computer audiophile on the cheap Class D amplifiers, can a chip sound as good as a regular amplifier?

[GUTB]

Okay so I listened to various class D amps. My impressions:

 

Mola Mola Kaluga:

Very resolving and forceful. Harsh and etched, shallow soundstage. Disappointing. Maybe not a good DAC and speaker combo.

 

Merrill Audio Veritas:

Resolving, wide sound stage, not harsh like the Kaluga. Once again, shallow soundstage.

 

AURALiC Merak:

Inferior to the other class D products I listened to. Not as clear / resolving. Again the room might not have been the greatest.

 

In all fairness, I will point out that 3D sounstaging was rare at AXPONA. I've heard a bunch of very wide soundstage presentations. Plenty of solid images. Depth though was uncommon. 

 

 

 

[elcorso]

1 hour ago, GUTB said:

Okay so I listened to various class D amps. My impressions:

 

Mola Mola Kaluga:

Very resolving and forceful. Harsh and etched, shallow soundstage. Disappointing. Maybe not a good DAC and speaker combo.

 

Merrill Audio Veritas:

Resolving, wide sound stage, not harsh like the Kaluga. Once again, shallow soundstage.

 

AURALiC Merak:

Inferior to the other class D products I listened to. Not as clear / resolving. Again the room might not have been the greatest.

 

In all fairness, I will point out that 3D sounstaging was rare at AXPONA. I've heard a bunch of very wide soundstage presentations. Plenty of solid images. Depth though was uncommon. 

 

 

 

 

 

Could you list the associated gear with each of those Class D amps you listened?

 

I stopped assisting to audio shows because I found they are more for dealers / factories relations than for customer evaluations.

 

Thanks,

 

Roch

[Jud]

43 minutes ago, elcorso said:

 

 

Could you list the associated gear with each of those Class D amps you listened?

 

I stopped assisting to audio shows because I found they are more for dealers / factories relations than for customer evaluations.

 

Thanks,

 

Roch

 

I think it has as much or more to do with the rooms, how many or few people are around, and the exhibitor's tastes as anything else.  I've heard lots of equipment in too-small rooms, set up to bowl people over with "detail," or both, which gives a hard edge to everything.  Or the equipment can be set up to avoid sounding muffled with a full room, which again gives a too-bright hard edge if the room isn't full.

[semente]

7 hours ago, GUTB said:

Okay so I listened to various class D amps. My impressions:

 

Mola Mola Kaluga:

Very resolving and forceful. Harsh and etched, shallow soundstage. Disappointing. Maybe not a good DAC and speaker combo.

 

Merrill Audio Veritas:

Resolving, wide sound stage, not harsh like the Kaluga. Once again, shallow soundstage.

 

AURALiC Merak:

Inferior to the other class D products I listened to. Not as clear / resolving. Again the room might not have been the greatest.

 

In all fairness, I will point out that 3D sounstaging was rare at AXPONA. I've heard a bunch of very wide soundstage presentations. Plenty of solid images. Depth though was uncommon. 

 

 

 

 

In my experience, at most demos and shows (with unknown gear in unfamiliar acoustics) we are listening predominantly to the speakers and how they sound in that particular room.

I am very suspicious of any report that makes extensive references to the sonic attributes of sources and amplification (and it's not uncommon for the latter might to be inadequate for partnering the speakers).

 

Could you provide information on the amp/speaker combos?

 

R

 

 

 

P.S.: did any of the amp/speaker combos provide adequate soundstage depth and lush timbre? Which ones?

[semente]

4 hours ago, Jud said:

 

I think it has as much or more to do with the rooms, how many or few people are around, and the exhibitor's tastes as anything else.  I've heard lots of equipment in too-small rooms, set up to bowl people over with "detail," or both, which gives a hard edge to everything.  Or the equipment can be set up to avoid sounding muffled with a full room, which again gives a too-bright hard edge if the room isn't full.

 

And then there's the listener taste: GUTB obviously like his sound wet and 3D-like.

[Superdad]

I've been attending (and exhibiting) at audio shows for decades.  

In my view--due to every exhibitor having different speakers, in a different room, playing back different recordings--valid comparison of electronics is darn near impossible.

There were a few times when a source component was of interest to us and we would arrange to borrow it after hours to bring back to try in ur own exhibit room.  Even then, due to room deficiencies (hotel room acoustics can be awful) and the fact that the speakers we were exhibiting with were always a popular brand borrowed set, assessment of the merits of the borrowed source component was fairly coarse.

[elcorso]

15 hours ago, Jud said:

 

I think it has as much or more to do with the rooms, how many or few people are around, and the exhibitor's tastes as anything else.  I've heard lots of equipment in too-small rooms, set up to bowl people over with "detail," or both, which gives a hard edge to everything.  Or the equipment can be set up to avoid sounding muffled with a full room, which again gives a too-bright hard edge if the room isn't full.

 

"Everything matters" as @Barrows use to say.

 

Best,

 

Roch

[bigbob]

1 hour ago, Superdad said:

 Even then, due to room deficiencies (hotel room acoustics can be awful) and the fact that the speakers we were exhibiting with were always a popular brand borrowed set, assessment of the merits of the borrowed source component was fairly coarse.

 

Having spent a career living in Hotel rooms I can attest to poor audio listening characteristics. Every room is different, so comparison is subject to the  conditions. I realize that my 'listening room' is not optimal, and I can hear a distinct difference depending upon where I am sitting, relative to the speakers. Often my friends don't realize the sacrifice I make when I let them sit in the "sweet spot"...

[GUTB]

Many rooms at AXPONA had virtually no acoustic treatments. Even some of the show rooms had little/nothing. Like the Jolida room. Ironically the bottom-of-the-line Salk3 towers in the Schiit hotel room greatly out-performed the Exotica towers in the Salk show room.

 

There was another class D amp demo I forgot to mention. It was in a little show room with some upper-model Vandersteens. Etched, glaring trash.

 

I was hard on the AURALiC Meraks but to be honest thier room had no treatment as I recall. And all the damn TALKING in the room. I remember just giving up on it pretty quickly.

 

I visited our own Vinnie Rossi's LIO room. Awful. Flabby bass from the Harbareths kind of sounded like a room distortion. I think something was rattling in there too. I doubt the fully outfitted LIO on display got those kinds of positive reviews based on what I heard.

 

The exaSound room was god-awful. If that room provided a fair representation of what big planar speakers can do....I'll never ever consider them.

 

MBL's million dollar room dominated the show. Nothing came close.

 

The $30,000 Audionet monoblocks were very impressive in thier room. Audionet is on my radar now.

 

The Synergistic Research show room was small, but it was superbly tuned. Once they were done trying to scam listeners and just you listen, it was one of the only rooms at the show that sounded proportionate with the price of the gear in it. 

 

A dealer room had a massive 211 SET ($13k) that sounded very nice...a step up from my own 845 SET system.

 

The Skorgrad Cables show room running the reel-to-reel was very impressive -- outstandingly analog, like listening to a top-end vinyl setup except even quieter and without the pops. It was this room that made me want to get into reel-to-reel. I'm sure Skorgrad's insanely overpriced cables (like the $18k power cables they had running) played a part, but thier other components like the Modwright pre and amp was in the affordability range.

[Jud]

I've heard a setup with a Modwright amp quite a bit.  It's very, very nice.

[semente]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

I've heard a setup with a Modwright amp quite a bit.  It's very, very nice.

 

The person who bought my PSB T2s brought along his Modwright integrated with DAC module (£6,400) for a listen.

It's a huge and heavy, very well made, beast but I was disappointed by it's performance.

The sound was a bit "veiled" with a slightly "grainy" perhaps rolled-off treble and an exaggerated low end.

And the dynamic swings were not as lively as what I am/was used to when compared to the TEAC UD-H01 I had at the time plus my custom designed amplifier (and to be honest the TEAC's performance wasn't particularly impressive).

Might work well with bright speakers, though.

 

R

[Jud]

8 minutes ago, semente said:

 

The person who bought my PSB T2s brought along his Modwright integrated with DAC module (£6,400) for a listen.

It's a huge and heavy, very well made, beast but I was disappointed by it's performance.

The sound was a bit "veiled" with a slightly "grainy" perhaps rolled-off treble and an exaggerated low end.

And the dynamic swings were not as lively as what I am/was used to when compared to the TEAC UD-H01 I had at the time plus my custom designed amplifier (and to be honest the TEAC's performance wasn't particularly impressive).

Might work well with bright speakers, though.

 

R

 

I've heard it with Wilson speakers and a variety of DACs, including the T+A and iFi micro iDSD, sounding quite good.  No pre-amp in the system.

[bigbob]

On 4/20/2017 at 3:22 PM, Abtr said:

Hi Bigbob, I have an off-topic question. Is it correct that you use the Chang Lightspeed power conditioner to feed your audio gear from an ungrounded power outlet?

 

As of Monday night, I have run a copper wire grounding line from the cold water pipe under the kitchen sink to the GRD terminal on the back of the hk 330i, and the sound floor further disappeared, when I touched to wire to the post. A very simple A-B comparison, but it has made a tremendous difference in the sound quality.

[Abtr]

8 hours ago, bigbob said:

As of Monday night, I have run a copper wire grounding line from the cold water pipe under the kitchen sink to the GRD terminal on the back of the hk 330i, and the sound floor further disappeared, when I touched to wire to the post. A very simple A-B comparison, but it has made a tremendous difference in the sound quality.

 

Very interesting. You may now have a dedicated ground/earth for audio. Note that this ground is propagated via the chassis of the hk330i to the ground connection of the Chang Lightspeed and from there to all other connected audio gear. You may then try to connect the water pipe to the chassis (or ground) of the Chang Lightspeed, which will distribute the ground connection to all audio gear via a so called star connection, preventing (subtle) ground loops..

[Abtr]

I just realize that your hk330i probably doesn't have a grounded power connection, in which case grounding it the way you did is fine. It may lower EMI..

 

For some reason 25 or so years ago designers of audio equipment still preferred a floating ground over real ground/earth (not sure about vintage tube gear). Grounded power connections seem to have appeared only when grounding metal casings of consumer electronics became legally mandatory for safety..

[bigbob]

4 hours ago, Abtr said:

 

Very interesting. You may now have a dedicated ground/earth for audio. Note that this ground is propagated via the chassis of the hk330i to the ground connection of the Chang Lightspeed and from there to all other connected audio gear. You may then try to connect the water pipe to the chassis (or ground) of the Chang Lightspeed, which will distribute the ground connection to all audio gear via a so called star connection, preventing (subtle) ground loops..

 

I guess in theory, that is what is happening, and I am one who subscribes to "if it works, don't fix it". The sound floor noise fell away, so that works. I could not find a place to attach to the Chang directly, and my audiophile friend, who understands electronics better than I told me the dedicated ground would propagate back through the connection to the h/k, which is obviously connected to all the components through the interconnects. What was amazing to me was the mere touching of the wire to the terminal was like a switch--"Noise Floor audible, noise floor gone". It once again is the case of "You don't know it's there until it isn't"

[esldude]

5 hours ago, bigbob said:

 

I guess in theory, that is what is happening, and I am one who subscribes to "if it works, don't fix it". The sound floor noise fell away, so that works. I could not find a place to attach to the Chang directly, and my audiophile friend, who understands electronics better than I told me the dedicated ground would propagate back through the connection to the h/k, which is obviously connected to all the components through the interconnects. What was amazing to me was the mere touching of the wire to the terminal was like a switch--"Noise Floor audible, noise floor gone". It once again is the case of "You don't know it's there until it isn't"

So you had noise you could hear with no music playing and this ground wire silenced it?

[bigbob]

11 minutes ago, esldude said:

So you had noise you could hear with no music playing and this ground wire silenced it?

No, but the sound improved when I touched the wire to the Grd post. Maybe noise floor wasn't the right word. For me, noise is not noticeable until it isn't there. Same was true when I first inserted HFC MC-0.5... Every thing sounds cleaner.

 

[esldude]

4 minutes ago, bigbob said:

No, but the sound improved when I touched the wire to the Grd post. Maybe noise floor wasn't the right word. For me, noise is not noticeable until it isn't there. Same was true when I first inserted HFC MC-0.5... Every thing sounds cleaner.

 

So this could be neural-optical noise reduction.

[bigbob]

3 hours ago, esldude said:

So this could be neural-optical noise reduction.

 

You got me there. This scholarly piece made it entirely clear...

https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-52-21-5050

 

And I thought you were pulling my leg...like the cranial-anal syndrome...

 

[bigbob]

13 hours ago, Abtr said:

 

Very interesting. You may now have a dedicated ground/earth for audio. Note that this ground is propagated via the chassis of the hk330i to the ground connection of the Chang Lightspeed and from there to all other connected audio gear. You may then try to connect the water pipe to the chassis (or ground) of the Chang Lightspeed, which will distribute the ground connection to all audio gear via a so called star connection, preventing (subtle) ground loops..

 

When I ran the copper wire to the h/k, I took a length of speaker wire and braided the two wires together at each end. It should be simple to un-braid the end which is attached to the h/k and split the two leads, attaching one to the 3-prong adapter I have on the Chang's power cord to achieve the star connection. Since no current is running in the ground wire, it should work. And thanks for the information. If it sounds even better in the star connection, I don't know if I can handle it---cause it sounded so much better just attaching the Earth ground to the receiver. I note that the h/k has a captive 2-prong power cord, so it might just be even more magical!

[Ralf11]

ground loop?

[bigbob]

27 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

ground loop?

 

13 hours ago, Abtr said:

You may then try to connect the water pipe to the chassis (or ground) of the Chang Lightspeed, which will distribute the ground connection to all audio gear via a so called star connection, preventing (subtle) ground loops..

 

 

Star connection, and it does sound better.

 

It was simple, and now the Chang Lightspeed Encounter is grounded--and everything in the system is grounded, with the second lead attached to the GRD terminal on the back of the harman/kardon hk 330i.

 

I am listening to my 24/192-50 song playlist, and everything is more opened up, three dimensional, crisp, sweet, and dynamic. Thanks to @Abtr and my Audiophile friend, who made the same suggestion just a few minutes ago when we chatted on the phone.

 

I guess I am finally getting to hear what the Chang can do to this "CAOTC" system

[noshortcuts]

Reading about impressions from audio shows, room by room, makes me wonder how that kind of listening can mean anything. After all, you are listening to the room and everything in it (the amp, dac, cables, source, speakers, people talking, etc.) So it seems impossible to judge one amp from one room with another amp in another room. 

[GUTB]

2 hours ago, noshortcuts said:

Reading about impressions from audio shows, room by room, makes me wonder how that kind of listening can mean anything. After all, you are listening to the room and everything in it (the amp, dac, cables, source, speakers, people talking, etc.) So it seems impossible to judge one amp from one room with another amp in another room. 

 

That's why I refrained from making judgment calls on all the various amps I listened to there. I listened to very high end systems that ranged from bad to mediocre.

 

One room that I felt was stand-out in terms of room treatment was the Odyssey room. They draped everything in covers, treated the walls, turned the lights off and had some string lights up trying to engineer a mood conducive to audio appreciation. Unfortunately I wasn't that impressed by the sound.