Step by step surgery

[fas42]

Everyone's having fun in the toilet paper as cable lifter thread - but if the underlying concept is not considered seriously, then some audio 'truths' are, again, missed ... 🤨.

 

I slowly took this sort of thing more and more seriously, as I got perplexing results, when I tried "silly things" - it was pretty obvious that taking absolutely no notice of how cables were arranged was not very smart, because the sound changed when I tried trivial experiments. Which meant that there would be an optimum method of dealing with this - that which minimised any distortion from whatever mechanism was causing these changes.

 

For me, at this point in time, it's materials that are key - not spacing per se. That is, using a "cable lifter" that's the wrong material will do zero, or make things worse - turns out paper is one of the 'good' materials; plenty of people swear by cotton ... which strongly indicates that static behaviours are a major part of what's happening.

 

So, a roll of toilet paper might not be so dumb, after all ... 🙂

[fas42]

Just had a sticky beak at PeterSt's forum ... noticed a post there by AS's manisandher,

 

Quote

My dream from day one has been that the DAC be totally immune to anything that happens before it. 10 years later...

Mani

 

Yes, it seems like that ... 😝.

 

Reaching a high enough standard of system integrity is HAAARD ... that's just the way it is at the moment - yes, if one has done this sort of thing over and over again, one develops an instinct for it - and  makes a beeline for likely problem areas, straightaway. And in fact one may decide to ditch the whole way the chain is set up in a certain area; because it will always be an uphill battle, using the particular approach that was decided upon some time ago - there is an inherent weakness there, which can never be fully overcome; or, be ridiculously convoluted in what's needed to "make it work!" - think, Windows OS and the workarounds people have devised, through the years 😜.

 

 

[fas42]

Just read this post,

 

 

Not a bad example of how to listen for aspects in the sound which inform one as to whether progress is being made - in the sense that low level distortion, noise artifacts are better attenuated - this is Blackmorec's "sonic net" getting more out of the way ...

 

#1 - "a purity of tone" - a giveaway that we're getting somewhere; "Liquid" - again a tick.

 

#2 - "not getting peaky" - this is audiophile code for treble that has less distortion; noting that people are frightened to mention the word, "distortion" 😉 - and that they fuss about everything else, in the hope that the distortion becomes less prominent - ummm, the smartest thing to do is to remove the causes of the disturbing artifacts ... problem solved! 🙂

 

"Less full bodied", but, "background vocals were certainly clearer, the piano had more sparkle, and the bass guitar had that stellar growl that I like" ... yes, that's how it works, 😉.

 

#3 - Hendrix: " It was definitely clear! I don't think I had ever heard Jimi's voice that clear in the left channel." - Yes.

 

" the guitar intro did seem a smidge peaky" - umm, you're listening to a Marshall amp - of course it's got bite to it!! Sometimes, instruments aren't meant to be polite, you know ...

 

 

"But how would I know if that's the way it was supposed (to) sound?" - er, it sounds like you're listening to the sound making whatever happening beyond the 'perimeter' of the particular rig; not your particular system's take, version of it - one obvious characteristic is that every track has a uniqueness about it, it changes the 'space' you're listening to, in ever more distinctive ways ... because the idea is to hear what the capture of the event reveals - and not what the addition of the 'makeup' of the system's "sound signature" turns it into, hmmmm 😜.

[fas42]

And another indicative post ...

 

 

Is the Sonore power supply 'magical'? No ... . Is the ultraRendu 'magical'? No ... . What's magical is what's on the recording, and adding the PS was, in this situation,  the critical step that pushed the particular rig into a significantly better zone of overall performance - and the subjective SQ went up dramatically ... this is what is achieved by doing "step surgery", 🙂.

 

Will adding this PS do the same "magic" in another rig? Perhaps, perhaps not - it's always a depends - there are no Rules Set In Concrete! ... Ever ...

 

[fas42]

Okay, the replacement Toshiba laptop has zero bass, with driver openings the size of one's small thumbnail - and initially I thought the audio was going to be generally terrible. But I'm adapting to the sound, and it's improving - this machine had been left unused for ages, so everything has to "recondition" - and the treble is showing promise ... 🙂.

 

It's settled enough for me to think about perhaps playing with audio players - see what that tells me, for this machine. So, ripped Ring, Ring from the ABBA CD I have, and will use that WAV as a test bed ...

 

First up, Groove Music streamer that came with the m/c: pretty awful, quite shrieky, poor separation.

Next, good ol' Windows Media Player, another rock bottom app: somewhat better, the shriekiness is more under control ... this immediately told me that choice of player does matter; so playing with software, including settings, will gain me ground.

 

Now, what about foobar2000? I have not had good results from that up to now, in other PCs - but I'll give the latest version a spin ... downloaded it; hmmm, promising - but far too much fidgeting on the interface: switch all that off, a definite gain there; and final setting change: buffer the entire track into memory ... not bad,not bad - the tambourine is finally starting to sound like it should, nice depth, and layering to the sound elements; voices quite decent.

 

Can I get it better? I'll try Media Monkey, and anything else that inspires me - aim is find the best match for this laptop.

[fas42]

As mentioned on the Stereo Magic thread, I'm using this live clip as well for fine tuning the Toshiba laptop,

 

 

As described there, I'm using the opus audio, the best quality version, for working with - exported to WAV format.

 

Media Monkey sounded pretty mediocre in default form, but tons of things to play with - now got it to a rough par to foobar ... so what does that give me? The "blatt" of the brass now sounds authentic, has plenty of bite; and the percussion has stopped sounding a throwaway - a good sense of space, the echo of the station environment now working - the picture no longer sounds a bit ridiculous, as if it's coming from tiny speakers - which is what it is! Listening at a distance from the laptop, the presentation still holds up.

 

Still a rough edge to possibly finesse away, when listening very closely to a speaker - will this happen? 😲

[fas42]

Working with Media Monkey, MM, at the moment - with the Ring, Ring track. The speakers on this laptop are so tiny that you can't hear anything below 200Hz - confirmed by running some frequency sweeps in Audacity. Which means that the treble has to be very clean, for the sound to be acceptable - plenty of HF action in this track, as John Dyson is keen to point out 😉, so this makes this track excellent for the fine tuning ...

 

And the same factors work for the Toshiba as did previously with the HP - simplify, simply, simplify. Pure battery doesn't work, because the current drain causes too much noise;the power adapter has to be running ... getting rid of plugged in cables helps a bit, but a major win is having the screen shut down.

 

What am I gaining? The vocals are steadily losing the remaining screechiness, when listening closely, and the ambience information starts to build - still not there yet, but plenty of things remain to play with.

 

What's the point of doing this, again? As yet another example that even the most basic, cheap set of electronics responds to tweaking - going from AM standard fare, to being perfectly acceptable given the constraints. Using the right audio track makes it trivially easy to hear the alteration in SQ as things are tried - the sound of this laptop is far less than the previous HP unit, having much poorer bass, and maximum volume is quite a bit lower; but it is still easy to hear distortion anomalies being present or not in the sound.

 

Doing this "step by step surgery" is a form of training, to make one's ears sensitive to the sound being 'wrong' - the procedure translates directly to being relevant to getting the most out of the most ambitious, expensive rigs.

[fas42]

Playing with a few more things - this Windows 10 is a mongrel; if you shut down processes, and hardware functioning, it uses this as an excuse to go off and fool around with the hard disk, etc ... the fan revviing up is the giveaway that it's trying to thrash the CPU; so part of this exercise will be doing a controlled HAL shutdown (2001 reference, for the one or two who don't know ... 😜), prior to playing.

 

Up to getting good layering on Ring, Ring; the percussion on the right is next to me, the vocals are way back; very good separation of all the sounds, almost zero unpleasantness, or shriekiness, to any element

[fas42]

All right ... I had to beat Windows 10 around the head a bit, but I've got it to stop fidgeting incessantly - about 5 services had to be given the boot; and this was not a trivial exercise. Which means that I get a solid run of 0% CPU usage over many, many minutes - the other plus is that the fan is not going off into a feverish fit, at odd moments.

 

Of course the machine is still ticking over - where's the decimal when you need one, 😉? - but things are now more consistent, to better do comparisons.

[Ralf11]

You should write your own OS - just for music.

 

Call it Playah

[fas42]

Those sort of things are around 🙂 - no, part of the exercise could be to see that once a decent standard was achieved, what then, say, was the most critical factor in maintaining that, by switching various tweaks off and back on again, one after the other.

[Racerxnet]

Those fingernail sized Bass pumping, air thrashing, speakers, along with the 1/2 watt amplifier are lighting up the room! 

 

Foobar2K

Thread priority: 7

MMCSS priority: High

Use WASAPI

Keep hard disk from sleeping.

If you want foobar to look pretty use coverflow.

 

Here is the services for win 10 you can disable. See below.

 

http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/

 

 

[gmgraves]

On 11/9/2019 at 3:32 PM, fas42 said:

Everyone's having fun in the toilet paper as cable lifter thread - but if the underlying concept is not considered seriously, then some audio 'truths' are, again, missed ... 🤨.

 

I slowly took this sort of thing more and more seriously, as I got perplexing results, when I tried "silly things" - it was pretty obvious that taking absolutely no notice of how cables were arranged was not very smart, because the sound changed when I tried trivial experiments. Which meant that there would be an optimum method of dealing with this - that which minimised any distortion from whatever mechanism was causing these changes.

 

For me, at this point in time, it's materials that are key - not spacing per se. That is, using a "cable lifter" that's the wrong material will do zero, or make things worse - turns out paper is one of the 'good' materials; plenty of people swear by cotton ... which strongly indicates that static behaviours are a major part of what's happening.

 

So, a roll of toilet paper might not be so dumb, after all ... 🙂

Quite literally one of the silliest posts I’ve seen from Frank yet. Cable elevators, really??!! Pray tell me, exactly how do they work? IOW, what do they do? What’s the electromagnetic mechanism that causes speaker cables to, in some way, interact with the floor under them to alter the signal on it’s way from the power amplifier to the speakers? I must have missed that class in graduate school when they discussed that particular phenomenon.🤣  

[Ralf11]

They work like marijuana - your cables get "lifted"

 

... or maybe "boosted"

[sandyk]

40 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Quite literally one of the silliest posts I’ve seen from Frank yet. Cable elevators, really??!! Pray tell me, exactly how do they work? IOW, what do they do? What’s the electromagnetic mechanism that causes speaker cables to, in some way, interact with the floor under them to alter the signal on it’s way from the power amplifier to the speakers? I must have missed that class in graduate school when they discussed that particular phenomenon.🤣  

George

 It is quite conceivable, that at least in some cases, there are mains cables directly under a wooden floor.

 Lifting them will further reduce any possible induction into signal cables

[fas42]

57 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Quite literally one of the silliest posts I’ve seen from Frank yet. Cable elevators, really??!! Pray tell me, exactly how do they work? IOW, what do they do? What’s the electromagnetic mechanism that causes speaker cables to, in some way, interact with the floor under them to alter the signal on it’s way from the power amplifier to the speakers? I must have missed that class in graduate school when they discussed that particular phenomenon.🤣  

 

The point, as I have stated many times, is to reduce static effects. For me. Triboelectric behaviour is one of the nasty ones in the audio game - my first good rig had this in spades, and I didn't realise what was going on at the time. This led to huge frustration - and me giving away serious audio for many, many years ... everything's a learning, George 😜.

 

Many of the rounds with the local audio mate down the road were digging carefully through the physical layout of everything - I would walk in, to hear edgy, 'wrong' sound; and we would experiment with reorganising various bits, to gain much ground.

 

Typical symptoms are, that anything with strong treble, which is complex, just doesn't work - the 'live' quality is not happening, and you switch off what's playing, fast.

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, sandyk said:

George

 It is quite conceivable, that at least in some cases, there are mains cables directly under a wooden floor.

 Lifting them will further reduce any possible induction into signal cables

At that low impedance, How? Maybe line-level signals. 

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

The point, as I have stated many times, is to reduce static effects. For me. Triboelectric behaviour is one of the nasty ones in the audio game - my first good rig had this in spades, and I didn't realise what was going on at the time. This led to huge frustration - and me giving away serious audio for many, many years ... everything's a learning, George 😜.

Yes, you have stated it many times, but that doesn’t make it a real thing. Audio manufacturing companies do this all the time, and some audiophiles as well. Like cable ads where they talk about characteristics that are real at 100 MHz, but they intimate in their advertising that things like skin effect and extreme high frequency roll off occur at audio frequencies (on everybody’s cables, but their own of course). There is no data that supports the notion that triboelectric effects has any effect on speaker cables. After all, speaker cable’s jackets are not made of styrofoam, and static electricity and alternating audio current are different types of electricity. There is no research that even suggests that it’s possible that one can affect the other.

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Many of the rounds with the local audio mate down the road were digging carefully through the physical layout of everything - I would walk in, to hear edgy, 'wrong' sound; and we would experiment with reorganising various bits, to gain much ground.
 

While it is true that signal cables and power cables can, under certain circumstances, radiate interference, it likely doesn’t affect the sound of a stereo system in any measurable or audible way. 

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Typical symptoms are, that anything with strong treble, which is complex, just doesn't work - the 'live' quality is not happening, and you switch off what's playing, fast.

Define “just doesn’t work”! Define “live” quality!

[fas42]

15 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Yes, you have stated it many times, but that doesn’t make it a real thing. Audio manufacturing companies do this all the time, and some audiophiles as well. Like cable ads where they talk about characteristics that are real at 100 MHz, but they intimate in their advertising that things like skin effect and extreme high frequency roll off occur at audio frequencies (on everybody’s cables, but their own of course). There is no data that supports the notion that triboelectric effects has any effect on speaker cables. After all, speaker cable’s jackets are not made of styrofoam, and static electricity and alternating audio current are different types of electricity. There is no research that even suggests that it’s possible that one can affect the other.

While it is true that signal cables and power cables can, under certain circumstances, radiate interference, it likely doesn’t affect the sound of a stereo system in any measurable or audible way. 

 

The experience that I've had, over and over again, is that it does matter - if I don't take it into account, I lose a lot of the SQ that matters - so these days I do this sort of thing automatically, it's part of standard housekeeping with any rig that I have input on. Yes, the precise why is hard to define; in part because the literature on this is so bare - I've tried to track down anything meaningful a number of times, and the number of articles that are useful are in the low, single digits 🙂.

 

One of the more likely scenarios, and this is pure speculation on my part, is that there is constant, low level static discharge occurring within the parts of the cable - and that this is causing a type of HF noise to be generated, and transferred to the conductors; just enough to impact the circuitry to which the cables are attached. Being careful with the cables, and the often mentioned "burning in" is enough to make the issue go away, in most cases.

 

Doesn't have to be styrofoam - anything where plastic of any variety is used could be suspect - my modus operandi is to assume that there could be a problem, until I clearly demonstrate to myself that there's nothing to it, for a particular setup.

 

Quote

Define “just doesn’t work”! Define “live” quality!

 

As mentioned earlier, take a recording "with strong treble, which is complex" - this should be very rich, intense, bowl you over with good vibes, highly satisfying listening - if it sounds messy, congested, something you can only take in small doses, where you're glad when it's over - then it's "not working".

 

"Live quality" means that it sends the same type of signals to your brain as one gets when listening to the real thing - stand on the footpath as a marching band in full roar walks past, right next to you; there's a quality to the sound that nearly all hifi rigs have wet dreams about ... that's why one has to address aspects like static behaviours, IME.

 

[Racerxnet]

15 minutes ago, fas42 said:

stand on the footpath as a marching band in full roar walks past, right next to you; there's a quality to the sound that nearly all hifi rigs have wet dreams about ... that's why one has to address aspects like static behaviours, IME.

 

You are having a wet dream about your laptops competency.

 

MAK

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, Racerxnet said:

 

You are having a wet dream about your laptops competency.

 

MAK

 

You seem to have great trouble understanding the concept, in this thread ... which is, to identify what is lacking in the SQ, and then try to do something about it. Strangely enough, this is how one learns to gain control in other things, such as one's life, and the environment in which one lives - to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

 

If you're poor, you could a) rob a bank, b) live in a fantasy country where there is always a magic machine that dispenses wads of money, so that you could surround yourself with toys that placate you, or c) learn a skill or profession or develop a business, such that other people will provide you with an income that is adequate to your needs ... your call ...

[Racerxnet]

12 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

You seem to have great trouble understanding the concept, in this thread ... which is, to identify what is lacking in the SQ, and then try to do something about it. Strangely enough, this is how one learns to gain control in other things, such as one's life, and the environment in which one lives - to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

 

If you're poor, you could a) rob a bank, b) live in a fantasy country where there is always a magic machine that dispenses wads of money, so that you could surround yourself with toys that placate you, or c) learn a skill or profession or develop a business, such that other people will provide you with an income that is adequate to your needs ... your call ...

 

Frank,

 

I have No problem understanding that a stooge with a laptop thinks everything else High End is incompetent. That's your take, not mine. My concept is that the room is part of ANY system Period. And always will be. People have to work on the room, because they don't carry the system under their arm like you. Hence the laptop!  You don't know me from a hill of beans and my ability to resolve the issues. You never listened to my system, after being invited over with your laptop to compare the qualities of each! 

 

You could; A) Quit blathering about a stupid laptop that cannot compete at any level with what others may have. B) Pull your head out of the sand and realize you start threads just to feel important C) Realize that others may have more skills than you do in life and have been rewarded greatly by their diligence and discipline. D) Understand that people can spend their income on items that may make you feel inferior, but is only a small outlay for their pocketbook.

 

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! 

 

MAK

[fas42]

12 minutes ago, Racerxnet said:

 

Frank,

 

I have No problem understanding that a stooge with a laptop thinks everything else High End is incompetent. That's your take, not mine.

 

Your take is that this is about a laptop - and you don't seem to comprehend that this is merely something I've been curious about, and experimented with, in the last couple of years ... there is a whole suite of activity in audio having nothing to do with computers, for decades prior.

 

Quote

 

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!

 

 

Good to hear, and thanks. Unfortunately, I'm not a natural business man - I'm an ideas person, and have always been that way - and that translated to not being that 'comfortable', these days; for a number of reasons.

[kumakuma]

19 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Unfortunately, I'm not a natural business man - I'm an ideas person, and have always been that way - and that translated to not being that 'comfortable', these days; for a number of reasons.

 

Someone recently told me that it is important to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

[Ralf11]

20 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

Someone recently told me that it is important to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

 

sounds like a neurotransmitter issue