Fas42’s Stereo ‘Magic’

[botrytis]

5 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Hi Anthony,

wow, that's some pretty impressive weight in those amplifiers! My Mephisto weighs in at a puny 108 kg!! It is the stereo version. I could have gone for mono blocks (doubling the weight ha ha) but it still wouldn't come close to yours. I previously owned the reference one Gryphon mono blocks. I didn't need mono blocks this time especially since I upgraded to the Vivid speakers.

 

I am now in the Hunter Valley and if I recall correctly you are up Toowoomba way. We must catch up one day after the big V is gone.

 

 

LOL my Pioneer M-22 weighs  a puny 55 lbs and it is only an anemic 30 WPC (actually, when it was recently rebuilt by a friend, it measured 38 WPC) 

[botrytis]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

The speakers are by Edifier, and they are the most impressive bit of kit I've come across, as value for money units. This is the first time I've had to do something to tame the bass, which was just too intense on some tracks; I haven't pushed them to the limits of what volumes they can pump out, as yet, but they can go to as loud as one would want in a room, with no signs of stress, etc.

 

It maybe be that your speakers have the classic bass hump to make them sound like they have more bass than they actually have (what Bose does and others). They are ported, I bet, and that is the issue, in expensive design can have some limitations.

[Jeff_N]

Last time I looked in here was thirty or forty pages ago. I can't believe this farce is still ongoing. Did he ever post one single photograph?

 

I'm surprised you guys haven't figured out: he has no stereo; there is no friend with a "sorted" "rig" "up the road."

 

He just wants attention. He wants you to believe that he's outwitted all those hifi manufacturers and you nouveau riches who've bought your outrageously expensive shiny toys. His non-existent ten dollar transistor radio beats them all, because he's clever enough to pay attention to all the little things until his Panasonic radio suddenly clicks, the clouds part, the "rig" disappears, and the voices of a thousand angels spring to life in his basement.

 

It's funny to engage with him for five minutes, but I don't know why you would want to waste any more time than that.

 

As I said forty pages ago, we should program a bot that posts stuff like "Woe is me! I have more money than sense, and I spent a hundred thousand dollars on my 'rig,' but it still sounds like poo! If only there were someone to help me." Then when this guy gets all lathered up talking about his "system," the bot keeps replying "Really? But how? Tell me more, PLEASE!" It will keep him occupied for years.

 

 

[botrytis]

23 minutes ago, Jeff_N said:

Last time I looked in here was thirty or forty pages ago. I can't believe this farce is still ongoing. Did he ever post one single photograph?

 

I'm surprised you guys haven't figured out: he has no stereo; there is no friend with a "sorted" "rig" "up the road."

 

He just wants attention. He wants you to believe that he's outwitted all those hifi manufacturers and you nouveau riches who've bought your outrageously expensive shiny toys. His non-existent ten dollar transistor radio beats them all, because he's clever enough to pay attention to all the little things until his Panasonic radio suddenly clicks, the clouds part, the "rig" disappears, and the voices of a thousand angels spring to life in his basement.

 

It's funny to engage with him for five minutes, but I don't know why you would want to waste any more time than that.

 

As I said forty pages ago, we should program a bot that posts stuff like "Woe is me! I have more money than sense, and I spent a hundred thousand dollars on my 'rig,' but it still sounds like poo! If only there were someone to help me." Then when this guy gets all lathered up talking about his "system," the bot keeps replying "Really? But how? Tell me more, PLEASE!" It will keep him occupied for years.

 

 

 

Well, this thread is like the local bar. Come in, set a spell, and chat

[kumakuma]

12 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Not presuming to talk for Chris but IIRC I do recall his suggestion to Frank along the lines of keeping his discussion of his 'method' to the couple of threads that are ongoing and relate to the topic. I think Frank said he was declined the ability to start up new threads that relate to 'the method' . If I am correct in both these things, my interpretation is that the intention is/was for most of this craziness to be contained to one or two threads and those threads can be placed on ignore

 

Rather than banning Frank entirely as other audio forums have done, Chris's approach appears to be trying to confine him to a limited number of threads.

 

In other words, a strange combination of social distancing and partial herd immunity rather than a vaccine. 👺

[botrytis]

2 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

Rather than banning Frank entirely as other audio forums have done, Chris's approach appears to be trying to confine him to a limited number of threads.

 

In other words, a combination of social distancing and possible herd immunity rather than a vaccine. 👺

 

We all have a crazy uncle and maybe Frank is just the crazy uncle for this forum....

[Jeff_N]

27 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

Well, this thread is like the local bar. Come in, set a spell, and chat

 

And listen to the annoying neighborhood wino say the same thing over and over.

 

"I worked in that mill for thirty years, and they lay me off? Thirty years I tell you. Thirty years."

[Confused]

19 hours ago, fas42 said:

Okay, now that I've seen David's system, I can immediately see things that I would address - unless he has already done something about that. To me, the routing of cabling needs a lot of attention - and would be something I would do before even turning it on.

Out of interest, how much audible difference to the sound would you expect this to make?

[botrytis]

10 minutes ago, Confused said:

Out of interest, how much audible difference to the sound would you expect this to make?

 

You mean measurable or subjective difference? I do not think routing the cables will make a measurable difference. Subjective, yes, as your brain fills in what you expect to hear.

[Confused]

1 hour ago, botrytis said:

 

You mean measurable or subjective difference? I do not think routing the cables will make a measurable difference. Subjective, yes, as your brain fills in what you expect to hear.

I stated audible.  So if it could genuinely be heard, rather that imagined, then I would expect that it would also be possible to measure. 

[botrytis]

21 minutes ago, Confused said:

I stated audible.  So if it could genuinely be heard, rather that imagined, then I would expect that it would also be possible to measure. 

 

Not always. I will give an example from my research background. I was working with a protein that is blue due to it containing copper. The instruments I was using to measure it's purity were not as sensitive as the human eye for the colour blue. In fact at 610 nm - I was seeing differences in colour when the instrument was barely measuring any absorbance. I knew there was a difference, the enzyme activity assay said there was a difference, the 610 nm measurement says there was not. 

 

This can be the same thing that happens with audio. That is why one needs to divorce other senses when we listen, sometimes, they tend to get in the way. And just because we measure a difference doesn't mean there will be a perceived difference.

 

It just depends

[fas42]

11 hours ago, Confused said:

To be honest, I cannot.  However, if you advise what you are picking up, it might provide some clarity as to how and what you are picking up as weaknesses based on YouTube clips.  This might be enlightening.

 

Well, I've just been enlightened!! I jumped to a couple of spots, said, right, there's a clear anomaly, noted the timing, was about to post those settings, and then thought, I might just check something - and repeated the playing from where I had written the time - in the video which had been paused in the meantime. What??! ... the quality had jumped up to a much higher standard ... what was going on?? Some more checking, including on a completely different video, on the same YT channel - same behaviour!

 

Okay, what appears to be going on, for me, is a combination of how YT, the browser, and my laptop works - if I'm listening in the conventional way, just letting the clip run from the beginning, then the processing overheads caused enough SQ issues to very obvious - which I attributed to the event being recorded. Now, I have often downloaded a clip video, and always found the SQ to be far better if I extracted the audio, and played it on my preferred app - which I attributed to a better playback chain, at that moment.

 

But the direct, instantaneous YT feed, interacting with my computer, was the real culprit. Okay, you might say, then why does playing a true source clip come across well most times? My thought is that if there is enough "margin of error" in the actual quality of what the source is, then the perceived SQ will be OK - but if it has dropped significantly, by being the recording of a good replay of the same, then the combined losses of that whole chain are too much - and it will sound 'wrong'.

 

I've just learnt something, 😵 ... if the YT audio rendering is suspect at some point, then merely 'rewind' to the point, meaning that the 'buffered' data is then used, rather than the instantaneous feed - which may be enough to lift the quality to a sufficient level ... 🙂. The obvious alternative is to download, extract, etc - but this is overkill for most YT viewing.

 

So, what I will do is extract the audio from that Gryphon clip - and listen more carefully ... to give it a "fair hearing", 😉.

[fas42]

5 hours ago, Confused said:

Out of interest, how much audible difference to the sound would you expect this to make?

 

It can be a very great deal ... the original good rig was exceedingly simple, with short, very direct runs of cable ... BUT, the speaker cables were lying on the carpeted floor! In hindsight, I suspect this was THE issue - but I had zero knowledge of such things being important back then ... these days, I go to "extreme" lengths to get this right - and it's trivially easy to hear when one gets it wrong. Symptoms are that the sound "goes dead" - the life and sparkle that natural sounds have is sucked out of the music; it becomes boring, tedious to listen to.

[sandyk]

20 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

 

So, what I will do is extract the audio from that Gryphon clip - and listen more carefully ... to give it a "fair hearing", 😉.

 Yahoo Serious ? 

 157kb/s MONO is the normal audio, and even if you have suitable Video editing S/W , the best that you will get from this clip is 288kb/s MONO, which is way too poor to properly evaluate any recording of a claimed Audiophile system.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eh03nu2k4gjopms/Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1- Daniil Trifonov-0x0002.aac?dl=0             288 kb/s .aac MONO

[botrytis]

Frank,

 

We have been talking about listening to the best copy possible and you want to go to a youtube video? That is like taking a 96K MP3 and comparing it to a DSD64 file. That is utter nonsense.

 

You have been obfuscating for too long in this thread.

 

What is your system? We have shown our hands, time to show yours. No more bluffing.

[fas42]

You're missing the point, Alex - every processing operation is like a reel tape generational loss - use the best R2R tape decks, do a copy of the master, do a copy of that copy, again and again - by the 20th iteration, the SQ will most likely be pretty mediocre, and obviously so. In spite of the fact that the master was pristine, and you used the best machines to do the generational thing.

 

The name of the game is to reduce those losses, when you listen to the replay of something, to the lowest possible level - if you do it really well, then subjectively, it will be indistinguishable from the source - the contents of the recording you're listening to. The very best audiophile playback will always be 'lossy', but hopefully you will get away with it, in the flesh - it will sound, "as good as it gets". But add further "generational losses", like the direct YT playback, as I described, then the imperfections of that first playback are now magnified enough to be clearly heard.

[botrytis]

1 minute ago, fas42 said:

You're missing the point, Alex - every processing operation is like a reel tape generational loss - use the best R2R tape decks, do a copy of the master, do a copy of that copy, again and again - by the 20th iteration, the SQ will most likely be pretty mediocre, and obviously so. In spite of the fact that the master was pristine, and you used the best machines to do the generational thing.

 

The name of the game is to reduce those losses, when you listen to the replay of something, to the lowest possible level - if you do it really well, then subjectively, it will be indistinguishable from the source - the contents of the recording you're listening to. The very best audiophile playback will always be 'lossy', but hopefully you will get away with it, in the flesh - it will sound, "as good as it gets". But add further "generational losses", like the direct YT playback, as I described, then the imperfections of that first playback are now magnified enough to be clearly heard.

 

You are missing the point, starting with a lesser initial subject, based on what you say, it will only get worse. Why start there?

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Frank,

 

We have been talking about listening to the best copy possible and you want to go to a youtube video? That is like taking a 96K MP3 and comparing it to a DSD64 file. That is utter nonsense.

 

You have been obfuscating for too long in this thread.

 

What is your system? We have shown our hands, time to show yours. No more bluffing.

 

No matter how poor a system is for reproducing, for where you're listening - it still creates a level playing field. You listen, on that terrible system, to a recording of a piano, and the playback of a capture of that piano, on a supposedly perfect system, which are both on the one recording - say, first real, then playback, then real, etc. It that ideal rig used did its job, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the real, from the playback.

 

The system I have is trivially obvious, and is as stated; the tweaks and workarounds are not simple, and completely invisible, or meaningless, in pictures. Thinking that an image of what I've done will tell you anything useful merely points that you don't understand my message.

[fas42]

Sorry, got some To Do stuff happening - back later ...

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

It can be a very great deal ... the original good rig was exceedingly simple, with short, very direct runs of cable ... BUT, the speaker cables were lying on the carpeted floor! In hindsight, I suspect this was THE issue - but I had zero knowledge of such things being important back then ... these days, I go to "extreme" lengths to get this right - and it's trivially easy to hear when one gets it wrong. Symptoms are that the sound "goes dead" - the life and sparkle that natural sounds have is sucked out of the music; it becomes boring, tedious to listen to.

 

We look forward to the Video Frank ! 😃

[kumakuma]

45 minutes ago, fas42 said:

The system I have is trivially obvious, and is as stated; the tweaks and workarounds are not simple, and completely invisible, or meaningless, in pictures. Thinking that an image of what I've done will tell you anything useful merely points that you don't understand my message.

 

I believe folks here are looking for proof that your equipment actually exists so I suggest that you also include a copy of today's newspaper.

 

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

40 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Sorry, got some To Do stuff happening - back later ...

 

Coming back is not really in doubt - its all the other stuff you say when you're here 🤷‍♂️

[kumakuma]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

But add further "generational losses", like the direct YT playback, as I described, then the imperfections of that first playback are now magnified enough to be clearly heard.

 

This makes zero sense.

[fas42]

14 hours ago, Confused said:

Maybe your phone is unambitious or needs sorting?

 

Or maybe it is far away?

 

Mainly unambitious ... it had designs on being one of those glorious bricks of the '80s - but it just missed the retro boom ...

[fas42]

1 hour ago, kumakuma said:

 

I believe folks here are looking for proof that your equipment actually exists so I suggest that you also include a copy of today's newspaper.

 

 

My God, I'm so skint I can't afford a basic DVD player, or $US250 speakers - how can audiophiles sink to such levels ... the truth is, you're going to get a picture of a column of the stuff that I showed in an earlier post, with a black curtain behind; and a large TV next to it, on a simple entertainment unit, with the DVD player on one of its shelves ... that's it, boys and girls - and I'm going to be pissed, because I will have to move a lot of stuff to get anything which resembles a decent frontal shot.

 

Now, if that excites the pants off everyone, you can motivate me to move the stuff in the way, in some fashion 😁 - you see, the audio fits in with with what's already there - it has no special, "home".