package. I wish I had a picture but I was totally drop jaw first time I've seen one. In fact I saw 2 different ones. I remember the other one was Toshiba and the other one might be a Sony. They never released that in the US. That one has a 7 band eq.
Junk it towards me when you make up your mind; lovely vintage ¨garbage¨ you got man ! You really got a good thing going ! (Hang On To Yourself)
I use mine whenever I use ClickRepair RT which definitely muffles things a bit. It's a compromise but for click removal it's a real boon. Like most people the tape loop is how I route CR and my laptop, and my EQ has an EQ mute button so I can compare both the CR RT output and the direct output with or without EQ which allows me to compare the original with clicks and non-eq'd against the 'fixed' audio by simply pressing two buttons to see which I prefer at the time. More often than not non EQ non de-clicked is preferable to my ears but then a few clicks n pops don't bother me but very useful to have the option. Just wish i could fit my laptop into a matching black Technics box so it fits in with the rest of my gear.
Still waiting for the right equipment. Basically just like yourself, I wont just buy a TOTL cassette deck that's looks like it got ran over by a truck with a crazy pricetag. Some I'm gonna be seriously needing your help on this one buying in Japan even 100 volts, I'll just work on the power supply conversion. There are only 2 decks that I'm after for. Nak zx7 or a 682zx. If you ever find one thats really super clean in and out and all original, please let me know and that possibly our boy. In regards to the Equalizer, last night I was listening to my stereo on a very rare occasion without my 32 band EQ. I couldn't stand it and feels like someone stole the magic sound separation of my 300b amp. I shut the stereo off till I'm finished doing the 7-year servicing.
LOL, back when I had one attached, it was more 'frown-like,' with the mids raised the most; the overall power boost was also part of the appeal.
I really appreciate the SQ of mostly the original albums especially running it on my recording, then playback with a 1/3 octave EQ running thru a tube preamp. BINGO...better than any snowflakes and I'm on the top of the world. Happy Saturday morning...
