Sanity Check

[zackthedog]

11 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

"audiophool"

 

""Very few are endowed with olfactory, auditory, visual, gustatory, or tactile senses to a level it overwhelms"

Not too sure what you mean here: like all other senses, our hearing, like our eyesight is not perfect, can be fooled, varies according to experiences, affected by outside events & moods, etc.

What i mean is that our hearing, and our comparative listening experiences are denigrated by the anti-audiophile trolls here as a completely unreliable and untrustworthy methodology and subjective to the point where there is no point in conducting any sort of listening tests, - blind or otherwise. When in fact the opposite is true.

 

Indeed.  It appears that we're not supposed to trust our ears, unless it's a certified DBT.  Then we can trust them. ;-)

[gmgraves]

4 minutes ago, zackthedog said:

 

I agree that hi-fi shows in hotels are not the best place to audition components.  That said, like you I heard far better sound in other rooms, even under less than ideal circumstances.  I've actually heard Wilsons in a pro showroom setting and didn't care for them then, either.  My main point was that price has never dictated my own choices.  I lusted after the original ProAc Response 2s the first time I heard them with a Cary 300B amp almost 30 years ago.  Ten years later I snagged a good used pair for $800.  Others may find them deficient but they suit my purposes eminently and I don't have any plans to get rid of them. Best $800 I ever spent, IMO. ;-)  OTOH I roll my own tube amps and have probably spent waaaayyyy more experimenting with various versions over the years than I would have on a decent commercial amp to start with.  But I like the current end result, and my wife likes them, and it's been a heck of a lot of fun along the way. 

I knew someone who had a pair of Watt/Puppies/Wow (don't remember the series) and I thought that they were the best sounding Wilson speakers I'd ever heard - but ONLY if the owner turned off the Wilson Wow (subwoofer) which muddied-up everything (in my opinion). the Watt/Puppy combo was actually excellent, but at US$15K at the time, there were other speaker, for less, that sounded just as good or better (Magnepan MG20.7, Martin-Logan Vista/Vantage, etc.). 

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, Danaudio said:

That test doesn't prove anything in my opinion. Put those same amps on a larger more demanding system and which ever amp puts out less pure power will sound horrible.

I disagree. If an amplifier sounds OK in one system, It has been my experience that unless the amplifier has marginal power power and is moved to a system with very inefficient speakers causing it to clip, it will generally sound OK in any system that it will "fit" in.

[Ajax]

19 hours ago, mansr said:

For now. I've thought about getting another, but it hasn't happened yet.

Hi Mansr,

 

I would urge you to seriously consider auditioning a second subwoofer. Like you I have good quality large bookshelf speakers, with excellent mid and highs (ACT SMC 19). I recently purchased two SVS SB 2000, which I hooked up to my Devialet 220 in stereo. These are not expensive and very much "mid range" as far as price (2 x US$600), but not sound. They are rated down to 19hz at -3db, which I think is a stretch but even if they only get down to say 25hz they have captured 99% of the base in most music I listen too.

 

Adding 2 x subs has been by far the greatest improvement to my system. I have a large room measuring 20' x 12', which has glass windows on one side and open plan on the other to the kitchen and hallway. Total area would be 20' x 60'. The subs add another dimension to the sound and they easily fill the space without drawing attention to themselves. With your eyes closed you have no concept of the position or even existence of either the ATCs or the subs - just great sound all consuming sound. 

 

Here is an experiment conducted by Harman Kardon on the benefits of multiple subs that I am sure you will find of interest.

 

 

https://www.harman.com/sites/default/files/multsubs_0.pdf

 

The Devialet 220 has its own internal DSP. I set the active cross over at 65hz (about 10hz above the floor of the ATCs). I've been slack in that I have not taken the time to measure with REW to ensure I get a flat response. I simply adjust to volume of the subs to the point where I can "hear" them and then back them off slightly (usually about 10am on their volume setting in my case).

 

The sound is sublime.

 

What the OP's test highlights for me is that "expensive" amplification at normal listening levels does not greatly influence the sound, which is why I happily purchase high quality second hand power amps that are around 10 years old, for about 1/3 of their RRP, and hook them up to high quality integrated Pre/DACs such as those manufactured by Benchmark Media. In this way you can get the "guts" of an excellent high quality system that both measures well and sounds wonderful .... all for under $3k. Just add source and speakers. If you are OK with active speakers then you can get a suburb total "system" for that price.

 

Why I mention adding subs under this thread is that when combined with an active crossover the need for expensive amplification is even further reduced, as the active subs relieve the amp of much of its work. They also relieve the speakers of receiving a signal that they can't properly reproduce in any case.

 

All the best,

 

Ajax

 

 

[rando]

56 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

"audiophool"

 

""Very few are endowed with olfactory, auditory, visual, gustatory, or tactile senses to a level it overwhelms"

Not too sure what you mean here: like all other senses, our hearing, like our eyesight is not perfect, can be fooled, varies according to experiences, affected by outside events & moods, etc.

What i mean is that our hearing, and our comparative listening experiences are denigrated by the anti-audiophile trolls here as a completely unreliable and untrustworthy methodology and subjective to the point where there is no point in conducting any sort of listening tests, - blind or otherwise. When in fact the opposite is true.

 

You might be better versed in meta-irony than me.  Saying I don't hate the crowd prone to calling people tin eared idiots meant just that.  Lapsed ability to interact is only a disqualifier if they bring nothing of else of interest to bear.  Consider how rare it is to get the easy talking schmoozers, engineers, people who've experienced great success in their chosen field, and everyone else under one roof.  Including those rare individuals with near faultless ears who are strong on the science end as well.  Vincit qui se vincit.   

 

If your version of a listening test is a social affair where every effort is made to detune your senses before playing with new toys.  They are right to question the methodology and what you are hearing.  That is enjoyment not deployment.  You seem to be trying to slowly walk this side conversation away from anywhere that is in sight.  One doesn't need to conduct tests to find results anymore than one gets results from a test conducted within the strictest of parameters.  OTOH, presenting something as a result couldn't result in anything but scrutiny or disinterest.  Which brings us back to the first paragraph on behavioral interpretation.

[Ralf11]

On 1/31/2018 at 10:59 AM, Indydan said:

They misspelled the word "conclusion" twice in the last paragraph:

 

"Well, we think that each can reach to its own conclussion..."

 

Were they as sloppy with their research methods?

 

Was the research conducted by the University of jackoffs?

 

"Don't believe everything you read" sounds appropriate right now...

 

Maybe they did a mind-meld between concussion & conclusion...

[Ralf11]

4 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

The issue is performance. The relationship between price and performance isn't linear, but in general they follow the same upward trend.

 

 

I don't think that SQ performance is a monotonically increasing fn of price.

 

It likely is up to a certain hinge point (the $10k figure is reasonable); but after that the function tails off rapidly and is less a function than a spray of points in factor space.

 

And many of those factors are not even aesthetic or ergonomic or reliability... many are BS factors.

[GUTB]

Everyone knows most of the little hotel rooms suck, and you go there mainly just to check out gear, look at prices and talk to the vendors. But you have to STOP using that as an excuse not to go to a show if you’ve never heard high-end audio before. There’s always at least a few big ballrooms set up by a big name like KEF, VAC, Mark Levinson, MBL, etc where you can hear a fair respresentation of high end sound. Someone will have a super high dollar system setup for show.

[Samuel T Cogley]

27 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

 

I don't think that SQ performance is a monotonically increasing fn of price.

 

It likely is up to a certain hinge point (the $10k figure is reasonable); but after that the function tails off rapidly and is less a function than a spray of points in factor space.

 

And many of those factors are not even aesthetic or ergonomic or reliability... many are BS factors.

 

As an aside, but relevant to the thread, is how tenacious arguments can get about where that "hinge point" is.  While I think your number is in the ball park, there's no shortage of audiophile forum arguments about where that number is.  Some/many people who have spent less predictably think the number is lower (head-fi has countless examples of this), and the other side is generally true as well.

[GUTB]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I knew someone who had a pair of Watt/Puppies/Wow (don't remember the series) and I thought that they were the best sounding Wilson speakers I'd ever heard - but ONLY if the owner turned off the Wilson Wow (subwoofer) which muddied-up everything (in my opinion). the Watt/Puppy combo was actually excellent, but at US$15K at the time, there were other speaker, for less, that sounded just as good or better (Magnepan MG20.7, Martin-Logan Vista/Vantage, etc.). 

 

In a life full of uncertainty, you can only count on death, taxes and that a Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan.

[Ralf11]

any Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan if dropped from a sufficient height

[Danaudio]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I disagree. If an amplifier sounds OK in one system, It has been my experience that unless the amplifier has marginal power power and is moved to a system with very inefficient speakers causing it to clip, it will generally sound OK in any system that it will "fit" in.

Not all power is the same. Take a 50watt/channel Pioneer amp and try to run electrostats on that. Good luck. Take a older krell or ML amps and run a 50watt/channel amp and it won't have any problems. In your own example you yourself said that the amps sounded different when moved to different speakers did you not in the DBT?

 

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

any Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan if dropped from a sufficient height

 

You'll want to do this while blindfolded to eliminate expectation bias that might affect the outcome. And, you'll need a good supply of both speakers, so that the result can be statistically significant.

 

[Allan F]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Rather than getting hung-up on semantics, lets say that I get to a point where I'm so used to the sound of the amp I'm reviewing that it's shortcomings are no longer noticeable by me unless I remind myself that they are there. We're not talking about my reference amp being glorious while the amp I'm reviewing is junk. We're talking about two pieces of equipment which just sound different (as opposed to one being bad)...

 

I understand your point, and I don't want to get hung-up in semantics either. But you used the term "unacceptable" to describe your initial listening impression. That suggests, to me at least, that you found the sound to be bad as opposed to different, from which one can infer that you thought the amp was junk.

[gmgraves]

20 minutes ago, Danaudio said:

Not all power is the same. Take a 50watt/channel Pioneer amp and try to run electrostats on that. Good luck. Take a older krell or ML amps and run a 50watt/channel amp and it won't have any problems. In your own example you yourself said that the amps sounded different when moved to different speakers did you not in the DBT?

 

Of course. That should go without saying. And again, yes, the amps sounded different when moved to different speakers due to the complex load that a speaker (and it's cable) represents. But just because they sound different, doesn't mean that they sound bad. I stand by my statement. If an amplifier sounds OK in one setup, it will likely sound OK in another as long as it has enough power for that different setup. I never said that it will sound the same in different setups, I merely said that it won't sound horrible as you maintain that it might. In this day and age there are no "horrible" sounding high-end amplifiers on the market. In fact the last "horrible" sounding amplifier I have heard was an early Dynaco ST120 solid state amp (from the late '60's) that was biased (by design) so far into class B that one half of the output pair stopped conducting before the second half of the pair started conducting, thus putting a notch in the waveform that could be seen easily on an oscilloscope with a sine-wave. On the other hand, you could only really hear it at relatively low levels. Then it was nasty! In later examples, Dyna fixed the problem and offered retrofit kits for those early examples so that they could be fixed. From the same era there was another early sold-state design called an Acoustech. It had a nasty habit in going into ultra-sonic oscillation, depending on it's load. When it did that, it pushed the amp into full-time clipping which sounded horrible. You couldn't hear the oscillation because it was above 20 KHz, but since the amp was clipping, the audible spectrum was clipping too. Luckily (?), two things soon happened. The amplifier went into thermal runaway and blew it's output transistors, and the ultrasonic clipping exceeded the duty cycle of your tweeter and cooked it as well! Now that's a horrible sounding amplifier. Acoustech fixed the problem by going belly-up! Luckily nobody makes amps designed like those any more.   

[gmgraves]

2 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

I understand your point, and I don't want to get hung-up in semantics either. But you used the term "unacceptable" to describe your initial listening impression. That suggests, to me at least, that you found the sound to be bad as opposed to different, from which one can infer that you thought the amp was junk.

 

Well, that type of audiophile hyperbole is to a degree, isn't it? As I have earlier in this thread, one audiophile's "unacceptable" could well be a characteristic that another actually likes, or at least tolerates. I should have been more exacting in my semantics! Mea Culpa! By "unacceptable", in that context, I meant that if I were in the market for an amp and were at an audio shop listening to competing  units and I heard one with a characteristic that I didn't like (lack of soundstage depth, perhaps or one with grainy high frequencies, or tubby bass), I would pass it by as unacceptable for another unit that didn't exhibit that characteristic. That doesn't mean that it necessarily sounds terrible or even bad, it just means that I wouldn't want to have such an amp in my system, but because I'm reviewing the amp, I find it there anyway. 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

In a life full of uncertainty, you can only count on death, taxes and that a Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan.

 

Depends on which Magnepan. Those Duette2s (bookshelf Wilsons - but there are stands available for them) wouldn't even obliterate a pair of Maggy MMGs! BTW, has anyone heard the new Maggy MG-30s? Perhaps at a show?

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

any Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan if dropped from a sufficient height

Few Wilsons float my boat. I have to admit that the Alexandria XLF for US$200K is spectacular sounding, but I don't know how they would wear on one long-term. Often spectacular sounding components invite listener fatigue if one were to actually live with them on a day-by-day basis. On the other hand, that might not be a problem because the type of people who can afford to buy speakers in that price range which look that ostentatious generally aren't audiophiles, just rich entrepreneurs and lawyer types who buy such speakers to furnish their Macmansions. These types tend to have three records in their collections (and they've had those since college and are Beatles, Aerosmith, and Chicago ) and will tell you right up-front that they aren't audio or music enthusiasts and they really never actually listen to their million-dollar systems.

[fas42]

22 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 

So do I. I went to a "Burning Amp" DIY conference in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and Nelson Pass was there (he usually is). He had set-up a demonstration that startled a lot of people. He had taken two 4 X 8 ft sheets of plywood with two-by-fours to prop them up vertical on either side of the room. They had holes sawn in the center of each to accommodate a pair of generic 8-inch coaxial speakers. He was powering them with a cheap amplifier for which he was giving away schematics and parts lists. The signal source was a $40 Sony CD player. Interconnects were generic, as was the flesh-colored 16 Gauge transparent speaker wire that he used to wire the speakers to the amp. Most attendees were shocked when they saw what was  making the very respectable sound. I know that I wouldn't have expected such a lash-up to do anything that could be even remotely considered good sound! So, yes, based on that experience, I find the results of the Spanish test very believable. 

 

Yes, that's the reality of the situation. Remarkably cheap components, nothing special in any area can deliver a SQ as good as would keep most happy ... but they need to be assembled in a careful, 'knowing' manner to deliver the goods ...

 

Many audio systems remind me a car with a massive engine, turbochargers galore, the whole shebang is screaming at high revs as it moves slowly slowly down the road ... going behind the vehicle, I see a huge anchor attached with a massive chain, deeply gouging up the road as the shemozzle struggles to keep up progress ... Ummm, why don't you sort out this anchor thing - say, by disconnecting the chain, eh? ... Can't do that!! That's the Way Things Are Done in this game - everyone says so!

[mansr]

44 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

And again, yes, the amps sounded different when moved to different speakers due to the complex load that a speaker (and it's cable) represents.

Any difference heard is probably mostly due to the speakers alone. To tell the amp and speaker influences apart, you'd have to record the signal at the speaker inputs. A good amp will deliver the same signal to any reasonable load.

[mansr]

4 hours ago, Ajax said:

I would urge you to seriously consider auditioning a second subwoofer. Like you I have good quality large bookshelf speakers, with excellent mid and highs (ACT SMC 19). I recently purchased two SVS SB 2000, which I hooked up to my Devialet 220 in stereo. These are not expensive and very much "mid range" as far as price (2 x US$600), but not sound. They are rated down to 19hz at -3db, which I think is a stretch but even if they only get down to say 25hz they have captured 99% of the base in most music I listen too.

A sub is a must with stand-mount speakers. The question is how much difference a second sub will make.

[Ralf11]

or the swarm system with DSP...

[realhifi]

56 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Few Wilsons float my boat. I have to admit that the Alexandria XLF for US$200K is spectacular sounding, but I don't know how they would wear on one long-term. Often spectacular sounding components invite listener fatigue if one were to actually live with them on a day-by-day basis. On the other hand, that might not be a problem because the type of people who can afford to buy speakers in that price range which look that ostentatious generally aren't audiophiles, just rich entrepreneurs and lawyer types who buy such speakers to furnish their Macmansions. These types tend to have three records in their collections (and they've had those since college and are Beatles, Aerosmith, and Chicago ) and will tell you right up-front that they aren't audio or music enthusiasts and they really never actually listen to their million-dollar systems.

 

All of the Wilson owners I know listen to their systems (a lot) and have large extensive music collections. Sorry you are in that circle of aquaintinance’s. 

[Spacehound]

On ‎01‎/‎02‎/‎2018 at 1:56 AM, One and a half said:

 

 

I

[Spacehound]

2 hours ago, realhifi said:

 

All of the Wilson owners I know listen to their systems (a lot) and have large extensive music collections. Sorry you are in that circle of aquaintinance’s. 

Wilson speakers (and a few others) are made purely to take advantage of the many people on this planet who equate 'goodness' with high price . Absolutely nonsensical price in Wilson's case. It's only a simple box with a few equally simple drive units inside, some of which they don't even make themselves, like the bought in engine fitted to an  home-made car.

 

If  Wilsons  were priced at 3,000 dollars tops  nobody would pay them the slightest attention. That's how Magico got started, if they cost 2,000 dollars a pair  they would never have reached the front pages of hifi magazines and so would have gone bust in a couple of  months,  never to be heard of again, like so many others. Wilson and Magico (who had no track record at all so had to do something just to gain attention)  STARTED by setting the nonsense price, and went from there.

 

Wilsons  remind me of Elizabeth Taylor's ridiculous diamonds and fit well in an 'insanity' thread.