Sound Quality, How far do yo go..?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by The Freedom Man, Jan 22, 2020.

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  1. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    I can understand that.

    There are speakers that do well with either SS or tubes.

    I'll use tubes on vintage speakers like the 60's series Wharfedale's and after enduring some years of SS with the Zu's, I switched over to tubes with them and my audio world is a better place for it.

    I have been running and of the front main towers (and the rear towers) from the beginning with only SS amps. With the exception of speakers specially intended for the audiophile market, I find that most modern speakers don't really benefit from tube amplification and sound their best with SS amps.

    I view it as kind of an unnecessary waste of resources to run them with tubes.

    I used to run the Altec A7's with these amps, before I tried my first tube Rogue M-120 monoblocks, and was in awe.

    I had gotten into the habit of keeping two pairs of towers as front mains on either side of the TV and would switch them back and forth with a speaker/amp A/B selector switch box.

    After switching the Zu Omen Definitions over to a PrimaLuna Prologue Five with KT88 power tubes, I didn't need the switch box.

    After running the Altec's with tube amps, I did try to go back and listen with a solid state amp and just could not do it anymore.

    Even more so when I moved from the large monoblocks and a couple of other large Rogue amps down to the nice 30-Watt amps.

    (Not that there is anything at all wrong with the large Rogue amps, whose power and dynamics can not be beat by the smaller amps).

    My primary motivation to move toward more moderate amps was not so much for audiophile reasons as they were financial. When I lit up the monoblocks, I would be burning two quads of KT88's. Being that I like to listen to my stereo pretty much 24/7 * 365, this was a costly proposition.

    When the realization sank in that I had 100 dB. sensitivity with the vintage Altec horns, I tried downsizing and found that I was even more pleased with the 30-Watt A/B amps, that did not run their tubes as hard as the larger powered amps did.

    When I brought in the 845 powered Line Magnetic 518iA SET, I figured that I may be better off not running the 845 tubes 24/7. When you get to the large power tubes like the 845's, they are not long lasting as the lower powered SET's like the 300B's are and a tube life of 2,000-hours can by typical.

    While I do like to run the Altec A7's during the day, while I am doing other things, I wondered if I might be able to find a SS amplifier that I could live with during the day and run the 845's at night.

    I found a small 50-Watt Electrocompaniet SS integrated, which I found to be amazingly tube like. Probably not up to your Sugden, but good enough to impress me with SS and the Altec's, which is somewhat of a tough sell and being compared to the tube LM 518iA SET at that.

    With that in mind, I repurposed the A/B switch to switch between the two amps, rather than speakers.

    After volume equalizing the two amps, I could seamlessly switch between each of them and hardly tell the difference, something that I would have said before was not possible.

    That gives me cause to imagine how nice the Sugden would perform, being both SS and SET design.

    Another one of my unusual audiophilisms is that, even with my nice turntables and Oppo player, I can still listen to regular lossy subscription Pandora and not have any issues with doing it.

    While Pandora is not up to the quality of my best vinyl recordings or CD's, it does scale up with quality amplification, which is opposite of what common audiophile reasoning might dictate.

    Anyone would think that with better quality amps and highly sensitive horn loaded speakers, that it would bring out the defects in lossy music more.

    Why it doesn't, I can not say?

    But my theory is, that quality material that is well recorded and well mastered amounts to more sonic wise than having a higher bit rate, go figure?

    On top of that, Pandora is not even at the higher bit rates that some of the streaming services are.

    I also use Spotify at the regular bit rate and find that it sounds real nice also.
     
  2. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    I like to listen to music like watching a movie or a play. I put a high premium on imaging, soundstaging, being about to enter the time and space of the original performance and to live and die with the ebb and flow of the instrumentalists' expressive performance subtleties and logic and drama like watching actors on a stage.

    Mostly I listen to jazz and classical, and mostly instrumental music, at least these days and increasingly so with each passing year for the last 20, though I grew up with rock and soul and country and classical and pop and show tunes and funk, lots of funk. I'm always interesting in hearing and learning new and different things -- I really like hearing something different tomorrow that I've never heard before as much or more than I like to return to old favorites.

    But of course that's not all I listen to or the only way I listen. I might be listening on inears while I'm mowing the lawn dancing to Taylor Swift's "I Think He Knows," or sitting on the porch reading a book about the great Congolese guitarist Franco and listening to historic recordings of his TPOK Jazz band or driving to work listening to Lizzo or Cecil Taylor -- Franco, CT and Lizzo have all been commuting music for me this week, though mostly I don't like to put on music as background to other activities (besides driving). But mostly I don't put on music unless I'm just going to sit and listen to it (but you can't just sit and listen to Franco, that's dancing music). And I don't put on music unless there's something specific I want to hear. I'm not someone who thinks, "Hm, what am I going to listen to." I don't really treat music anymore like a soundtrack to my life or a social thing, which was more something I did as a kid and young man. For me now it's more of a thing unto itself.

    I like listening to recordings of in-the-moment performances recorded in real acoustic spaces with a focus on imaging that I really feel like I can enter, and I don't like to be distracted by the equipment, or by the sound of comb filtering when I move my head because of stuff in the room, or boomy bass decay and lumpy bass response that pressurized the room in irregular ways that call attention to itself, or mechanical playback artifacts like groove echo. I like to be transported to the time and place of the performance.

    I've also been a musician all my life -- started with piano lessons as a 6 or 7 year old. I've gigged as a pianist, a guitarist, a drummer. I've written a lot of songs and led bands and done a lot of home recording and some studio recording, both recording my own work and the work of other younger musicians, so I don't really have too much of a memory of music as a listener apart from music as a practioner too.
     
  3. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    Given that we’ve drifted in to the old objective/subjective chestnut I’d like to ask a Electronics For Dummies question, as I am interested in the issue but don’t have any technical knowledge.

    I guess a basic measurement would be distortion caused by your amp?

    Now when I’ve been playing around with isolation I found that I identified what I understand would be called smearing in the high frequencies along with a flabby bass, both of these have been removed/reduced by changes the variables in isolation.

    Now if I’m the engineer designing my amp I imagine I’ll have measurement of how accurate each component is in the electronic chain, perhaps pages of data.

    Is there not a question of how you perceive the distortion dependant on where in the chain that distortion was created.

    So do we need all that data to be able to rely on measurements, or am I too ignorant.

    Despite my Luddite exterior, I suspect that I could have really enjoyed pursuing a more scientific career path.
     
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2020
  4. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Well, there's no one kind of distortion. Distortion can mean any kind of deformation of the output wave relative to the input, so your amp clipping might produce harmonic distortion or there might be intermodulation distortion or you might have tracking distortion because of a problem at the stylus/record groove interface, or you might have distortion from speakers being pushed passed their physical limits, not only will all these different sorts of distortion (and there are others) sound different, there can be different sounding IM and HM because of distortion of different frequency components in one case vs another. There's no one kind of distortion and no one way distortion sounds, regardless of what part of the system is distorting. It's all going to sound different, and not necessarily because it's first, second or third in the signal chain, but because it has different components and characteristics. And then on top of that how we perceive it is going to be different from person to person.

    If you're hearing alterations in the signal because of lack of isolation though, that might not be distortion that might be noise. Noise is spurious signal that's being added to the signal you're trying to reproduce or amplify.
     
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  5. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    My biased interpretation of that is that listening is our best data analysis and that whilst measurements may direct some to seeking a dem, it can only be a very rough guide.

    Your description seems to express better than, what I attempted to say.

    Given my lack of knowledge I'd consider subjective reviews, the flowery the better and see how I feel about their capabilities, from experience the differences, between components, can be fairly subtle to "How could you rate this as good!", I'm unable to know if there is a correlation between my ranking and any particular measurement.
     
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2020
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  6. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    To me, someone else's listening impressions of a piece of gear, is meaningless, unless I personally know them really well and trust their ears and have listened with them and had conversations with them and unless l have confidence that they've listened in really critical neutral environments -- like one of the engineers I've done mixing with whose ears I trust. I trust my own ears because I know my own experience, but not entirely. Our ears and our perceptions lie. If I hadn't measured in-room response in my room, I would never have wound up with the positioning of the speakers and the listening position I have today. I wouldn't have arrived at it by random trial and error. It would have never occurred to me that that would be better than the nearer field setups I was using. You ears and brain with not always give you the best results and you'll never know what you don't know, but if you know you have flat response and even decay times, you know you have flat response and even decay times, etc. Your ears are a pretty rough guide, especially if you're using recordings that you didn't record yourself. You don't even know how they are supposed to sound, you're just guessing at that.

    I don't glean anything useful from someone else's attempt to describe their impression of what they're hearing in terms like "musicality" (which to me is not a quality of audio or sound and is meaningless), or to characterize minute timbral differences they think they hear. I don't really care whether or not some one thinks something sounds good or bad. Just tell me about noise and dynamics and frequency balance and source and load impedances. That's information I can use.
     
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  7. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    As always I find many things I can agree with but if I was buying a new component I'm pretty sure I'd still do the same as before.

    I may have failed to give a adequate explanation of my position but we're probably in a position where others can decide how to approach both assessing and possibly buying a particular tweek.

    I want to see some support for #9, then the fun can begin.
     
  8. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    I find that imaging works best in the nearfield with bookshelf speakers on stands, though I suppose monkey coffins would work equally well, up in risers.

    In a large room, I think the ability to have a big full sound, takes precedence over imaging. To pressurise a large listening space, you need surface area, which with modern speakers usually means towers and multiple drivers. It's a trade off.

    I grew up mostly listening to pop music on the AM radio, Mostly from WQAM, which went on the air in Miami in 1921. Their DJ, Rick Shaw greeted the Beatles on an early stop of their first U.S tour.

    Up to about that time, we only had a small lift top record player that I used to play the Birthday Song on when I was five, some Christmas music also. I did have my Chipmunks Christmas Song and my father brought me Charlie Brown, by the Coasters on Atco Records.

    [​IMG]

    My early audio days were sparse.

    But this is when we moved up to Fort Lauderdale from Miami, from the city to the suburbs, a new concept back then. Started listening to pop mostly during the last three years in elementary school, 4-5-6 back then.

    We were fortunate to have a movie theater on the other side of US1 and we were allowed to ride our bicycles to it. Before that, never grew up in the dealy ears watching movies in a real theater, only now and then, because there were none close by. For me, this was real excitement. Not just the visual part, but the dynamic movie sound. Saw from Russia With Love, when it opened there. For exciting movie music, it's hard to top John Barry!

    That changed with the movies. Then two things happened. My father bought me an upgraded record player, it was tubes and stereo, it looked like a suitcase, with a pull-down record changer in the middle and speakers on each side. My father took me to see Dr. Zhivago and that hooked my on the cinematography but also the music. I bought my first original movie soundtrack from that movie. I used to sit in front of the stereo and listen to the Dr. Zhivago soundtrack for hours, something I will never forget.

    The Overture begins with the tymani, with one drum coming from the left speaker and the other for the right, something they don't typically do in modern stereo recordings.

    I think you may have coined a new term "lawn dancing." :)

    Sometimes I listen to music in the car, but mostly I don't.

    I like to sit and listen to random music on subscription Pandora. I enjoy the randomness of it and it has introduced me to so much new music.

    Back in 2014, I brought in a pair of custom La Scala cabinets from California, from the same individual who restored an upgraded the Altec A7's.

    One evening, I was sitting on the sofa. I had turned the volume control down on the Peachtree Nova, which I was using as the system DAC and preamp and I had forgotten that the stereo was on. I kept hearing noises outside of my back door. This went on for a while. Finally, I got up and looked outside, there was no one there. I sat back down.

    Suddenly it hit me, that I had been listening to Jazz on Pandora. I turned the volume back up and it was a live recording in a Jazz club. The noises that I was hearing was the background sounds in the room. While the Altec's have a high sensitivity of around 100 dB., the La Scala's are even more sensitive. Even with the volume all the way down, the transient sounds of glassware, silverware hitting plates and such, were still playing through the La Scala's, even though the volume was all the way down.

    [​IMG]

    As much as the La Scala's do bring to the table, they are nowhere near the level of the Altec's and will require some extensive modifications to up to par for use in home audio.

    If you enjoy a "you are there" listening experience, it is hard to top the A7's, which now have been upgraded from two-way to four way, completely horn loaded speakers. Couple that with all tube amplification (after the DAC in case of a digital source) and as specially using single ended class "A" power amps, I have never had live sound better reproduced anywhere.

    When live recordings are made with the venue information captured, you really do get a "you are there" listening experience.

    Back in my teenage years with my original pair of A7's, I could recreate the experience of a full live Rock concert, with Steppenwolf Live, playing through a Crown DC-300A.

    Now they can create an intimate Jazz club, complete with dynamics and do it at SPL's of 60-70 dB, that has come a long way.

    My primary focus all of my life with audio has been, does it sound real, are you there?

    My musical experience was completely opposite of yours.

    After playing the coronet from the 6th through the 9th grades, I faced the realization that a musician I was not, nor was I ever destined to be.

    That was OK, since back in the day, just about every other person I knew was a musician. I guess this realization alone, left me firmly entrenched in audio reproduction. A good many of my friends were professional sound engineers, so my audio background exposure was more with pro-sound equipment than with home stereo.

    I think that it is entirely possible that our views on listening to music are not all that different after all, perhaps?

    You played, I listened (and learned).
     
  9. Manimal

    Manimal Forum Resident

    Location:
    Southern US
    I use old telephone pole ceramic insulators. I like the look and what the hey, it can’t hurt:)
     
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  10. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    I like old telephone pole ceramic insulators too. That at least gives them some sort of purpose, other than just sitting there.

    They also have a pre-destined audiophile type look to them, like that were specifically created for just that purpose.

    Which, in a way, they are.
     
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  11. Manimal

    Manimal Forum Resident

    Location:
    Southern US
    Yes:)
     
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