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Inside High End Equipment


STC

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10 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Audio equipment can easily be very robust to all kinds of environment changes/interference, and really should be.   Incompetent or overly-cost-reduced designs can certainly allow power voltage or noise issues to encroach into the audio.  I can make a perfect as-specified, but non-robust design just like any other engineer, but one important difference about  is in robustness.   Being a designer whose '70s (relatively high-tech) industrial computer equipment had lasted for decades -- I fretted over the reliability issues back then.  We also had massive amounts of low level I/O that had to pass across buildings (in Illinois -- lots of thunderstorms).  We robustly handled relatively high frequency clocks, low level signals and cross-building thunderstorms -- equip worked at least 20yrs in machine rooms with very few repairs.   We should be able to do that today, why not?  cheapness.

 

Tweakiness should be long gone, unless toy/junk equipment is involved.   Gang -- audio isn't rocket science anymore.  Audio stuff quit being a tricky thing to design for back in the 1980s or even before.  Digital added a bump in the 'trickiness' curve, but competent design and production techniques solves the problems.   It might be a *little* more difficult or costly to produce a well designed product, but too often there is poorly designed/tested stuff being sold.  Equipment designed correctly, implemented correctly in production, and used correctly with other good equipment -- won't have tweaky behavior.

 

I wouldn't brag about external situations causing difference in audio, unless there is an intention that twekiness is desired in day to day use.   Tweakiness should not be a badge of courage.

 

John

 

John has a far better understanding of the situation than most there - he had to deal with real world issues of making things work, properly, so appreciates that things are not always straightforward.

 

Tweakiness is not desirable - never, ever ... it's a band-aid solution to overcome lack of integrity in the gear that one can easily buy. Cheap to buy gear has excuses - but what has the expensive stuff to offer as a reason?

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9 hours ago, marce said:

Wot like say a pressed metal case...

 

Yep. But just a bit of spacing should get you out of trouble - the friend down the road has a Naim amplifier, and he had to replace the main smoothing caps; the replacements were taller than the standard fare ... there was an unpleasantness to the sound, which was new. "What have you done lately?" ... "These caps" ... "Hmm, they are almost touching the top; very close to the tin lid ... how about we add some internal spacing material, to force the top of the case to be higher, further from the caps?" ... "OK ..." . That unpleasant edge to the SQ? ... now gone ...

 

 

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11 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Yep. But just a bit of spacing should get you out of trouble - the friend down the road has a Naim amplifier, and he had to replace the main smoothing caps; the replacements were taller than the standard fare ... there was an unpleasantness to the sound, which was new. "What have you done lately?" ... "These caps" ... "Hmm, they are almost touching the top; very close to the tin lid ... how about we add some internal spacing material, to force the top of the case to be higher, further from the caps?" ... "OK ..." . That unpleasant edge to the SQ? ... now gone …

 

 

 Electrolytic capacitors have aluminium cases which are non magnetic and unlikely to be affected by being close to a steel top cover as is often the case. Even 1U,2U and 3U aluminium rack cases normally have steel top and bottom covers.

 A more likely reason is that the new capacitors needed additional time to further stabilise.

New larger electrolytic capacitors can have much higher current requirements when brand new. Some even needing 100s of hours to fully form.

 The use of internal spacing material is also likely to have improved air flow resulting in a lower internal temperature. 

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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36 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Miles from understanding the situation, I'm afraid - and that was the attitude back then, as well; as soon as you produced a CD which made their rig sound awful, "Well, what do you expect, if you use a lousy recording!!" ... 🙂

 

No, "a decent pro JBL or Presonus" makes 'em sound like shit - even more so then the unsorted audiophile setup - you see, what happens with competent playback is that the sound is 'huge', but still retains 100% integrity; all the sound elements within are pristine clear and undistorted, as scrumptious as your very best "audiophile" recordings, 😜.


Your preferred sound is nothing more than Bose 901 direct/reflecting type presentation. 
 

Go read up some interviews by the recording engineers of your so called reference recordings. Those were the early years of effects introduced in recording. Know the difference. in fact, that was the golden era of sound being more than plain pure recordings. Beetles, Gabriel, Animal Farm, Zeppelin and more had them. 
 

Pay attention to solo vocalist. What may appear to be a single singer can be a mixture of left and right overdubbed. Headphones would reveal them. 
 

time to close this thread. It has now become more about inside the head of high.....
 


 

 

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4 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 Electrolytic capacitors have aluminium cases which are non magnetic and unlikely to be affected by being close to a steel top cover as is often the case. Even 1U,2U and 3U aluminium rack cases normally have steel top and bottom covers.

 A more likely reason is that the new capacitors needed additional time to further stabilise.

New larger electrolytic capacitors can have much higher current requirements when brand new. Some even needing 100s of hours to fully form.

 The use of internal spacing material is also likely to have improved air flow resulting in a lower internal temperature. 

 

Could be a reasonable explanation - but I was there at the time. It was all of 10 minutes or so for him to add this spacing - and we both noted the improvement immediately.

 

Another consideration is that the spacing was viscoelastic; had very good damping properties. So, the lid was now far less prone to random vibration - one could go crazy trying to work out the precise cause and effect mechanism; but if it's relatively easy to try things out then it's worth the effort, many times.

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3 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Could be a reasonable explanation - but I was there at the time. It was all of 10 minutes or so for him to add this spacing - and we both noted the improvement immediately.

 

 

 I know of an Admin in another forum who uses rubber on top of large electros in order to try to reduce their vibration. 

 Some ceramic capacitors are also subject to audible vibration issues

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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2 hours ago, sandyk said:

 


Douglas Self, as one example was discovering new causes of distortion and recommending ways to correct them,
 in the first edition of his Audio Power Amplifier Design handbook in 1996, and later editions such as the 5th edition in 2009.
 He identified 8 different causes of distortion.
 Other technical writers such as  Bob Cordell published later Handbooks with even more recent design information as late as 2011.  (Designing Audio Power Amplifiers)

 

There have also been marked improvements in the Power Supply area recently, with the introduction of very low noise voltage regulators such as the LT3042,LT3045 (0.8μVRMS (10Hz to 100kHz) and the complementary -VE rail LT3094 (0.8μVRMS (10Hz to 100kHz) and the Introduction of Ultracaps.

 

I modified John's post  re tricky thing to design for

 

maybe you don't understand his stmt.??

 

As is so often the case from you in this area, that is an incorrect statement as none o'that makes much real difference in SQ compared to other things, but you can argue with him about it.

 

 

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1 hour ago, STC said:


Now you know why you have been resoldering, ripping the speakers, generating your own power? That’s a sign of having bad gear. 

 

The problems exist for almost all gear, from the low end right up to the highest echelons - once you are aware of the anomalies in the SQ that matter, it's trivially easy to pick the same defects over and over again, occurring in rigs no matter how ambitious - tarting an expensive bit of kit up with all sorts of goodies doesn't help, if the underlying deficiencies are not addressed.

 

1 hour ago, STC said:


Everything about how your magic system sounded was the sound of the Bose sound. It is musically captivating, wall of sound, speakers not localized, poor stereo, sounds the same no matter where you are in the room. 
 

This is why audiophiles are always in circle of confusion. They do not understand their reasoning for their preference. Understand that and you achieve your perfect sound sooner. 
 

Now please don’t pollute this thread unless you want to post your high end stuff. 

 

Where did I say, "poor stereo" - the imaging is superb, each sound element in the picture is sharply in focus, sitting in its particular spot on the soundstage; you can "reach out, and touch the sound maker", so to speak. In complex mixes, the layering is very impressive; it's a "multi-ring circus".

 

You see, at this level, everything works. Ordinary recordings of classical pieces are fully realised; pop recordings throw up hugely imaginative soundstages; jazz is intense, and each solo is fully captivating - there is almost nothing that doesn't deliver.

 

This is what true "high end" sound should be about ... but it usually isn't ...

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3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

John has a far better understanding of the situation than most there - he had to deal with real world issues of making things work, properly, so appreciates that things are not always straightforward.

 

Tweakiness is not desirable - never, ever ... it's a band-aid solution to overcome lack of integrity in the gear that one can easily buy. Cheap to buy gear has excuses - but what has the expensive stuff to offer as a reason?

We (as consumers) are stuck doing the 'reviews' (criticism or giving positive feedback) nowadays, because the general audio press appears not to be doing their jobs.

 

Sadly, I don't believe that there is much excuse for much less than ideal audio quality -- given the specific components -- nowadays.  Those doing boutique products really have a major challenge .  Gotta be careful about some of the equipment purchased as 'high end', not because the developer didn't try to do a great job, but low volume equipment makes the cost of the side/support/packaging/testing sky high.   Amortizing the desired testing over a 10-100 units can make the testing very expensive on a unit basis instead of a piece of equipment that might sell 1k-10k units.   When I mention 'testing' -- I am encompassing all of the cabling issues discussed elsewhere.  The bugs really should be worked out, and testing gives information for correcting the product to work best for the actual customers.

 

So, sometimes the very high end, but low volume equipment might not be tested quite as well, or perhaps because the design engineer focused on certain issues (raw en/in of a given transistor circuit), might have overlooked certain packaging or ground return design matters. 

 

One developer doing all of the design, and worse-yet, the testing substantially increases the risk.  The HW developer (esp if there is one for everything) cannot test his own product without great risk.

 

Honest clarification, I didn't do all of the work for every engineering discipline for the the  project (actually several) that I alluded to back in the 1970s.   ( I did get involved in every engineering discipline though -- helped to pull it together.)   However, since the company was small (about 3 full HW engineers, 2-3 full SW engineers, where I was 1 HW and 1SW), each of us could be involved with the others projects/disciplines.  This enabled our small teams to double check each others work.  The same goes for the software, even though that is an even more tricky thing to test and prove.   As a responsible engineer, I actually ENJOY working with my engineering friends, and that day-to-day interface and discussion (not personal chit-chat) helps the product as much as making the work-day more pleasant.

 

When an actual product is developed, where there is a connection to the AC mains, EMI considerations, at-the-time high tech components, millivolt signals, kV common mode voltage peaks, 10thousands of lines of software (probably about 50k lines -- a lot for the 1970s),  we were both busy and each responsible for each others work.

 

The small audio boutique firms worry me, because how can they afford to sell a product while not skipping 100s of steps required for good quality?

 

In a way, I sometimes expect MORE flaws in boutique equipment, it is just that the flaws aren't necessarily in the main specs, but the secondary issues like 'cable compatibility' or 'grounding'  are where I'd expect to see problems.   The engineer developing a circuit for a near ideal RIAA preamp is going to design that preamp very nicely -- but there are so many other factors in a real product.

 

I run into similar problems -- trying to be jack of all trades -- on my DA decoder...   The 'meat' of it is wonderful, it is just ugly and relatively unpleasant to use.  It is very easy to spread a small team too thin on a high quality but low production volume product.

 

John

 

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37 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

as none o'that makes much real difference in SQ compared to other things, but you can argue with him about it.

 

Perhaps to your ears and the mediocre equipment that you use, they don't, :P however  they make a marked improvement when  using a modern transparent system. The further that you refine a system , the more you are able to notice things that quite affordable systems do not reveal, as mentioned also by another poster.

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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14 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Where did I say, "poor stereo" - the imaging is superb, each sound element in the picture is sharply in focus, sitting in its particular spot on the soundstage; you can "reach out, and touch the sound maker", so to speak. In complex mixes, the layering is very impressive; it's a "multi-ring circus".


Now looks like your memory too is failing. When you write from first hand knowledge you will remember what you say and the reasoning. Go and look back at all your posts here and ASR. 
 

@The Computer Audiophile requesting moderating rights. Thank you. 

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39 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

Perhaps to your ears and the mediocre equipment that you use, they don't, :P however  they make a marked improvement when  using a modern transparent system. The further that you refine a system , the more you are able to notice things that quite affordable systems do not reveal, as mentioned also by another poster.

 

my ears and equipment are better than yours, not that I would make a personal attack on someone's gear

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3 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Frank - what do you use for improving make/brek connections?  Is there some special emolument you apply?

 

(I know... geo-specific joke but still...)

 

Taking you seriously, I eliminate all of them, in the ways mentioned - this was at the heart of getting my first rig firing ... it's always, always about the weakest links in the chain ...

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7 minutes ago, fas42 said:

it's always, always about the weakest links in the chain .


And that’s you.

 

You have no idea about the objectives or purpose. An example is this thread where this supposed to be confined to pictures inside the high end and related discussion to it. And yet you come here and started like a broken record. 

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13 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Looking back, this is where it started going off the rails - I was commenting on the construction ... and some chap decided to have a go at me ... 😜

 

 


That is probably the 3000th time you are saying this in this forum. It means nothing. It is like telling I would rearranged the furniture and move the speakers to bring out the SQ. That is a general statement that adds nothing to what we already knew. 

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2 hours ago, Superdad said:

Hey, I come to this thread topic for the pictures of the inside of all the weird gear that @STC and his friend get in for repair.  Can we get back that that?! x-D

 

I agree. Just about every thread on this forum devolves into a pissing match between a half dozen old dudes (one can only assume) who may as well be shouting at their own feet. About to put the entire forum on ignore. 

SERVER CLOSET (in office directly below living room stereo):NUC 7i5BNH with Roon ROCK (ZeroZone 12V on the NUC)>Cisco 2690L-16PS switch>Sonore opticalModule (Uptone LPS 1.2)>

LIVING ROOM: Sonore opticalRendu Roon version (Sonore Power Supply)> Shunyata Venom USB>Naim DAC V1>Witchhat DIN>Naim NAP 160 Bolt Down>Chord Rumor 2>Audio Physic Compact Classics. OFFICE: opticalModule> Sonore microRendu 1.4> Matrix Mini-i Pro 3> Naim NAP 110>NACA5>KEF Ls50's. BJC 6a and Ghent Catsnake 6a JSSG ethernet; AC cables: Shunyata Venom NR V-10; Audience Forte F3; Ice Age copper/copper; Sean Jacobs CHC PowerBlack, Moon Audio DIN>RCA, USB A>C. Isolation: Herbie's Audio Lab. 

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