Step by step surgery

[fas42]

And still not happy ... the rig has developed an old foe - that the sound steadily deteriorates from a initial clean presentation - the symptoms are easily heard on a CD which has a huge, deep soundstage, with sparkling treble; that these qualities slowly go sour, to the point where it is far too irritating to keep listening - and you hit Stop.

 

This is with the CDP, not the amp. Easily determined by switching off the amp in mid track, and powering up again. Yep, the problem is still there - so, power down the CDP, let supplies drain charge, turn on again, and go straight to the track last playing - SQ is back up again to what it should be.

 

What has caused this? It could be that I disturbed something during the physical manipulation of the player while doing the mods - or, I made a change in a way or to a degree which the player is not happy with ... note, the electrical paths in the NAD have not been altered one iota, merely how they are physically organised. Will the problem go away if I just let it "burn in"? From previous experience, unlikely ....

 

Further examination needed - and experimenting ... hmmm.

[fas42]

I feel I can't emphasise this enough ... this rig, more than any of my previous efforts, satisfies from immediate switch-on. For a variety of reasons, it's been sitting cold for a number of days, and I only today felt it was worthwhile giving it a run. Put on a HiFi News giveaway classical compilation CD first thing, and it pressed so many plus buttons - it just sounds good!

 

Previous setups usually took hours to deliver a decent satisfaction hit, as all the parts of them settled down at different rates, from a standing start. This unit, now, delivers a big sound from the word go - good parts, and design at the heart of the components makes this possible, I feel.

[fas42]

An aspect that can't be emphasised too much is expressed in this post,

 

 

When a system is working at a high level, disturbing it in seemingly trivial ways can "demolish" the SQ - "What a disaster! This sounded horrible, flat, thin and dead. Afraid that it was broken for good I did the world's fastest shield reconfig back to the default. Happily it worked and all is good again." 

 

The sides of the plateau of optimum sound are extremely sleep, in many places - slip off by performing a careless move and you can fall a very long way ... the good news is, that the plateau can always be recovered - no need to panic ... .

[fas42]

The Lush^ thread continues to throw up good examples of how juggling of rubber bands to hold something together will always give different results, depending upon exactly how tight the bands are, how many, where you put them, etc, etc, etc ...

 

At one stage many years ago I played this game with how I set up earthing and shielding of analogue cables; every variation changed the sound, you go round and round and round in circles ...

 

To stop the madness, completely redoing the interface or whatever is really what's necessary - the underlying fragility or susceptibilty of that part of the system to the slightest puff of wind in the room needs to be changed; how the system is behaving in all areas has to be got completely under control; to stop the huge time waste, and frustration.

[fas42]

The thread that just keeps giving ... .

 

From a recent post,

 

"It's still amazing to me how a cable, and a USB cable at that, can so transform my system sound for the better. Add to that the ability to experiment with so many different configurations, pretty much like trying a new cable each time, this could possibly be the best bang for the buck in audio right now."

 

This again is coming from the usual audiophile desire to Add Goodness; rather than seeing it as an exercise in working out how to Subtract Badness - the recording can never be Gooder than what's contained in the source material; the principle is to work towards making the playback chain completely transparent. If playing with an aspect of the rig keeps altering the sound, and you're doing it without a clear end goal, then you might as well have an old fashioned graphic equaliser, for endlessly tinkering with the makeup that the equipment applies to the recording.

 

 

[fas42]

I didn't bother following most of that absurd Belden thread - a remarkably good example of how off track people's thinking can go, when they cling to certain beliefs which are fundamentally flawed.

 

What people cling to, always, is the idea that everything you do with an audio system Adds Goodness - fatal error; what you should always have in mind is that you're Fixing the system, getting rid of critical flaws and poor implementation that is audibly degrading the SQ. And if you have to spend a lot money buying a device, a key part or materials to achieve that goal, for your rig, so be it. Don't moan about the cost, specialist items are always going to be expensive; that's how the market works ...

 

An alternative route is DIY. Which is what I do. Tradeoff is minimal cost versus having to really understand what's going on, and getting grease on your hands.

[fas42]

Had a look at the papers put out by the Ionoclast by Belden mob, and can see that they have got a lot of the construction right, in key areas. So they certainly will do a better job than the average cable used at keeping some of the gremlins at bay; it's all about the fine details of the actual construction, rather than the mumbo jumbo about LCR, time, etc.

 

It definitely will cost something extra to produce those type of conductor arrangements, but whether it's worth the money asked is another matter ...

[fas42]

The magnificence of Peter's Lush^2 device is that it does a remarkably good job of overturning "expectation bias" barrows. Reconfigure, of all things, a digital communication links - and you reconfigure your sound! No extra money is paid, no new bling enters the equation ... yet, the sound changes, and one can go back to an old config with ease ... leaving objectivists seething, gritting their teeth, .

[fas42]

All the threads are dominated, as usual, by the audio enthusiast's belief that Adding Goodness is the Solution to Everything - which is why, of course, the audiophile world is such a disasterous rats' nest, . All far more rational fields of human endeavour worked out ages ago that when something doesn't function as well as it sometimes can, then it generally means that "we have a problem". And that therefore you move logically forward, by analysing the situation, experimenting, understanding that the issue exists for a specific reason - and resolving by the most intelligent, least expensive method.

 

The Hobbit world of audio resolves by pumping hard on the passion pedal, throwing money in the air, and indulging in strange whims - and as relaxation engages in games of "old men yelling at each other" .

[fas42]

Latest post in the Lush^2 thread ended with the comment, " Audio is a VERY complicated and strange thing"  - no, it's not!! What one is trying to achieve is complete transparency to the source recording, with no contribution from the playback rig; and, this is not trivial to do!

 

Think of acquiring a luxury vehicle - one of the attributes you would prize is its subjective isolation from the outside; the sense of "quietness". Only trouble is, the quieter you make one area of the vehicle's makeup, the more the remaining noises will intrude into one's consciousness - a minor rattle will drive you crazy, and you will demand that the dealer sort it - or you will waste much time trying to track it down yourself.

 

And that's the nature of achieving optimum quality in a rig - the closer you get to a peak, the more the "little things" will draw your attention to something "not being perfect". Choices are, accept the quality level where you're at; or, decide to dive in even deeper, and determine where and why "the noises are occurring".

[fas42]

Again in Lush^2 - from PeterSt,

 

Quote

The otherwise rounded square sound for suitable music now turned into palpable square (go figure). Yesterday I played a favorite Infected Mushroom and besides I didn't even recognize it any more (not for each of the 6 or so "demo" tracks I keep of it) it was all the most literally beautiful. This with a freshness and sparkle previously unknown and what keeps on occurring is the ever so nicely "splashing" of cymbals this now shows.
I just wrote in my notes that all these (3) weeks I haven't had one annoying moment.

 

The "splashing of cymbals" is an excellent guide, something I have used for 3 decades. The most "extreme" rock, or "heavy" music should convey the pristine quality of that drumkit element - because it's always there, in the capture. It makes it so, so easy to assess the SQ - 30 secs of a Status Quo track gives one enough data to make a quick, correct decision on the tune of the rig.

[fas42]

Chris's recent posting of Munich 2019 sounds is a good grab bag of rigs that of a high standard; and other ones which are showing significant issues, or exhibit far too much 'character' - a fancy word for distortion that doesn't sound like distortion. Just carefully comparing and contrasting the 'tonalities' would be a good exercise in learning to recognise where setups "get it wrong" ... a key word is "dynamics" - this is normally used by people when they hear correct sound; the lack of, "dynamics", is one of the hallmarks of faulty reproduction.

[fas42]

Today was a good exercise in diagnosing the two rigs at the friend's house, down the road - overall, they were both performing to a very good standard at various times; one of the best listening sessions I've had there.

 

One setup uses media players exclusively as source and DAC, and it was working well enough to make it obvious that the auxiliary battery pack, which normally was used to make sure that player's internal battery maintained good voltage levels, was actually degrading the SQ. Why? One would have do a whole series of experiments to nail the precise cause - again, simplicity wins, by virtue of reducing the number of boxes involved.

 

The main house rig, using a tweaked Quad CDP, was initially not quite there; and this turned out to be a mains cable, which he had bought new, to replace the DIY, braided one - he likes to keep experimenting, and on initial installation prior to my visit felt there was a gain. However, we did some swapping, and it was clear that this in fact was a backwards step - why? Possibly because his DIY cord was better constructed, or there was an issue with how the cord had been routed; which was hard to reverse.

 

The final dollop of cream - an idea of his - was assigning the Quad to DAC duties only, and using a basic DVD player to spin the the disks, and communicate via optical. The sound was hard to fault, and made it easy to listen anywhere.

 

One particularly niggling problem remains - the media player rig has a contact integrity weakness, easily audible, in the cable between player and amplifier, but it's going to be quite tricky to create a hardwired solution; everything is so delicate in that area of the device, and he doesn't want a setup which made it easy to accidentally damage the parts - something he's going to think about some more ...

[fas42]

It's all about signal to noise ratios - an 'unfortunate' aspect of human hearing is that we can discern 'oddness' even when buried deep in noise; it is frequently mentioned how remarkable hearing is in extracting what we do want to hear in electrical mush; which means that provided there is some pattern to it that we will be aware, or can be senstive to, unwanted anomalies at very low levels.

 

What gets damaged in the listening is what christopher3393 mentions in another thread -  "The word "beauty" came to mind often, so I started thinking and reading about it more, and noticing it more, particularly when listening to music." Yesterday, the rigs at my friend's were projecting the "beauty" of what was captured with an ease and a sense of 'truthfullness' at the peak moments; you had no desire that it "should be better!" - but, this integrity was still capable being lost far too easily; an irritating quality would start to intrude, the sense of ease evaporated.

 

And this is because the systems were not sufficiently 'rugged'; at least one or two areas were borderline good enough, and would slip out of optimum status enough to be clearly audible as "something not quite right". Of course, once one is aware of this, it is the nature of us humans to feel the tiny splinter as a major hurt - and we're motivated to do something about it.

[fas42]

An album we played which I have never come across berfore, which was ruthless in its ability to show rig status was this,

 

 

This was either excrutiatingly unpleasant, or worked quite well, depending upon everything - the value of certain recordings to highlight system tune issues is enormous.

[fas42]

Awwright! ... time for some real step by step surgery now! On my laptop, that is ...

 

It's an old beast, a good solid HP with a particularly nice audio setup built in - very long in the teeth now, the graphics driver always had an issue, now and again locking the m/c up - but wasn't a real problem. Well, it's got savage now - it's pretty clear that the graphics chip is close to completely losing its marbles: the laptop screen stopped working properly ages ago - but I rescued it by adding an external monitor, via VGA; but now even that has gone bad - the Radeon chip driver software goes nuts trying to make the circuitry behave; this is edge of your seat stuff! Luckily, by shining a torch on the almost invisible display on the main screen, I can enable VGA mode working on the external screen - and get by.

 

This morning, it was even worse - still hasn't booted up cleanly. So, obvious thing is to transfer working to the very solid, old Dell unit lying around - but, this has a terrible audio subsystem! Think, transistor radio with almost dead batteries ...

 

Would like to rescue the HP, if possible - because of the good sound it does. Lift the lid on it, and generally poke around, see if anything can be done. So will have to spend time playing around, and trying various things - I'm a person who hates throwing things out because of a silly problem, that's easily resolved. And check out best options for another laptop, if the Dell is too annoying to use.

 

Oh, dear!

 

 

It never rains but it pours Addendum: the ADSL link has gone bad again, from yesterday. Have to play footsies with taking the phone off the hook, to prod the rusty local exchange into plodding on, before it gets booted by the NBN coming ... soooon!!

 

[fas42]

All possible - I haven't taken it apart yet ... the problem is there from cold, if anything it improves the more you use it.

[fas42]

Yes, I was thinking before, capacitors needing replacement; definitely will be scrutinised carefully - anyway, softly, softly, I don't want to muck up the hard drive in it - will organise that first.

 

But now, time for lunch!

 

And thanks for your thoughts, Alex, 👍

[fas42]

There was recent rain, but relatively light. If it were the cause, I would judge that it had soak into the weak point over some time.

[fas42]

For your pleasure , Alex ... turns out this laptop is a mongrel, has to be completely dismantled, screws everywhere, to get to the good bits - http://www.insidemylaptop.com/disassemble-hp-compaq-6730s-6735s-notebook-remove-cooling-fan/ .

 

I have the 6830s, which is mechanically the same, and I'm partway through the maze - my previous, budget Dell was so much more accessible; which it needed, to do periodic defluffing.

[fas42]

OK, x thousand screws later - will I get them right putting it back together?  - the beast is exposed. And looks good apart from usual slight dust; absolutely nothing obvious. Bare minimum of smoothing caps, and they are a long way from the graphics action, can't see that as being relevant, otherwise other circuitry would be playing up too.

 

Possibly the thermal resistance is too great between the graphics chip and heat pipe, because the goo between has dried up - I'll lift the latter and check .. but I trawled the net a bit more, and it looks like graphics going bad is a common problem - people talk about oven cooking to reball the chip - sounds good, eh? - on the basis that the soldering underneath the chip has gone sour, and that frying the whole board makes it reflow. But more careful analysis posts say the real issue is that the constant thermal swings inside the chip has distorted internal tracks to the point that micro-fractures occur - and that cooking the chip 'resets' those tiny breaks. And that far more gentle heat treatment from a heat gun, hair dryer is a better method.

 

So, I'm going to give this a go. Try not to overdo the heat, and see what gives me; if nothing, then amp up the heat ... a step at a time ... .

[fas42]

Except, it's only the graphics area that's playing up - hard to boot is only because it's tricky to trigger off what's happening on the screen; once I get VGA mode happening, on the external monitor, it's as steady as a rock.

 

This is the motherboard, with the heat sink/pipe assembly removed,

 

 

Note that there are only three smoothing caps there, and their location - the graphics chip is the one top left of the HP Compaq label, circled by tiny SMD caps, like a clock face.

 

I'll do the easy steps first; apparently people have cooked motherboards in ovens at ridiculous temperatures, and the circuit survived; and it restored graphics functionality, at least for a short time.

[fas42]

To start, it will be just an extension of what people do as part of normal troubleshooting - applying heat, or cold, to determine if that affects behaviour.

 

Ultimately, I need to move to a new m/c ... amount of RAM, gotchas in whether latest versions of software can run, all add up - there's a point when its only use is as a when all else fails machine.

 

I'm typing this on a desktop that must be close to 20 years old; XP, 1G of RAM - ahh, memories ... .

[fas42]

Well, how about that! Finally got around to trying the heat bath treatment on the HP - and signs look good!

 

I had oodles of flimsy bits of the machine lying around, and a while ago I tried plugging all the key electrical bits together, precariously balanced on bits of paper, etc. And it started fine - so I hadn't caused a problem dismantling it - but the external monitor was still showing chaotic behaviour, as expected.

 

Removed the heat pipe; a remarkably thick layer of thermal goo mated the chips and heatsinks - which is not a good thing; the thinner the layer that gets the job done the better - could this have been causing the graphics chip to suffer excessive temperature swings while working, increasing the stress on internal tracks?

 

Finally happy with the fill-in Dell laptop to continue with in the meantime - and in the mood to go the next step. The most sensible suggestion I came across while researching was to heat the graphics chip to 120C for 5 minutes - so, created a tube to funnel hot air from a hair dryer onto a small area, about the size of the chip, and monitored the temperature with a thermal probe on the multimeter; the nozzle of the tube a couple of inches above the chip kept the temperature in the right zone ... and cooked the graphics chip for the required time.

 

Thinned out the thermal goo in a best attempt to get better contact between heatpipe and chips, and reattached. Organised the bits so a working m/c was possible, and fired it up. Yes!! It booted and went to external monitor; I was able to switch between Radeon chip and VGA, and the display looks good!

 

OK, now to put it all together again, confirming that all screws are used, - and see how it flies ...

[fas42]

Reassembled, less the 1,000 screws in the base, to see how it behaves for a bit, before adding all the covers, etc. This post has been entered using that HP - I'll give it a day or so of solid use to make sure it holds together, before tightening it all up.