Your audiophile embarassment

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Ghostworld, May 20, 2016.

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  1. Chris Schoen

    Chris Schoen Rock 'n Roll !!!

    Location:
    Maryland, U.S.A.
    Then did you start a new fad, playing all of the records at the wrong speed? :laugh::sigh:
     
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  2. Chris Schoen

    Chris Schoen Rock 'n Roll !!!

    Location:
    Maryland, U.S.A.
    I have a bunch of cds with "Sound Rings" on them. At one time I believed they "improved" the sound, still not sure about that, but there they are...
     
  3. Spending an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with the phono section of my stereo after it wouldn't play the final side of Donald Fagan's double disc "Sunken Condos" album. Sunken Condos is on three sides of clear vinyl. There is a label on the blank fourth side but it doesn't list any tracks. :doh:
     
  4. Spin Doctor

    Spin Doctor Forum Resident

    I'd forgotten this one, but I saw a post that reminded me... So at one point I'd been looking at turntable mats and found one that seemed to have good reviews, etc. I don't remember it being cheap either...

    I get this thing and I find that it's leaving oily marks on my records! I try washing it several times, in different solutions, contact the distributor, etc. Eventually I get rid of it and get a Herbie Mat.

    Anyway, at the time I'm working as a quality engineer at a prototype fabrication shop and one day, I see one of the shop guys bring in a roll of the very stuff that turntable mat was made of! It was made to line tool boxes and you could get a 3ft x 10ft roll for about $6.00 at Wal-Mart! :cussing:
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2016
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  5. TimB

    TimB Pop, Rock and Blues for me!

    Location:
    Colorado
    Well back in the 80's and 90's I used the green pen on the edge of cd's. With older players I could hear a difference on ab comparisons with and with out. When CD players and DAC's improved I could not. My best guess is higher jitter reduction on newer equipment. Granted it was not a big difference, but it removed some of that glassy brittle sound that the first few generations of CD players had.
     
    thegage likes this.
  6. TimB

    TimB Pop, Rock and Blues for me!

    Location:
    Colorado
    My first speakers! Ya they sucked.
     
  7. Vinyl Addict

    Vinyl Addict Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA

    Hahaha, is it that rubbery, non-skid shelf paper type stuff?
     
  8. Spin Doctor

    Spin Doctor Forum Resident

    Hell yeah... lol.
     
    Vinyl Addict likes this.
  9. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    [​IMG]
    They actually work somewhat well for home theatre - with the drivers angled in like that, listeners on the sides get a more balanced sound, instead of having the speaker on their side beaming sound directly at them. Also the lack of high frequency means they don't distract the sound stage from the center channel speaker.

    I've thought about putting a better tweeter in them to brighten up the sound. Doing that, you'd have to replace the single capacitor with a real crossover. You'd probably want to replace the low frequency driver also so that it matches in output through the crossover frequency. Then you'd probably discover that for the Thiele-Small parameters of any driver you put in there, the porting is at too high a frequency, it could benefit from a different enclosure with appropriate volume and porting, plus with a new box you could angle the speakers less ridiculously. That should make for a simple upgrade that would vastly improve the sound.
     
  10. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    Been reading this thread and couldn't come up with any contribution, although I'm sure I've had my share. Long version coming.
    Yesterday though, it happened to me. A few weeks ago a friend gave me an old Hafler P225 amp. The P225 is the pro model of the D220. He said it had distortion in one channel and he had no use for it. Ok, I turn it on and adjust the DC offset and bias according to the manual and then hook one channel at a time to an old pair of Polk speakers. No smoke so I grab an ipod and give it a listen; sound fine. I leave it on for a full day playing the ipod on shuffle and all seems fine.
    Next stop is a few days in the main system. I really like the sound of this 20+ year old amp so begin thinking of bringing it up to spec.
    After checking into mods for the amp I decide to go with Musical Concepts and order a kit. A few days later I start installing the kit which takes a few days of off and on work. I turn it on and...NO SMOKE.
    I rebias and set dc offset again and hook it back up to the old Polks. It sounds fine and gets another 24 hours of play.
    Off we go in to the main system again. After a few hours of listening I decide to crank the bias up a bit. Everything seems to go fine but after the new bias setting I hear extreme distortion from the left channel. My first thought is "well crap, why didn't this present itself before I did all that work?"
    I sit down in front of the amp and start looking it over and notice, :doh: I left the B+ fuse out of the left channel PCB. Turn off the amp, pop the fuse back in, and away we go. Sounds great again.
     
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  11. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    I have a couple of unplayable discs because I read Mr. Telling on Armor All. He lost credibility with me after that.

    I'm waiting for an antidote.
     
  12. Bachtoven

    Bachtoven Forum Resident

    Location:
    US
    I listened to my new PrimaLuna amp with the left/right channels reversed from my CD/SACD player for nearly two weeks before I figured out why the imaging was so bad!!! :realmad: Now, to my credit, I listen to a lot of solo piano music, and it wasn't until I starting playing symphonic music that I realized something was wrong. Even then, it took some sleuthing since I was listening primarily to European orchestras that frequently split the violins left and right and/or place string basses on the left side of the stage.
     
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  13. Colin M

    Colin M Forum Resident

    So not the late 80s Bell Wire makes the best speaker cable then?
     
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  14. ernest787

    ernest787 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dallas
    I'll join the fun...

    I own an AVA 600r amp. Awhile back I blew a fuse in it. So i pull the amp out and and take the fuse out. I look at it and it doesn't look like what I remember putting in. My wife then calls for me, so I just shrugged it off and placed the new fuse in. Put the amp back in place and went on my way.

    A few days later I sit down to listen to music. I try to power on the amp and it lights up and then immediately blows. I'm slightly frustrated but pull it out and get back into the fuses. I pull the culprit out and put a new fuse in and then place in the amp back in place. Try to turn it on again and immediately it blows. I go around 3-4 times with this and am at my wits end. I'm frustrated and cannot figure out why the thing keeps blowing.

    Finally it hits me. I look and sure enough the fuse I replaced a few days ago was not the channel fuse but it was the main power fuse. In my haste, I didn't pay attention to what fuse I was replacing, and that was the reason I didn't recognize the fuse. Thankfully I had not thrown away the "blown" fuse and put it back in the proper slot, and then replaced my channel fuse. Amp immediately powered up and has worked fine since.
     
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  15. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    I think they preferred the 90s stuff...!
     
  16. Thorensman

    Thorensman Forum Resident

    I b
    i bought a few of these then realised they must be fakes as they were not very good!
     
  17. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    They did have a nice box...!
     
  18. Thorensman

    Thorensman Forum Resident

    If you take 18" of satellite cable ( with the 5 Air cored insulator) and copper foil and shield, remove outer PVC covering and shield, run a length of cat 5 solid core(0.6) for the ground and cover in polyethylene heat shrink and fit phono plugs you will have a superb cable for £20.
    Blow away £ 200 priced ones!
     
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  19. F1nut

    F1nut Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Mars Hotel
    It's SDA and there was no design flaw. They have a polyswitch (thermal reset device) that trips when heated up from high levels of distortion/clipped signal, which shuts down the tweeters. The more you trip it the more hypersenstive it becomes. As long as you have a good high current amp and know the limit of the volume control you can remove it and replace with a jumper or a resistor of the same value as the polyswitch, usually 0.5 ohms.
     
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  20. BigGame

    BigGame Forum Resident

    Last night I can't wait morning ,so I connect speakers on my first Krell .
    Don't laugh so much.
    [​IMG]
    upload an image
     
  21. The7thStranger

    The7thStranger Part of the Rhythm Nation

    Location:
    An der Lahn...
    The speakers I use in Germany are technically computer speakers. But they're from Bose and sound damn good.
     
  22. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    1. I went to @Doug Sclar home to listen to some music. I hooked up my portable hard drive so he could evaluate some of my needledrops. They didn't sound quite right, and the guy has expert ears, and kept telling me they sounded bad. I couldn't figure out what was wrong until I suddenly realized that we were listening to the mp3 versions and not the FLACS.

    2. I once blew out my high efficiency speakers by over-driving them with a woefully underpowered amp.

    3. I used Dolby NR on my homemade tapes. Not that it was a bad thing, but I just wish I hadn't now.
     
  23. cmcintyre

    cmcintyre Forum Resident

    It was a long while back, but I've never forgotten it.

    In charge of the student radio room in a tertiary educational college, which was equipped with Crown pre-amp and Power Amp and Bose 901s. I went down to find out why one channel had failed in the very large listening space. So I did the obvious thing, and changed the speaker wires, and soon had no channels working.

    One channel in the power amp had gone DC and blown one of the 901's. I had then promptly blown the other one by connecting the DC channel to the one remaining working speaker!

    A fair bit of money later - the system was reinstated with separate Crown Power Amps for each channel, a new set of the then current Series 6 901's and a relay between the control room and the listening space..... .....and a protective device between amps and speakers should they ever go DC again.

    They say people learn from their mistakes - it was a great learning experience.
     
  24. king charles the third

    king charles the third New Member

    Location:
    London
    I once changed the interconnects on the back of my Denon amp but accidentally pushed the MC switch in & my turntable sounded strange. I assumed a cartridge lead fell out so I completely dismantled cartridge off tone arm & re set up cartridge back on tone arm. The cartridge pins were a bugger to pull out & push back in . When I discovered it was something silly on my part I felt a prawn for wasting 3 hours of my life!
     
  25. action pact

    action pact Music Omnivore

    Many years ago, I used to spend a lot of time making home demos on my little Fostex portastudio. I wanted a feedback effect on something experimental I was working on, so I did it using a mic through my hifi (!) and promptly blew the surrounds on one of the woofers. I then "fixed" the woofer with scotch tape and toilet paper and listened to it that way for several years.

    Jeez, whadda dope I was!
    :doh:
     
    Donniej, msg and Vinyl Addict like this.
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