Inside High End Equipment

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12 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

In the 3rd and 4th photos from the top, the electrolytic capacitors are too close to the valves and will have a reduced service life due to the heat.

I base this on extensive feedback in a U.K. forum devoted mainly to Musical Fidelity valve products

 

Några gear is not really any better than a dozen other, less expensive brands. They used to build (arguably) with another Swiss company, Stellavox, the finest battery-powered reel-to-reel tape recorders in the world. When that business went away, they had to find another, and that was high-end audio gear. To maintain their corporate identity, they make everything "look" like one of their recorders. This probably puts constraints on their packaging leading to problems with available space like the one outlined by Alex with the electrolytics being too close to the tubes. 

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58 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

guess this one (no peeking!)

 

 

 

Impressive layout. I guessed Mark Levinson before zooming-in to see what it really was. 

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4 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

How about something like this?

Incidentally, the John Curl Blowtorch Preamp part 2 Thread in DIY Audio , now has almost 100,000 replies !!!

 

Click on the image twice for a much larger image.

 

I can't believe that anybody is taken-in by things like this. All cases like this do is triple the price! You're not just paying for the aluminum that 's in the case, you're also paying for the aluminum that they machined away as well! This is what's wrong with the high-end. Useless bling that does nothing to improve SQ, It's just there to drive the prices up. I've often thought that equipment should be sold two ways, in sturdy, utilitarian enclosures (like the kind Schiit and Audio by Van Alistine uses) and if the buyer wants to pay for it, excesses such as the (admittedly beautiful) case machined from a single billet of aluminum as shown above. So many of the pleasurable things in life have been pushed out of the reach of the average hobbyist, things the average Joe Working Stiff used to be able to afford: Sports cars, private planes, nice cabin cruisers, sail boats, etc. Now the greedy among us want to push audio completely out of the reach of the average would-be audiophile as well. Then the pundits of this hobby lament in print about how we don't get many young people coming into audio! When I was a teen, One could buy a decent stereo amplifier as a kit under $40. Decent (for the times) speakers for about the same. An AR turntable was $70 and a decent magnetic cartridge from Shure, Pickering, or General Electric could be had for $10 and a stereo FM tuner could be bought from Eico, Dynaco, Heathkit, or Knight for $40! That system, by the standards of the day, provided damn good performance, and super value. Now, of course, if one had a little more money, but still reasonably priced,they could buy finished amps and tuners from H. H. Scott, Fisher, Marantz, Sherwood and McIntosh. A pair of Dynaco MKIII 60 Watt/channel power amps could be built, from kits for just a tad over  $100, a Dynaco Preamp, the PAS3X could be had for under $50. H. H. Scott sold kits, nice ones too; as did Harman Kardon, and the stuff was quality for the period. Even in the 70's every college kid was able to buy a decent receiver from Japanese companies such as Pioneer, Sony, Panasonic, Technics, Sansui and the like and a pair of OK speakers from AR, Infinity, or Dynaco to go with them as well as a sub-$100 direct-drive turntable to complete the system and the stuff sounded OK. But the point was that average people could afford it, and the kid who started modestly when young could buy better and better equipment and still not be priced out of the market! Bah!, these price trends make me sick and it's bling like the case shown above that makes equipment so expensive, and causes your average young music lovers to stick with their iPhones and earbuds while making fun of our audio hobby! Can't say I blame them much!

 

Sorry about the rant!

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18 hours ago, semente said:

 

What about ventilation, isn't it an important requirement to ensure stable performance and longevity of components?

Of course ventilation is important, but it doesn't require several thousands of dollars (at retail level) worth of CNC machined aluminum billet to get adequate ventilation. That can be just as easily accomplished with holes punched in cheap sheet steel!

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1 hour ago, semente said:

I agree.

Although this new John Curl designed Parasound Phono Preamp is not housed in a case machined from a solid billet of CNC machined aluminum (but the front panel is as is the partition around the main circuit board), It sure doesn't give you much for the $2300 asking price! Compare this for $2.3K with this for (roughly) the same price. Somebody is ripping-off somebody...  

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3 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

You are not taking into account the fact that Parasound's retail prices are based on a traditional deal/distributor model.  So USA dealers purchase at about 40% off, and international importers pay get anywhere between a 50-60% discount from retail.

 

So Parasound sells that $2,300 retail product for between $920 and $1,380 to their distributors and dealers.  Thus their profit has to come out of that much lower figure.

 

Schiit Audio sells direct, so there are no dealer/distributor margins to account for. 

 

 

You are correct, Mea Culpa. But on the other hand there is more than 2-1 difference between the dealer price of the Parasound and the price of the Schiit Yggy. Wouldn't you agree?

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12 hours ago, Sam Lord said:

Sure, but you aren't accounting for parts quality.  If the Parasound had bulk-foil resistors and polystyrene caps, it would have been a bargain.  But as you said, it really isn't: I don't expect the Parasound to have better devices than the Schiit.

 

 

Neither do I

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On 1/30/2018 at 4:12 PM, sandyk said:

Not so.

 The transformer may be bolted to a metal chassis which is earthed for protective purposes, however many linear PSU powered devices do not have the  0 volts connected to the Safety ground. This includes many Preamplifiers, DACs etc. that may have their 0 volts side connected via their Interconnects to the Input of a Power Amplifier which may be earthed and provides the earth reference for them.

 

For example :

Tell Me Alex, is their some reason why this design has the chassis ground (earth), the ±15 volt supply return and the 5 volt ground all isolated from one another? I would think that this arrangement would be an invitation to ground loops.  I would tie all the grounds together starting with the center tap of the power transformer secondary

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14 hours ago, sandyk said:

To answer George about earth loops.

 I have to use a low noise 10 x preamp ahead of my CRO at maximum sensitivity to see little more than a thickened trace from the Preamp's output at it's maximum gain of 3.2, which appears to be VERY low level SMPS rubbish from the nearby TV.

 after I queried you about the ground (or earth, if you prefer) loop issue, I thought about it further, and I realized that the 5 volts is for the digital circuitry in the DAC and the ±15v is for the analog circuitry, and I can see the need to keep those two supplies isolated one from the other as much as is practical. But surely, the 5v earth and the chassis earth are common to one another. How could it be otherwise?  

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7 hours ago, KingRex said:

I'f I could build something for $1 and get 1000 people to buy it for $5 or build something for $1,000 and get 2 people to buy it for $50,000, I would make the 2 units.  

You have hit the nail firmly on the head! That is exactly the model for High-End audio! I do some writing for a local high-end manufacture and I know the people involved very well. They sell a very expensive ($13K) integrated amp of 50 WPC, they sell a mono-block 100 WPC for $9K Each, and they sell expensive speakers and a DAC and a preamp and phono stage currently. Here's the process. They get their (very high quaility) blank circuit boards from China, and their cases are CNC machined, locally, and their assembly personnel consists of the company founder, his wife and his teen-aged kid. They sit down at their kitchen table a couple of nights a week and stuff and solder circuit boards. Because they buy parts in such small numbers the parts price is high. Because they make so few units every year, their CNC case prices are very high. If they made a thousand pieces of their integrated amps per year, they could sell them for about $3K each, but to do that, they'd have to hire assemblers. The way that they do it now, works for them, because the only overhead they have is parts cost. They probably sell 10 Integrated amps per year, maybe 20 pairs of mono-blocks, I've no idea how many speaker sets they sell, but I'm sure it's not many. But they make an excellent living with this business model. Were it not a mom and pop organization, they probably wouldn't be able to stay in business (I think they have 5 dealers, nation-wide). I suspect that a lot of high-end manufacturers are a similar business model- or they started that way (Audio by Van Austin, for instance). 

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On 5/24/2018 at 2:07 AM, STC said:

Italian made Pathos Twin Towers Inpol hybrid integrated amp. Output is Class A single ended MOSFETS.

 

 

Not much in it, is there? Bet it costs a small fortune!

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On 5/6/2018 at 9:49 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Wow. At the time it was the best CD player in the world :~)

I don't think it was. I think the Phillips/Magnavox FD-1010/CD-101 was the best CD player in the early days. I had both. I borrowed one of the first Sony CDP-10s in the country and thought it sounded lousy - I mean REALLY BAD! So when I decided to buy a CD player, I drove 50 miles to buy a Magnavox CD-101(the Sony and the Magnavox were the only two players on the US market at the time, but they were soon joined by a Kyocera unit [used the Sony chip set - Sounded lousy]). The Magnavox sounded so much better than the Sony unit, that there was no contest! Turned out that early adopters who bought the Sony or Kyocera units had such a lingering bad taste in their mouth from the awful sound of these units that most of them were anti-CD for many years after that! 

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3 minutes ago, mansr said:

For a while, the CDP-101 was the only CD player on the market. It was, by definition, the best. Yes, the Philips players were better in most every way (I prefer the look of the Sony over the Philips CD100) once they became available.

Really? I thought the little Philips/Magnavox top-loader was truly elegant looking and built like a tank. I gave mine to a friend when I was finished with it (replaced it with a Boothroyd-Stuart Meridian MCD-Pro unit which started with the same transport as the Magnavox/Philips CD100/FD1010.) My friend is still using the little Magnavox player in  his seaside vacation home in Nags Head NC. Connected to his Yamaha Receiver and his Magnepan MMG speakers, it sounds just fine (or did the last time I was there, two years ago). Good music at the beach!

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21 hours ago, elcorso said:

 

C'mon George! It's filled with Italian air, containing flavors of Frantoio Muraglia Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Provolone, prosciutto, pesto, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine, Ferrari, Maserati,  Amaretto, focaccia and of course scent of beautiful Italian woman ...

 

You have to pay for this !

 

What do you get from Schiit? Only the scent of silicone air ?

 

Roch

In that case, put me down for one! After all, I love all things Italian! And Montepulciano, whether from the town of Multipulciano in Tuscany or the Montepulciano that comes from Abruzzo, it's one of my absolute favorites!