Fas42’s Stereo ‘Magic’

[sandyk]

9 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Looking back on the tweaking, and recognizing reality -- the ED Beta video quality sucked by todays standards....  Why bother, except for my self-fulfilled personal hobby at the time?  Any professional that I would demo the results to would necessarily be a little condescendingly kind and say something like 'that a boy', and try to hold back their disdain.   If I would have pushed my hobby onto other people, they would have claimed that I was foolish or insane to tout my 'Emperors New Clothes'

 

 Nevertheless, my own experience with a couple of good SVHS machines was that they were still capable of recording TV at a higher quality than almost all of the archived material from that period that you see on YouTube these days.

[fas42]

14 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I’m not casting you as a complete villain (or even a partial villan). I don’t think that you are lying, or that you are crazy. I do think that you have deluded yourself into believing something that cannot be, but I’m sure that you honestly believe what you assert to be true.

so, you have no real cabinet for the speakers, and the separation between them is only a foot or so. And you don’t EQ the speakers to get rid of the boom-box peak n the mid bass region. Thanks for the clarification.

Well, it is the weakest link. 

 

George, the simple facts are this: 35 years ago I was tweaking a pretty decent setup, in completely conventional ways - and one day it transformed, subjectively, from normal stereo presentation to the whole 3D shebang, with all the special qualities as described by Blackmorec - everything else has followed logically from that - so I either deluded myself, out of thin air, that something I had never read about should spontaneously occur ... or, I stumbled across a behaviour of the human hearing system ... now, which is more likely to be the case, hmmm?

 

The cabinet for the Sharp speakers is about half the thickness of my original B&W speakers, but both are made from the same, "junk", chipboad. Separation is about 4 feet. I can't abide the sound of the cheap bass bump so beloved by many; and no system of mine has ever had that characteristic.

[fas42]

14 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

 

Why not invite some AS members to have a listen. Not just telling us all but showing us just how good your system is !

 

Well, as I have said on numerous occasions, at the moment it's in halfway house status - I'm pretty tired these days, and it's been left to rot, yet again, because there are too many other things in life going on - there's always the clips on YouTube of the recordings of the NAD and Sharp in action, done when I was enthused enough.

 

I get more of a kick from getting N. nearby to push his rigs into the good zone - there's always an issue of "What can be looked at, to further the SQ?".

 

Plus, I have already had the experience of how audiophiles listen - they want their recordings to sound exactly like they do on their own rigs, only "better" ... if it doesn't tick this box, they're not interested.

[fas42]

10 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Same with audio equipment -- if you don't start with the correct equipment, tweaking is pretty much in vain.  Note also, I was quite satsified with myself on the 'improved' video, but it was still laughably bad WRT pro standards.  (There was ZERO practical way to improve the quality of the color without very major additions of technology, for example.)  The 'consumer'  design just wasn't intended for the pro quality that I was trying to achieve.

 

Each of us, from time-to-time, we find our own 'rabbit holes' of wasted effort.  The key is to try to find hobby efforts that are actually worth doing.

 

John

 

 

Interesting story about the video tweaking, John - I have in fact got the same need to fiddle ... one of my rabbit holes was reverse engineering the unique format of the Yamaha synthesizer data storage of its sequencer recordings, onto diskette. Used Perl for the exercise ... of course pointless, because in following generations standard MIDI was used.

 

Luckily, in audio, what we are working on is "timeless" - that is, the point of the exercise is to recover the full potential of unique recordings, stretching back over 100 years. Better gear should make it easier, but how game are you to hack very expensive kit? The obvious option is to use thrown away items, which can be modified to the point of killing them, if need be - the point is to understand what's going on ...

 

Which the audio crowd can't understand - in the car world, it's standard practice to get hold of an old bomb, and turn it into a fire eater - "totally impossible!", screams the bling obsessed audio crazies, 😝.

[fas42]

6 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

Did watering cause the soundstage to "grow"?

 

The water flotation idea modified the vibration environment of the circuitry, and possibly altered the humidity levels enough to change some parasitic behaviours of electrical parts - there's always a reasonable, technical explanation.

[John Dyson]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

 Nevertheless, my own experience with a couple of good SVHS machines was that they were still capable of recording TV at a higher quality than almost all of the archived material from that period that you see on YouTube these days.

That wasn't really the point that I was intending to make...

 

The very latest SVHS machine with TBC and NR could produce a reasonable picture with NR artifacts and still very poor chroma -- but that wasn't want I was talking about....  We could get into NTSC vs PAL & all of the tradeoffs, but why care anymore -- right? :-).   What we have today BLOWS AWAY the best of NTSC or PAL in their native broadcast form.  VSB is a real killer perhaps more than the actual format itself, and was the real problem with broadcast NTSC, but no-one seems to ever have mentioned that complication...  There was always too much religion in those arguments -- MAYBE my little message was too complicated for what I was trying to say.  The D9 stuff that I mentioned could reproduce the noise from any given Laserdisk very accurately -- there is no comparison -- because of the movement of technology AND the application of the correct device to solve the problem, instead of morphing a solution that will only be able to 'ALMOST' solve the problem.

 

Here is the crux of my comment -- cant make a silk purse out of a sows ear.  You can try, and you can do reasonably well...  But, you ain't gonna get the 'real thing' -- that is, unless you grow a lot of silkworms.

 

John

 

[fas42]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Well, I do think you are alone in making a pair of boom-box, ghetto blaster speakers - still mounted in their plastic boom-box enclosure to sound better than a pair of $200,000 (US) Wilson Alexandria XLFs!😉

 

(Grabs George by the throat with both hands, and says following 2 inches away from his face, 🤣).

 

On a well sorted rig, the XLFs will sound vastly superior to the Sharps.

 

On a flawed setup, the XLFs will be almost unlistenable to, because they will magnify all the errors made earlier in the chain - you will hate them.

 

If the choice is, Sharp speakers well driven, versus XLF badly driven - most sane people will give the thumbs up to the former ... because, they are enjoying the music more ...

[sandyk]

8 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

What we have today BLOWS AWAY the best of NTSC or PAL in their native broadcast form. 

 Agreed.

[fas42]

16 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Well, it is the weakest link. 

 

If you mean no subwoofer, that's where I strongly disagree ... I have not heard anything in all these years that has convinced me that adding bass reinforcement in this manner assists with the competence of the sound, as a fundamental aspect of the situation. What an excellent subwoofer can do is take the electrical load off the circuitry that delivers all the frequencies above that region, allowing that part of the system to have lower distortion, by having the workload shared. The type of tweaking I do alleviates this factor to a degree where I never feel that I'm missing something.

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

George, the simple facts are this: 35 years ago I was tweaking a pretty decent setup, in completely conventional ways - and one day it transformed, subjectively, from normal stereo presentation to the whole 3D shebang, with all the special qualities as described by Blackmorec - everything else has followed logically from that - so I either deluded myself, out of thin air, that something I had never read about should spontaneously occur ... or, I stumbled across a behaviour of the human hearing system ... now, which is more likely to be the case, hmmm?

 

The cabinet for the Sharp speakers is about half the thickness of my original B&W speakers, but both are made from the same, "junk", chipboad. Separation is about 4 feet. I can't abide the sound of the cheap bass bump so beloved by many; and no system of mine has ever had that characteristic.

Frank, you keep saying this, over and over again. Do you not understand that even though you believe this to be true, it’s physically not possible to achieve the results that you claim with the equipment and the methodology that you describe? And no matter how often you repeat it, nobody buys it. I wish I could, but having tried about every tweak in the book, I have found that the results of every tweak were so minuscule as to be either totally unnoticeable or so small as for it to be on the very edge of audibility. Did I hear a difference or is it imaginary? If it is a difference, is it a positive or a negative difference?

I know that the effects of such tweaks are cumulative, but in my experience, everything together is hardly worth the effort, and definitely not anywhere near the level that you report by several orders of magnitude. That’s the source of my extreme skepticism.
 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

(Grabs George by the throat with both hands, and says following 2 inches away from his face, 🤣).

 

On a well sorted rig, the XLFs will sound vastly superior to the Sharps.

 

On a flawed setup, the XLFs will be almost unlistenable to, because they will magnify all the errors made earlier in the chain - you will hate them.

 

If the choice is, Sharp speakers well driven, versus XLF badly driven - most sane people will give the thumbs up to the former ... because, they are enjoying the music more ...

Cough, hack! Thaankkkss for letting my throat go - Ahggggh (clears throat)! Speakers that good would have to be powered by a single-ended, EL34 (6BQ5) flea-Watt AC/DC amplifier out of a cheap, 1960’s radio/phonograph console in order to sound “bad” (they only need 15 Watts, they’re that efficient!). They would sound decent powered by a 1970 Sansui receiver. Where our opinions differ is that it would be very difficult to badly drive a pair XLFs, and impossible to drive a pair of boom-box speakers well enough for anyone, (except maybe you) to find them preferable to a pair of XLFs (and this is from someone who doesn’t particularly value the Wilson sound!).

[fas42]

32 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Frank, you keep saying this, over and over again. Do you not understand that even though you believe this to be true, it’s physically not possible to achieve the results that you claim with the equipment and the methodology that you describe? 

 

Why is it physically impossible? The deep bass, yes, that's impossible - but that's not in the equation, for me ... if you do the maths, it's trivially easy to buy cheap equipment that will deliver, say, 110dB at the normal listening position - but for the vast majority of the time, the SPLs are considerably less than that - so, the other side of the equation is what the distortion is like at those sound levels ... I work on the types of distortion and noise which are most troubling, and these have very little to do with what the standard measurements are intended to detect.

 

I listen to ambitious gear, and shrink at what it sounds like - I have zero doubts that this situation could be turned around, if the right areas were addressed ... but someone has to do it ... 😉.

 

32 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

And no matter how often you repeat it, nobody buys it. I wish I could, but having tried about every tweak in the book, I have found that the results of every tweak were so minuscule as to be either totally unnoticeable or so small as for it to be on the very edge of audibility. Did I hear a difference or is it imaginary? If it is a difference, is it a positive or a negative difference?

I know that the effects of such tweaks are cumulative, but in my experience, everything together is hardly worth the effort, and definitely not anywhere near the level that you report by several orders of magnitude. That’s the source of my extreme skepticism.
 

 

The word is indeed "cumulative" - the current NAD and Sharp have lots, lots more to be done to them; in fact it's a never ending exercise if one wants to be pedantic about it. What "accumulates" is that a recording that previously was barely tolerable starts to show signs of coming good - doing the type of tweaks I employ is useless if all you use are pristine, "perfect" recordings to test the changes - in fact, I can almost guarantee that it will make those audiophile tracks less and less interesting to listen to.

 

What's happening is that it becomes easier and easier for the listening mind to hear past recording quality issues - because it doesn't have to cope with the playback anomalies, on top of that, as much as it needed to, prior to doing the tweaks.

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

4 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Well, as I have said on numerous occasions, at the moment it's in halfway house status - I'm pretty tired these days, and it's been left to rot, yet again, because there are too many other things in life going on - there's always the clips on YouTube of the recordings of the NAD and Sharp in action, done when I was enthused enough.

 

I get more of a kick from getting N. nearby to push his rigs into the good zone - there's always an issue of "What can be looked at, to further the SQ?".

 

Plus, I have already had the experience of how audiophiles listen - they want their recordings to sound exactly like they do on their own rigs, only "better" ... if it doesn't tick this box, they're not interested.

 

So Frank, we have to take your word for your results, nobody here shares your experience, and your experience of other audiophiles listening assessments clashes with your own listening experience.Hmmmn!

[fas42]

39 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Cough, hack! Thaankkkss for letting my throat go - Ahggggh (clears throat)! Speakers that good would have to be powered by a single-ended, EL34 (6BQ5) flea-Watt AC/DC amplifier out of a cheap, 1960’s radio/phonograph console in order to sound “bad” (they only need 15 Watts, they’re that efficient!). They would sound decent powered by a 1970 Sansui receiver. Where our opinions differ is that it would be very difficult to badly drive a pair XLFs, and impossible to drive a pair of boom-box speakers well enough for anyone, (except maybe you) to find them preferable to a pair of XLFs (and this is from someone who doesn’t particularly value the Wilson sound!).

 

I have yet to hear a set of Wilsons "sound OK" - one of the worst situations was at a dealer that @Audiophile Neuroscience doesn't want me to mention 😜 - one of the behemoths in the lineup; driven in part by some MBL gear, Mark Levinson was there too, I think ... this was rip ya ears off stuff; impossible to take seriously.

 

Yes, of course the setup needed a lot of TLC - but that's my point ... it shouldn't be like that ...

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

I have yet to hear a set of Wilsons "sound OK" - one of the worst situation was at a dealer that @Audiophile Neuroscience doesn't want me to mention 😜

 

Frank I think we have to seriously consider that your hearing is 'unique' and may not apply to anyone else here or elsewhere.

[fas42]

3 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

So Frank, we have to take your word for your results, nobody here shares your experience, and your experience of other audiophiles listening assessments clashes with your own listening experience.Hmmmn!

 

Plenty here understand how good playback can sound - plenty of posts expressing that in the last couple of pages ... the disagreement is about  the method of getting one's head to register that standard.

 

Most audiophiles believe that there are "special" recordings that must sound more and more special, the better the rig. And that such systems must make recordings deemed "bad" sound worse and worse, to have credibility ... the chasm in the difference of thinking is too great.

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

If you mean no subwoofer, that's where I strongly disagree ... I have not heard anything in all these years that has convinced me that adding bass reinforcement in this manner assists with the competence of the sound, as a fundamental aspect of the situation. What an excellent subwoofer can do is take the electrical load off the circuitry that delivers all the frequencies above that region, allowing that part of the system to have lower distortion, by having the workload shared. The type of tweaking I do alleviates this factor to a degree where I never feel that I'm missing something.

That would be true only if you did not value that lowest octave an a half of the spectrum. While I believe that some mightn’t care, If you listen to opine organ, you won’t be one of those. One place where tweaks do work is careful crossover from the main speakers to the subs. I do it with DSP and a microphone, and the sub integrates with my Martin Logan ESLs seamlessly!
 

 

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

6 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Plenty here understand how good playback can sound - plenty of posts expressing that in the last couple of pages ... the disagreement is about  the method of getting one's head to register that standard.

 

which is why I said

 

8 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Frank I think we have to seriously consider that your hearing is 'unique' and may not apply to anyone else here or elsewhere.

 

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Frank I think we have to seriously consider that your hearing is 'unique' and may not apply to anyone else here or elsewhere.

 

One of the little pleasures is that N. tells of the times when he manages to squeeze an extra level of quality out of one of the rigs, his wife comes in, attracted by the sound, and says, "Gosh, you've got to get Frank across right now, to hear how it's going!" - ummm, not so sure, at 11.30pm, 😉.

[gmgraves]

8 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

I have yet to hear a set of Wilsons "sound OK" - one of the worst situation was at a dealer that @Audiophile Neuroscience doesn't want me to mention 😜 - one of the behemoths in the lineup; driven in part by some MBL gear, Mark Levinson was there too, I think ... this was rip ya ears off stuff; impossible to take seriously.

 

Yes, of course the setup needed a lot of TLC - but that's my point ... it shouldn't be like that ...

One might like one type of speaker over another, but even though I prefer planar speakers like Maggie’s, or ESLs from M-L or or Sound Labs, doesn’t mean that other technologies like cones sound bad, and believe me, if everybody thought that this equipment sounds bad like you do, they wouldn’t stay an business. The fact that you believe that this highly touted, expensive gear sounds bad, just re- enforces my opinion that you “hear” very different from the rest of us.👐🏻

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

his wife comes in, attracted by the sound, and says, "Gosh, you've got to get Frank across right now, to hear how it's going!" - ummm, not so sure, at 11.30pm, 😉.

 

Frank, we should leave your nighttime excursions out of this 🥰

[fas42]

9 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

That would be true only if you did not value that lowest octave an a half of the spectrum. While I believe that some mightn’t care, If you listen to opine organ, you won’t be one of those. One place where tweaks do work is careful crossover from the main speakers to the subs. I do it with DSP and a microphone, and the sub integrates with my Martin Logan ESLs seamlessly!
 

 

 

Pipe organ is one of the test CDs I regularly use ... the harmonics in the bass area have to be done well, and usually I don't bother trying this one on a system I come across - too many signs that it will be a bit of disaster, and be difficult trying to pretend it sounds OK. On a system with good subwoofers that should have handled it, the SQ was a fail.

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Pipe organ is one of the test CDs I regularly use ... the harmonics in the bass area have to be done well, and usually I don't bother trying this one on a system I come across - too many signs that it will be a bit of disaster, and be difficult trying to pretend it sounds OK. On a system with good subwoofers that should have handled it, the SQ was a fail.

Like we have been saying. You’re idea of what constitutes good sound to you, is very different from what most people think is high-fidelity playback.

[fas42]

37 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Like we have been saying. You’re idea of what constitutes good sound to you, is very different from what most people think is high-fidelity playback.

 

Meaning, a pipe organ recording shouldn't sound like a live pipe organ ... got it! 🙂

[Teresa]

5 hours ago, fas42 said:

One of the little pleasures is that N. tells of the times when he manages to squeeze an extra level of quality out of one of the rigs, his wife comes in, attracted by the sound, and says, "Gosh, you've got to get Frank across right now, to hear how it's going!" - ummm, not so sure, at 11.30pm, 😉.

 

 

Is "N" short for Nobody?

 

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

Meaning, a pipe organ recording shouldn't sound like a live pipe organ ... got it! 🙂

 

You totally misunderstand George's post, if you want a pipe organ to sound like a live pipe organ you need the lowest frequencies. The largest pipe is 16Hz.