Step by step surgery

[semente]

Thanks, I'll have a look.

 

As mentioned before, I have a friend who used to modify commercial gear, he's getting ready to go commercial with his own brand soon, and in most cases the improvements were easily noticeable.

My integrated was designed and built him, a design developed over 15 years, and he modified my Pioneer PD-91 CD player. I don't have access to it at the moment or I would post a couple of photos.

But to illustrate my point here's a photo of an integrated amplifier modified by another person I used to chat with in a Portuguese forum:

 

 

A good caption could be from messy to optimised... KISS.

 

All commercial equipment can be modified/optimised, even that which is already performing at a very high level.

[semente]

9 hours ago, fas42 said:

And, the latest Audacity is still 'bad' ... as good an example of step by step, as anything  else, .

 

In the meantime, until this is sorted, I'll have to drop back to version 2.2.2 - to get real things done ...

 

A side note: I hate things having a "bad feel" - which is why I react to people getting terribly technical in dealing with a situation, when there are obvious, glaring problems that cry out to be fixed first. Case in point: people  asking whether a corrected FR sounds "better" - I say, First sort out that terrible treble distortion - I can't hear past that!

 

Frank, I think you need new speakers... ?

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On 2/18/2019 at 11:26 PM, fas42 said:

When doing a round of improving the "little things" it never works to have a listen half way through. Midway through tidying up the CDP internals I was prodded by my wife to "put some music on", and in a moment of weakness I agreed - slapped the bits together enough so that it worked - "sounds OK ... uh, oh, starting to go off". By the third track of the second CD I couldn't stand it any more - it was sounding awful!! And pulled the plugs ...

 

How did your wife react to that?

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12 hours ago, Racerxnet said:

I have done very well in life and hope you have as well.

I've owned 2 businesses which provided quite well for me, and affords some of the finer things in life.

How about that Frank! 

 

🤮

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8 hours ago, fas42 said:

A good exercise for those who don't believe that the engineering of most systems is so marginal that the loss of "specialness" is always ready to leap out and bite you, is to deliberate sabotage the SQ when a peak listening level has been reached. A bit of introduced interference or electrical noise is usually enough - from experience, about 3 or 4 easily reversible "bad moves" will create such an unpleasant edge to the sound, that it will be "unlistenable to".

 

Now, what's that telling you, hmmm ... ? 😉

 

 High-end manufacturers know that raving-reviews, bling-looks and pride-of-ownership usually make up for any lack of performance.

[semente]

You really should try a calibration device.

 

[semente]

5 hours ago, fas42 said:

The theory's good, but I would be very annoyed if it still didn't shape up - I tried another more technical approach today, but it still ended up with a colour cast. So, I threw caution to the winds and tried a variation of what I used to fine tune the previous set - flick through channels one after another, and play with each of the RGB guns as appropriate, to get skin tones and vegetation to ring true, for each new channel colour combo. This worked nicely, and I was able to steadily zero in to quite a good approximation - under daylight conditions - to what I had before. This means that the skin tone matched the lighting conditions present in the scene - how people looked "felt right", for the style of the broadcast. That is, people are pink, purple, orange, white, yellow, or red, even natural - depending upon the channel, and program/ad.

 

Night time viewing still needs work - there are very obvious 'glitches' in how near black is handled, on the sides of the screen; I need to find a good compromise there.

 

Once I've settled on the rough settings for daylight, heavy cloud, and nighttime I'll play with subtle variations of single parameters, and see how that sits, for a day or two - the idea is to squeeze the last ounce of subjective performance out of the set ... the best compromise possible.

 

 

 

You put too much trust in the accuracy of the image provided by different broadcasters.

 

Even the news read by the same person and broadcast in BBC Radio 4 doesn't sound like that same person reading the same news at the same time on the Parliament Channel or BBC World News or other BBC Channel.

 

Try using a static photo that you know is accurate (use google).

[semente]

I used to edit photos on a LaCie Electron Blue CRT and the calibration file produced by the Monaco Optix (later bought by X-Rite) was a significant improvement.

[semente]

11 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

You miss the point ... I want to watch TV, and not be disturbed by the visual contradictions of the colour in the image. Let's take a specific example - our current PM is being shown a lot, for some strange reason 😁, and the colour of his face is different in every situation - just this morning he was being interviewed, and his skin tone was very pink - why? Because the lighting and background were strongly in that direction, you could pick that every element on the screen was pushed in that direction. He has also been greeny yellow, red, orange, and even at times, gasp!, 'natural'. And each time the lighting of the scene obviously was directed in those particular directions - his skin tone matched what everything else in the frame strongly signaled.

 

I don't expect the TV image to be "correct" - but I expect everything in that image to correlate with what my memory tells me how colours alter, depending upon the lighting conditions.

 

How your TV displays colour is static whilst casts and hue deviations depend on the programme material.

 

If you get your TV to display colours as accurately as it possibly can then it may not improve the worst cases but the better ones will look as good as they possibly can.

 

The alternative is to ride the tint, hue and saturation control for every single programme...

 

 

It's the same in audio with euphonic colourations. Such equipment may indeed perceptually improve some recordings but it will also tint any thing it plays indiscriminately. Like wearing tinted eye-glasses all the time.

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9 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Agree, trimming takes time - I spent weeks on the previous, low cost TV ... at the end of the period I was moving the Green offset and gain by a single increment, up or down, day after day to absolutely nail the colour of vegetation. Tedious, but it was worth it - I could watch the local gardening show, and every bit of foliage, bark and flowers came across as being spot on ...

 

Use your time wisely:

 

 

[semente]

5 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Agree ... but if the set is not ideal in its behaviour, then some 'manipulation' may be necessary to correct, to bring the image into a best subjective 'calibration' - this set has picture curve manipulation, so I'm investigating the very non-obvious way it works, to see whether that adds some degrees of freedom of movement.

 

Rather impressive - we have a small Aldi set in the bedroom, and found that the same codes get into the factory menu of that unit, and that it has colour LUTs, Look Up Tables - mapping of colour values ... rather nifty for a Chinese cheapy, I thought 🙂

 

Just use a colorimeter. Else you'll be clutching at straws.

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2 minutes ago, Archimago said:

Sorry man, I can't follow this as it clearly makes no sense. You're claiming that there is a special setting at which gross frequency manipulation with treble and bass controls suddenly is no longer audible?

 

Some amplifiers used to have a "Direct" button that would bypass the tone controls...