Fas42’s Stereo ‘Magic’

[PeterSt]

Very nice post.

[PeterSt]

Let me try to add an other dimension which I did not see explicitly addressed :

 

Most audiophiles are sure to be in heaven long gone. They claim "it can't be better" and "I am done with my system - it is OK now".

I have been there too (this is something like 14-15 years ago) where I explicitly said so.

Meanwhile, however, I was still working on getting annoyances out of the way. Like too harsh sounds. I thought they couldn't be removed, until I could succeed with one of them. Since then (now maybe 10 years ago) I explicitly say that I am never done with my system; it can always improve.

 

What I since those 10 years ago am saying is that almost everybody (this will include everybody who reads this) unconsciously is stil taking hurdles. Hurdles of not the best sound always. Hurdles which actually cause you to constantly think that your wife wants the volume down, while you don't want to do that. But it feels sooo uncomfortable.

 

Only when these hurdles are all out of the way, you can go full speed with the real improvements. All else with the hurdles, lead to subjective judgments because you are working on those bass nodes first. Or shattering sound for some recordings (and meanwhile - again unconsciously - blame the recording).

 

A good measure is your wife indeed. Once see stops asking you to put down the volume, or even takes control in putting it up, then you can be assured you're in the (very) OK direction. And mind you, over here it is ~90dBSPL each and every evening for 3-4 hours in a row.

Additionally it is way cool to observe (by me, as a person) that so many emails or forum posts talk about "my wife now even sist down next to me on the listening couch !". Dozens and dozens of times. And all I mostly do is provide one small element to this Walhalla. Still, I explicitly use the women-ears because it is not their hobby. They are inherently annoyed by our noise. When that stops you must be on to something ...

[PeterSt]

56 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Of course, any audio connector that makes hot before return and breaks the return before breaking the hot is simply wrong-headed, but we're stuck with it it looks like.

 

Funny, I read exactly the same in @sandyk's post. still he is not talking about that at all, when reading back on it. 

George, did you know that such RCA plugs exist ? They mechanically move (consist of two parts sliding in/out each other). I must have a couple of them somewhere, but I actually don't use RCA any more. Only BNC.

[PeterSt]

9 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I've never heard a steel case or any other kind, vibrating to the music unless it's left unscrewed.

 

You can always hear the material, George. OK, not "you" as such maybe, but it is easily possible. Btw, I think the given example was (pressed) sheet metal and that is the worst.

 

No matter how hard a cover is screwed on, you can still hear the cover (acoustic resonance). You are into cars, right ? well, use that rubber(ish) stuff that seals all kinds of boxes etc. inside the motor compartment (can be bought on a roll so now you perhaps know what I mean). Put that under the cover (where it touches the cabinet) and listen again ...

 

Proper damping of e.g. a D/A converter is an almost impossible job. The best results I had with the DAC floating on water. Yes you read right. And don't do this at home.

I stopped using this because the result depended on the water level; you may be able to imagine that the stack of water under the DAC is important for its own resonance towards the "floor", but merely how the floor - under influence of music - hammers on to the DAC. Now, the water level always changes because it vaporizes. So each 4 days or so I had to add water and I always knew because it was audible that the water level dropped too much.

So for 6 months or so I had been watering my DAC. Who says I'm crazy ?

 

  

 

[PeterSt]

4 hours ago, sandyk said:

5 hours ago, PeterSt said:

They mechanically move (consist of two parts sliding in/out each other). I must have a couple of them somewhere, but I actually don't use RCA any more.

 

https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/rca-connectors/4848884/

 

Exactly. Those.

And I can tell you all, they are a great relief when used, because you suddenly can make connections without a blast of loud hum, btw no preamp or other analogue attenuation means assumed.

(never tried that with BNC anyway so actually no clue at this moment how they are arranged re this matter)

[PeterSt]

4 hours ago, Hugo9000 said:

  That's awesome that you documented it with photos!  What are you doing now instead to get that liquid clarity of sound?   

 

Haha.

 

This thread could be about what's all between our ears. OK, possibly it is about Frank's only, but I wouldn't be so sure about it;

 

This gag with the water has not been repeated by anyone, no matter how often I advised to try it. Of course it is super dangerous as well and it actually requires something like olive oil or another some oil which is not conductive. Point is, that fluid always has different properties from water (usually with higher density (more thick)) and then it does not work anymore. Mind you, the damping is required from two directions : through air on to the DAC (musical pressure waves, mainly the micro stuff hence higher frequencies) and via the floor and now the lower frequencies.

Side note : at that time I was playing with a real time FFT analysis always on. So when the music played I could watch the FFT and this is exactly how this "idea" emerged. And mind you, no matter how softly I tried to walk the floor, you'd see that as 20Hz and beyond (lower) on the FFT. People just have no clue how impactive the room is for capturing the musical pressure waves which are fed back to the DAC. In that DAC we try to maintain sub-femto seconds clock systems.

With the water damping system, I could not see me walking the floor any more.

 

Back to the between the ears thing : exactly. It sounded like liquid. Of course I am quite positive that it sounds like liquid because I knew it was floating on liquid, but still ..

These days it goes way beyond that ...

 

So we now make cables. Mind you, digital cables, like for USB. I can hear exactly what material is used in there.

For a digital cable ? C'mon Peter !

So that.

And yes, I obviously know what material is used in there. But the sound just receives the properties of that. At least between my ears ...

 

The nasty thing now is, that once you have the idea it works that way, you start making the cable from the other end. You take a material, be sure it is lushy, name the cable like that, even give it the color, and out it goes.

Works for everybody.

The mere sad thing is that when this same cable is made flexible to the sense of how the (new) materials are used in there - them being shields only - not only I myself can hear the difference between how the materials are configured, but everybody can. Like I provide software (playback) settings which are interpreted the same by everyone, now the configuration of a cable is received the same by everyone (but one so far, but alas). So this is not between our ears, it seems.

 

Someone said that these days we "tweak" by means of buying new DACs etc. Well, I think it is hardly about that. It is far more about how to make things consistently working with each other. About all the groundloops and noise we (most of us) can not see but can find by empirically trying / finding out. And indeed it is about the knowledge and reference that "things can be done". Without that you'll try nothing, have your sound as it is and possibly your name is George (no offense intended, but it is typical stereotype thinking of many of us in here). You're in the state of "can't be better", "doesn't need to be better" and "don't BS me with snake oils".

Now try sugar cubes (if someone knows what I am talking about).

[PeterSt]

2 minutes ago, semente said:

I know someone who had his record player on a shelf hanged from the ceiling with cottong strings

 

Believe it or not, but when the house was built I'm living in right now, I designed holes in the ceiling for cords to be attached to the ceiling of the floor above (as in 2nd floor) so my speakers could hang on those cords, disconnected from the floor (and ceiling) of the listening room.

In the end I found it too much hassle and it wasn't make for real.

 

If I'm thinking of it now, each of the both bathrooms above those corners of the listening room, would have had a steel cable or something vertically going through them. Not sure what to do with that. Play harp while taking a shower ?

[PeterSt]

17 minutes ago, Teresa said:

By the same token extremely close miked recordings will never have correct timbre

 

My father, playing the main (solo) viola in the orchestra (also owning a sound studio back at the time) some times had to play with a microphone on his viola. He hated that. It was impossible to get any realistic viola sound from that.

 

Although all differently positioned, all are wrong of course because the sound of the instrument only expresses at somewhat further distance :

 

 

 

 

 

 

It would be similar to you listening to a speaker 50 cm from the floor at 30cm distance with your nose in the woofer, hoping that you'd be able to hear the tweeter which is at 1m50, too.

 

 

[PeterSt]

14 minutes ago, semente said:

I have never tried sugar cubes (I prefer Bjork solo ? ) but I did use some ugly-green dry floral foam when I was still living with my parents...

 

Hmm ... that would indeed have properties I like (feel the stuff and you can hear the sound). But, it will age and could be too dry / too hard. FWIW, his is what I consider the best means of footer for what one can buy :

 

 

If you look close at the bottom block, you say layers. It is about that. Plus of course the material itself, which is anti static foam. This too ages somewhat (may get pressed-in after a while and depending on how the device's footer presses into it, hence the supporting surface).

 

There has been one individual somewhere who created the exact right "kristalline" footers. They were quite expensive, but I didn't care about that. What I did care about is that the guy vanished before I could order with him.

I think I spent a year throughput in finding the best material for footers and make something myself. Now the fun where all comes together (for my silly own stories) : http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=2838.msg30071#msg30071

That is in a thread which is all about the floating DAC experience and if you scroll back many pages, you'll see that this was put up as a riddle for people and how the first one who could tell what I was up to, could win a prize.

That prize was : my own creation of the best footer material, which was sugar of a certain size, that compressed to a certain density, vacuumized in plastic of a certain height and size, and next it was shipped to the winner. He, named Coen, never had been made aware of what it was and probably will have thought it was drugs (3 bags of it).

I never dared to ship this with the NOS1 (which is what these footers were for) because I was sure that at some stage it would turn bad on customs somewhere.

I still use these and it does not age or compress or anything.

 

Btw, this is not related at all to the sugar cubes I mentioned. That is something entirely different which alters the sound like crazy, but mainly makes it inaccurate (for NOS1 owners).

 

 

 

 

 

[PeterSt]

19 minutes ago, fas42 said:

and it's remarkable that others have not seen or investigated these sort of behaviours.

 

Nah. Maybe it is remarkable that someone is as stupid as me doing such a thing. Btw, only few audio manufacturers would have the analyzer for this to begin with. And let's be honest, I too only did this in 2014 while I had the gear for 3 years by then. But why did I actually start with that ? ...

 

I was tuning the low frequency of the back then new Orelo MKII speaker. This was close miking (sorry) to the woofers while I in parallel wanted to know how low music normally goes, in-room. It is there where I learned (empirically) how most of the CD's are high passed for LP and that, for example, the MFSL recordings usually do not do that. So for fun : often the master is nothing better or different, but still this high-pass is omitted. Compare the two versions regarding this of The Wall and the very first track. Now you know ...

But of course first have a speaker which can render this "ambient" because it is all about that. A kick drum doesn't do 20Hz. But it's ambient roll (especially in the larger space) does.

A kettle drum is quite OK for most systems. Unless it is used in a church. Now you suddenly miss out.

 

One learns this by observing the FFT in real time for a couple of months. Only idiots do this.

But, and this is again a bit you, Frank, now I know this I have it in mind and it has become my reference. If something goes odd, I can hear where to be while what's there to hear for real (directly) probably isn't even audible. But mind you, 20 Hz may not be audible, but it may influence the remainder (up to ~200Hz in my case) severely. Too much LF (because of something being wrong) and all else goes wrong.

Or don't buy these speakers. Haha.

 

Edit : I meant these for comparison :

 

[PeterSt]

1 minute ago, kumakuma said:

 

Or you could just start with well recorded music to begin with... 

 

Bieber makes new music, I heard.

[PeterSt]

Here is a larger thread exactly about older recordings and how they suddenly started to work for me :

HOLY sh*t (by Bill Evans)

Very small excerpts :

 

Phasure NOS1 owner already know : Yes, that old stuff suddenly seems to sound "great" while before it just sounded bad to today's well recorded material. But to be honest "great" only means that we can suddenly normally listen to it, and nostalgic values come across.

and

But now there was yesterday; It was by accident that I went back in time even further; AlainGr pointed me indirectly at Waltz for Debby by The Bill Evans Trio, because a HiRes version of it popped up at HDTracks, and listening to AlainGr who said that sounds superb, I thought to play the CD version of it (I don't have the HiRes ... yet). WOW I have never ever heard anything like this. It is my miles and miles and miles the far best recording I have ever experienced. Recording ? man, sheer live !! Ehm, this is from 1961.

 

From there I went further and further back in time if it only remained to be stereo.

Point is, it takes a few things to let this work. But once it does it sounds better than today's modern recording techniques. Anyway, that thread is largely about this.

 

The thread is more so about the endless search for the better recording / mastering version. The particular Bill Evans example is a most tough one and it appeared that only one person (I could find) had the same version I have. Most probably this was because I got it from him. LOL.

All the other versions (so many exist !) sound like double sh*t. The Hires ahead of all.

 

[PeterSt]

5 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

do you happen to have a vibration reduction vs. freq. graph on that stuff?

 

(you may want to edit your post because the quoting went a bit odd)

 

Yeah, I was thinking of that yesterday. But I'm almost sure I have not because it wasn't an explicit project. The microphone and analyzer stuff was there for other reasons and along the way I thought to try it. That it wasn't a specific project I can see on the fact that it emerged right in the middle of another subject (thread). Btw, which was about USB noise. So go figure.

[PeterSt]

11 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

do you happen to have a vibration reduction vs. freq. graph on that stuff?

 

Also, it is quite impossible to measure, or I don't know how to do it. Thus, take a pulse shot and measure the impulse response won't do it, because you'd think you measure refections. Instead however, you may be seeing the room moving. This really is so. Thus all we can do is make the room move and measure that. And this would be implied by just walking. And obviously I coincidentally saw that happening, when focusing on the sub low frequencies (the speaker was tuned up to 17Hz straight) which implies I set the FFT bins to that area (say under 40Hz only).

It doesn't even matter where in the room you walk because the (concrete) floor is of one piece and walking it would gulf relatively endlessly (for distance).

 

While this is about the lowest frequencies, to a certain extent it works similar for higher frequencies. Up to the point that the floor (or the floor via walls or ceiling etc.) does not move any more. It will be about self resonance too (not me ).

 

Another anecdotal little story :

When working on these low frequencies you may run into all sorts of strange trouble, *because* your LF waves are / remain nice sines. Thus, the more they are that, the more energy they have. So what happens in my situation ? 

I am trying the limits of the LF, but at 16Hz I always have a boost. What I perceive from it (audibly ?!? -> can't be !) is the same I hear when playing movies about depth bombs etc.). And you now what ? ALL my doors have a self resonance of 16Hz. So once 16 Hz plays, all adjacent doors rattle at that rate. But the rattle implies more square waves and so I hear them. Freaky.

 

Because I am really crazy and stupid, I once set up the Schumann Resonance acoustically. What is it ? 7.8Hz or so. I wanted the electronic device on a Sunday (shops closed) ...

In my blindness I heard nothing so it did not work. Meanwhile I did not notice that it did not work because the speaker of the time just did what I asked (in software setup wave) but it was not loud enough. So I made it louder and I recalled a boost of additional 20dB. Still nothing.

I forgot about it and later I went upstairs. The whole G-D house was shaking !! Really so. Btw, a stone house.

I thought WTF and went down again, still not thinking of my experiment (still running, which I forgot). Saw the speaker from a distance (easily 200lbs+) which was displacing itself back and forth for a sheer 10cm or so. Man, that looked scary. Anyway clear : the thing self resonated at IIRC something like 1Hz because of the severe 7.8 Hz in there, the (15") diaphragm moving back and forth like crazy.

[PeterSt]

9 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Easy to hear why it went down so well - my HP laptop, alive again, has no trouble conveying the transient bite of the piano notes, just on the internal speakers.

 

Yes, and that is about all (and probably fake(d) either).

So, No Frank. It doesn't come that easy. What you've got there is a most lousy representation. What do you actually think that high frequency rattle in the background is ?

 

You may go for the venue only (which is imaginable) but SQ is to be ahead of all, for me. There is no SQ in there. Easy to hear. 

[PeterSt]

5 hours ago, fas42 said:

I was just pointed to this track, on another forum, by someone saying "I just listened to the Lemon Song on Tidal, Mqa and non, and I was struck how awful this recording sounds on my system.

 

All the LZ's fail on the MQA versions. It is or that they were among the first done (MQA'd) or that they are too good on the cymbals, which at least the first 5 are special for (unlike any other rock - maybe of all ages). I must add that I theoretically only compare with the Barry Diament transfers as they are the best anyway.

 

Whether the MQA is from an "original", a remaster, a remaster super de luxe XXX in giftwrap or whether from Tidal or from hiresaudio.com, it all doesn't matter. They hurt.

 

(Thus) Interestingly they are the only ones who consistently fail on MQA.

What's also a possibility is that they didn't get the Barry Diament transfers for the source - I actually didn't investigate that, or even thought it. I don't know the numbers by heart, but the BD transfers would show a DR of 14 while all else is 10 at best. Something like that. And this seriously matters ...

[PeterSt]

On 10/16/2018 at 11:23 PM, semente said:

@PeterSt you're the expert on cymbals. How good is Bill Evans' "You Must Believe In Spring"?

 

Observed from the YouTube Frank just gave ? mweh. But that is a loose mess all over. Energy to brain-dead I'd say.

 

But while I started out last night with this album, track 01, to get in the mood - the cymbals in that track were as odd as can be. But it remained at that unless we count in the shizzle/ticking whatever in the first few minutes of the 2nd track (Frank put up). After that all was right, unlike what my poor headphone shows me from this YouTube. I thought it was so good that I forgot to switch off this album and hip-hop over to my regular stuff.

 

You can hear from the piano how all should render and from there you can hear that the cymbals are a bit too laid back. I mean, literally. They are farther in the back (in the studio) than justified, but I think this is also because of how the jazz venue was back in those days (although this is not that old (1977)). At least it was sticks instead of brushes.

 

I am experimenting a bit with (^2) Interlinks, and if that wasn't causing it, the cymbals sounded too much "China".

But it can well be that this was used for real.

 

It is relatively easy to let a system exhibit all cymbals as China ones because it is a matter of coloring into a certain "dark" direction. So cymbals can come across as too small sized, too long (now mouth spitting will also be audible), too white (sterile / too analytical system) or China (too dark colored). 

I blame my current Blaxius^2 configuration on the latter, but oh boy what does that make the piano sing.

[PeterSt]

I'll be damned. This is from a Bill Evans YouTube from 1979.

 

 

A mild one, but one.

[PeterSt]

1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

I am experimenting a bit with (^2) Interlinks, and if that wasn't causing it, the cymbals sounded too much "China".

 

But it can well be that this was used for real.

 

On topic, here you can actually see how I go about with system improvement (which, mind you, is thus not for myself only).

 

You see it happening that I am a kind of disturbed by the China cymbal observation, knowing from experience that it can easily be an exhibit of coloring. And if anything, I hate that. I can only work with neutral or else whatever it is, is rejected. For that, one must obviously know to some extent how instruments (in rooms etc.) should sound.

 

The interesting thing with the China cymbal sound, is that these cymbals thus really exist. Same of course with the tiny small cymbals. They too exist. But if you hear them, where those the ones in use ?

I take nothing for granted.

 

In this case I was testing / observing a new configuration of my Blaxius^2 (only new since last Saturday) and it occurred to me that - apart from the great piano sound - the cymbal I heard could show a too much coloring setup (as a whole). But was it the interlink configuration ?

Today, the next day I thus (?) sort out whether it can be true I heard such a cymbal. And well, the result we see above. Probably it was true (in the older YouTubes (like end 60's) sure not, but that is to be expected. '77 I really wondered as per my earlier post today).

With this kind of proof, it can thus be my judgment that the cable configuration is OK. Which is a kind of relief because possibly I never experienced such a good 3-4 hours of listening like last night. Would that be in a coloring venue than this would NOT be nice. It would tell me that I like coloring better than neutral and the kind of death penalty is put to that for myself, by myself.

 

Btw, the double bass from Frank's last YouTube sounds like a (disconnected) cello. But it is a double bass right in the middle of the play in reality so something is slightly off with my PC headphone sh*tty system.

Anyway, this is how I work and it is a continuous process. Day in day out.

[PeterSt]

One last more about cymbals; Remember this one ?

 

On 10/14/2018 at 5:22 AM, PeterSt said:

What you've got there is a most lousy representation. What do you actually think that high frequency rattle in the background is ?

 

Well, look / listen here :

 

 

(and in my earlier today's post I called it "shizzle")

 

So this is a sizzle cymbal and the "nails" in there have a sound and life of their own. Observing the YouTubes of the Bill Evans Trio from the 60's you can see that they use just this. So now you know what the high frequency rattle is on the Last Waltz YouTube (and then implied by brushes which fairly inaudibly hit the cymbal but waking the nails ).

Not that you could hear that on the Last Waltz YouTube ... (so bad it is).

 

More "news" could be that a DAC like some dCS would show all cymbals like this. So with that experience we know that when cymbals sound too long but like sizzle cymbals always, something is amiss again. When you don't know you may like it for the length of the cymbal, but when you do you will also know that it can't be right that suddenly all drummers have a sizzle in their kit. They are just not common enough to be everywhere. Same with the intended ugly sound of the China cymbal. You hear it in everything ? then something really is wrong. Well, not the best.

[PeterSt]

4 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

with a differential time delay, altered phase and slightly different amplitude

 

The emphasis would be beyond math.

Theoretically your "slightly" would be correct, of course. But I don't think it can be utilized. Altered phase (= time delay) Yes.

[PeterSt]

12 hours ago, MrD said:

or noise free system.

 

Hi MrD,

 

What does it mean "a noise free system" ?

 

Regards,

Peter

 

 

[PeterSt]

37 minutes ago, MrD said:

The audio signal is near 100 pct free of corruption.

 

Bbbbut ... that does not make sense ?

So I am sorry - but what is "100 pct free of corruption" now means ?

I am not playing word games, but merely try to point out that by such qualifications we again go nowhere. The "Frank" thing. And you were trying to support Frank, right ? 

[PeterSt]

9 hours ago, fas42 said:

But doing such is meaningless, if, for example, the audio system is a fully integrated unit - the simpler the audio chain, the less opportunities for this type of inteference to manifest.

 

So Yes MrD, in similar fashion I wanted to respond to your :

 

On 10/28/2018 at 6:50 PM, MrD said:

In my system I use 5 separate chassis amplifiers,preamp, electronic crossover,cd transport,tube DAC. The star ground scheme is about 30 pounds of 00 stranded copper cable. I needed that kind of parallel circuit to achieve a interference or noise free system.

 

but since you are so keen on the "no distortion" thing, I thought to better ask you first what this means in your book so I could check the merits of what you are saying, knowing how difficult it is with such a "complicated" setup.

 

But instead I am pictured as a troll and must study a few things. Oh well.

 

Do you, btw, already have an answer ? 

[PeterSt]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

IOW, to be continued ...

 

After 20 years ?