An Edifying Journey ...

[fas42]

Not relevant to anything in particular, but I just triggered on how many people mention the distance they listen from the speakers. In my case it's about 20 feet, when sitting down in the room: the speakers are lopsided in the room, way over to the right, and are not even symmetrical around some centre line. There's a line of glass all along the right hand wall - to catch the good views we have over the Blue Mountains hills, . If I'm seated it's on a chair very close to the 'back' wall - but this does nothing to improve or degrade what I hear; the way I listen to music is that it's part of the living space, and it has to work whether I'm seated, moving around in the room; or wandering around the house in general, engaged in some other activity.

[fas42]

Okay, some experiments later it appears the current most important weakness is more related to the shape of mains waveforms that the audio components see, than an antenna effect - merely changing the load on the possibly troublesome extra length of mains circuit alters the SQ; an optimum amongst the few tried is easily found. And then moving that specific load to be plugged directly into the wall socket, adjacent to the leads feeding the audio components - leaving the 'antenna' section open circuit - gives me close enough to the same result. Which is a good sign ... extra fine tuning at that point may give me a good enough solution.

 

What's gained? Play a swing orchestra track from 1920s, pump up the volume; when in best form you hear the boisterous brass chorus lines ring true, if not accurate enough you get 'shrieking' ...

 

Why is everything so damn sensitive ... er, dunno, !! Actually, this is everywhere, in audio - why so many continually fiddle. Our ears are remarkably sensitive to subtle variations, and pretending otherwise is just plain silly - best is embrace this 'truth' and learn how to make the most of every situation ...

[fas42]

Man, this is tricky!! Have been back and forth, back and forth, a number of times, to try and get clear evidence that the interference issue can be resolved by dealing with it at the socket that the rig plugs into interface. Just when I think I have a good handle on it, then I note that there has been a loss of SQ, after playing a few CDs - this is an old, old mongrel of a thing to resolve, at times; there is some static buildup somewhere, or a rectifying action going on, which disturbs the equilibrium of the system - which takes some time to manifest.

 

And here is an aspect that the doubters will really love!!  ... The direction a load which is not purely simple resistive, in my latest tests, is plugged into the mains makes a difference - this is truly scratch ya head stuff; but is quite consistent. With a "best!" direction sorted, we can then move on ... .

 

I think, after my last attempt, that I may have a 'robust' configuration. But not sure ... a few more rounds, at least, to confirm that a "solid" approach has been attained.

[fas42]

On 12/23/2022 at 3:07 PM, fas42 said:

What's been happening ... umm, nothing . Why? At its core I'm lazy, and a bit worn out from life's to'ing and fro'ing. Right now, I can get the DVD player and Edifiers into a good state by the conditioning exercises mentioned above; this will give perfectly acceptable SQ from the first CD, at the expense of futzing around for a few minutes loading and unloading disks, and skipping through tracks.

 

The sound is not as good as it could be, but so close that I haven't got enough steam built up to go the next step - any CD that goes on delivers highly satisfying listening; I need some album that is so poor in technical quality that it irritates me to listen to it, with the current status of the combo. I haven't unearthed one yet - but when it arrives, that will provide the kick forward I need ... I hope !!

 

Okay, I might have found that album, which was mentioned here,

 

3 CD set, and the 2nd one pointed out, very strongly, the issues ...

 

Okay, 1951 live recording - lots of coughing and such, and with the volume up, huge amount of extraneous noise going on. Some of it sounds like lorries moving off, going through the gears - would be an interesting exercise just trying to work out what all the non-musical background stuff is, .

 

Anyway, the combination of everything means that the integrity of the replay chain has to be top notch, to work well for listening. And that CD just mentioned was quite unpleasant to the ear - was the recording gear off kilter, at that time ... or was it my system? Reloaded the disk - no, still just as unsavoury ... tried reloading yet again ... and again - ah hah! Now had snapped into shape; was as good as necessary to make the listening a delight ...

 

Which means what? Well, the CD required 4(!) attempts to get it to seat well enough so that the DVD circuitry was happy reading off the data. Which meant everything in terms of the quality of the listening experience; the technical quality of the music capture in this case is such that the difference between optimum signal and slightly non-optimum signal was subjectively huge - remember, this is purely the waveform of the optical data going across, its "jitter".

 

This is now a very good recording to work with, to sort out this data link - I can, say, deliberately make the CD mount badly, by adding some spacing material on one side, so that it always 'wobbles' while playing - a signal regenerating tweak needs to compensate for this 'perfectly', to be considered a successful solution.

 

Am I kicked forward? ... We'll see, .

[fas42]

Played my budget album of Dionne Warwick hits, for Burt - and was, as usual for this CD, reminded that this is an excellent test recording - slightest issue with the chain, and it just sounds, off. Big, lush orchestral backings, lots of air, recorded with very ordinary equipment of the day; this just doesn't present well if the rig is slightly off colour - required reloading the disk, to improve the optical link waveform.

 

Playing with, and exploring what ChatGPT can do for me at the moment, on solving software design ideas - who knows, might be able to use for the optical link conditioning device engineering, .

[fas42]

The Edifiers have been very quiet lately ... got revved up on playing with AI to do code generation, automatic system building - an interest of mine almost from the start of my working life ... still not a clear road to using tools for doing the whole journey, without paying silly money - but it's just around the corner .

 

But the active speaker setup, in the couple of times I've fired it up, have done well. Leaving them for long periods, now, hasn't caused a fall off in quality - by halfway through the first CD, and having done all the checking and jiggling that I've mentioned a number of times here, they perform to a high standard. Fill the house with the music, and sound good whether right next to a speaker, or at the other end of the place ...

[fas42]

Just found another track which is quite excellent at picking shortfalls,

 

 

A movie soundtrack compilation CD I picked up last time, a cheapy, has this - and "shrill!!" is what comes to mind. In spite of the image quality of the YT video here, the sound quality, for whatever reason, is right on the edge of being too much - other tracks on either side of this, many much older, are fine.

 

This pointed out that a tweak had failed; the edginess had gone up to a whole new level - so, replaced the resistance that had gone open circuit, and a reasonable presentation was now on show, for this track.

 

Which again points out the value of "difficult!" recordings - they make it so obvious when the slightest deficit is dragging down the SQ; you immediately know when the situation is then corrected, because the listenability is dramatically improved ...

[fas42]

Nothin' much happened recently ... but then I decided to move forward on getting better mains filtering - and now appear to have stumbled on what many try to deal with: a 'dirty' earth or ground in the house wiring; it now makes more sense why people go for exotic "grounding boxes", and the like ...

 

So far my filtering has been relatively conventional - relying on a connection to the earth line at certain points. But what happened recently was that I decided to take a noise filtering unit used for the DVD player, and move it across to the powered speakers run; improving that side of things at the expense of the other ... lo and behold, definite improvement in isolation from noise ... but still a touch susceptible. Then just today I noticed, because of historical changes that the earth wire in the moved filter had been disconnected - it didn't need to be there, because the player was double insulated. So ... the filtering wasn't working correctly for other filters downline, now - surely the filtering should improve even further if I reinstate the earth run to where the other circuitry supposedly "needed it".

 

Ummm, no ... a big, NO! SQ got worse and worse - it spiraled downhill, steadily, as the CD ran ... bad move!! Immediately undid the connection to earth at the plug end ... ah!!! Back to a good standard ...

 

Conclusion? The earth wire in the house is far too noisy, and just messes things up, if I use it - I can work without it with this rig, but if one had equipment which must have an earth, for safety reasons, then highly likely all sort of hoops will need to be jumped through, for its presence not be be a degrading influence.

[fas42]

Happier now ... did Yet Another Reorg of the mains filtering - and I may have struck the mother lode, . Now getting a good standard of SQ, without doing the extra fiddling that was always needed in prior iterations; the isolation works with all the "wrong things in place", that is, just normal household stuff plugged in, working or not, along the same circuit as the rig. Which was always the goal ...

 

Perhaps also a smudge better clarity now - Nellie Melba tracks recorded in the 1910s work a treat, and just ran now an el cheapo CD of ELO's Discovery album, from a cold start; space, separation, layering, sweetness - no complaints!

 

Still have to reseat CD at times - until I organise a optical signal conditioner, poor physical alignment of the disk in the player causes too much loss - so, very much still on the list ...

 

With regards to the power filtering, I can now start to work backwards - what can be taken away from the convoluted arrangement I now use without losing anything? For example, there are 5, count them(!), 5 stages being used for the active speakers - what is not pulling its weight!!?

 

[fas42]

This journey has slowed down, a lot! Anyway, gave it a better go, today - and ended with frustration!! Why? Well, to do anything to test whether altering the mains filters causes one to lose SQ, the physical parts of the circuitry have to be disturbed - and this adds another variable to the equation! For a start, the component loses power, even if only for a short time - and the length of time varies, depending - restarting, were any changes you hear due to the filter change, or to the fact that the component has to restabilise?

 

So, I ended up going in circles - I was losing, gaining, losing, ... SQ; it wasn't making sense. What to do? Well, I have to approach it more methodically; organise things even more rigorously so that one, and only one, part of the setup alters between changes - now, this is much harder than it sounds, especially if cables need to be moved, and powered up status alters. What particularly makes it worse is that the closer you get to optimum, the more sensitive the system becomes to its current status - and where you're at is easily misinterpreted; you end up undoing a change which was in fact a positive step - but you missed it, .

[fas42]

Ok, ease back a bit ... tried, from cold, something "just for fun",

 

 

This quite perfectly captured the warm up behaviour - first few tracks, very nicely balanced - not big sound, but nothing negative draws your attention; then, for the next group of tracks finer detail is drawn out, but is not rendered well enough, it becomes a bit "in your face", a touch 'aggressive'; finally, towards the end of the disk, everything has stabilised enough, and you get, the Bi-i-i-i-ig presentation; as befits the era, with hairdos to match, ... vast caverns of sound, which stretch out to infinity ...

[fas42]

A follow up to the previous post ... as said on the cover, this is a 2 disk set; and the 2nd one proved more difficult - it seemed no matter how many times I unloaded and reloaded the CD, I couldn't get the quality to 'sing' on this one - wasn't "bad", but never matched up to the first disk. A bit frustrated, I left the system idle for a few hours, and then was motivated to try again - during that time, that 2nd CD was left sitting in the player, its mounting status didn't change; also, the DVD player powered down, automatically, over most of that period - the speakers stayed powered up. Just pushed Play, to activate everything ...

 

Boy, if you want 'proof' that warm up is critical, this was it! The first couple of tracks, that I had heard over and over again earlier on, were so far down in SQ - so 'small' and uninspiring . By the 3rd or 4th track it was climbing back fast; and then finally decided to give the mounting mechanism yet one more chance to "get it right". And, it worked. Finally had decent size and tonality - it was where it should have been, first time.

 

So, the value of that exercise was to motivate me to really do something about the optical signal conditioner - that, properly executed, will rid me of this annoyance, and hopefully lift the overall standard a touch higher. Started some more serious research into the electronic parts needed, yesterday - hopefully can keep the momentum going, .

[fas42]

And, finally getting somewhere ... the key bit of circuitry should be on its way, courtesy of a member of the family jolting me, providing an excuse to get hold of it, .

 

In between, got another stack of CDs from the op shop, $1 each - including The Nutcracker Suite, by Rattle, nice packaging; clear plastic sealing hadn't been broken! Did someone have two copies - or, just hated Tchaikovsky? Got another good, roughy, test album, , The Entertainers Volume 3, AVM1021 - so obscure that Google gave me zero results ... . Swing era, 30's plus stuff; Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Durante(!!), Carmen Miranda, ...

 

[fas42]

Video clips of interest thread, or here? This is a nicely done presentation of Edifiers speakers which are a clone visually of what I use; different model number, and some upgrades, but you get a sense of the polish of these units - the company does a massive range of these sort of speakers.

 

 

[fas42]

So, what's happening? ... Nothing much; that piece of the signal conditioner I mentioned earlier was arriving supposedly within 11 days, and still hasn't turned up! Turns out that it may take til the end of July to get here - I need to have the item in front of me, to be inspired to go the next round ... so, keep on waiting ... .

 

Why is this step so important? Because, it currently is the most significant variable in the rig's behaviour; there is little point in trying to assess other variables, because the differences most likely will be swamped by the changes in SQ determined by how well seated the CD is in the player, and how settled down the overall circuitry in the unit is at any moment - the aim is to eliminate that factor ...

 

 

Update! Isn't that how it works, the watched kettle never boils! I had composed this post, but hadn't submitted it - so, yesterday the stuff turned up ... . This is a programmable chip on small board, which will do most of the grunt work of buffering the data stream, and then feeding it out under the control of an isolated from everything else clock - the latter can be played with, to see exactly what the optimum characteristics of the optical signal need to be, for the Edifiers to "play nice" .

[fas42]

Things are progressing ... the parts that arrived work, using some test examples; now to do the serious stuff, which involves playing with a processing description language, with lots of technical details to be dealt with. None of which I've had any experience with, . The concept is simple, but implementation most likely not ... what I thought could be straightforward, as a 'programming' exercise turns out to be needing extra fiddling with, to get it to play ball - very much a learning exercise, as well as a means to an end.

 

Some positive feedback yesterday - some family members had a listen to current state of rig, which still needs 'artful' juggling of the player to get better SQ; a preference they had is of old time tracks, the hits, etc, of the glory days of cinema. Meaning 30s, 40s stuff. On went a budget compilation of the usual suspects - and went over very well. Played at a very low volume, what was noted was the clarity and diction of the voices, and the ease with which all the backing instruments could be heard - very satisfying listening

[fas42]

Noise is the enemy. Cannot be overstated, because in digital playback it adds a type of degradation to the sound which undermines any longer term listening satisfaction ... this has been discussed to death for decades, and but only now is it being taken more seriously by, and dealt with more effectively by, the makers of less than absurdly expensive equipment. Most importantly, one has to do whatever it takes to kill this stone dead. Or at least attenuate it to acceptable levels ...

 

What am I talking about here? The system in current status can hit a high point fairly regularly; but is still too fragile: the slightest misadjustment adds an edge to the SQ which is unacceptable. And the most obvious for a while has been the level of jitter of the waveform on the optical link; which is why I'm assembling a "signal cleaner" to eliminate that variability.

 

Yesterday I again played with an area of the setup which now and again I've looked at, and thought, "This could be better...". And that is the umbilical cable feeding the passive left speaker from the active right speaker. Part of the route I thought was still too subject to vibration, but all attempts to ameliorate this have never added anything - I always removed the attempted tweak, because the sound only got worse. But this last time I tried Yet Another Idea - which, so far, works!

 

Damping, which is not constrained to anything external to the cable, was added, very lightly to the critical area. And made a positive contribution, confirmed by removing and then adding the material again.

 

Is it good enough to mean that I don't need the dejittering addition, as well? Don't know, will need to test more. Will it give benefits in every situation? Again, lots more testing. Is it, a 'permanent' tweak? No, because it looks ridiculous - a more sensible way of getting this extra stability is needed.

 

So, every time you think you've got noise under control enough, think again . Most likely, it can be got better - and the listening will always benefit. Always ...

[fas42]

Double post ...

[fas42]

So far the improvement to the damping of the umbilical is holding up ... but, welcome to the world of cable craziness! That is, every slight adjustment to this extra damping "changes things" - this is not because altering the stabilising of the cable magically "makes it better'"; I'm merely varying the level and nature of the unwanted, remaining electrical noise that the non-perfect cable is introducing, by playing with a 'rubber band' solution - now, the answer is to not keep playing with these 'stretchy things'; because this is not engineering. The real solution is to organise the cable in a fashion so that this noise is so low in level that it has no audible impact - which is not trivial, if I want a cost effective, and visually acceptable, method.

 

In, unfortunately, the real world of cable madness, , this doesn't happen - the cables are used as effects units, to give the 'right' signature to the gear, part of a 'mastering' jigsaw, to achieve one's "house sound" ... which is not getting closer to accuracy, which I believe is the right goal.

 

Making progress on the optical signal cleaner ... as is always the way, it turns out using a value for money approach means that I have to work harder to get things to function as expected, as required; more experimenting, trialing, to understand how to get the key part to play ball, .

[fas42]

The signal cleaner part is chewy ... . This is what happens when you play with "bleeding edge" stuff - you find out you're one of the first to try things; there is almost zero material out there to help guide one. Slowly, slowly, getting a handle on how to see what it's doing when I try to make it behave - good days, and not so good days  ... stay tuned ...

[fas42]

The chewy has become a grind ... something that should have taken a couple of hours to get a handle on, has spread out into weeks - the key buffer mechanism of the signal regenerator part is not playing ball, and it's unclear what's going on - things like, if one changes which parts of the buffer are used, it either works, or, it doesn't. And I don't know where the fault is ... with my thinking, or the part/firmware ...

 

No experience out there of doing this, to draw on - I shall, persevere, .

[fas42]

Sorted!!! ... yep, the glitch was in my thinking - back on track now ... but, have learnt a lot from all that futzing, .

 

Just happened to bump into this, https://www.facebook.com/lenwallisaudio ... this is where all the action for me was, back in the 80's; they sold me the key stuff that made up the first competent system - used to visit them regularly, over the years.

[fas42]

Today just tidied up a bit of the filtering circuity that had been knocked a few many times; one lead had come adrift - and the SQ picked up nicely. Just running a CD of Miles Davis Quintet 1965-'68 stuff, and it's doing an excellent job of sounding like the band is about 15 feet away - both when standing at that "right there" spot, and how it comes across from the other end of the house ... happy boy!!

[fas42]

Time for an update ... not much to report, unfortunately. For various reasons, mainly with me, progress on the digital signal regenerator has been slow - my energies these days are way down on what they used to be, only a couple of years ago, and the type of thinking that's needed to get the job done can be hard to switch on, at the moment. Plus, stupid glitches - after not touching it for a week, the key part appeared to have stopped working ... oh, no!!! But, false alarm ... the USB port of the PC that was used to control the part had gone bad, in the interim, with zero indications that anything was wrong - confirmed by trying a mouse on that port. First time I have ever had that happen ...

 

The good news is that the buffer mechanism keeps doing the right things, and has enough goodies to play with to make the structuring of the processing straightforward; it's just up to me to get it organised!

 

On the Edifiers themselves, chugging along nicely ... happened to try a tweak which stabilised the umbilical even more than before, for a gain! Which says there is always scope to "make things better"- it only ends when you try absolutely everything that can have an effect, and nothing more makes a difference, or only causes a degradation in SQ. 

 

The downside of incrementing the quality like this is that it becomes so obvious when the standard is a touch down; so you then run around in circles trying to work out where something has come undone, gone out of adjustment, etc. The upside is that even from a cold, week since I've touched it, startup, is that the sound is 'magic' - it's just, there; enough weaknesses are reduced so that even when the electronics and speakers are just warming up it fully communicates. Yesterday was such a day, binged on a diet of Classic Hits of the Fifties compilations CDs, one after the other - just the usual cheapies; the brilliance of the arrangements, and remarkable musicianship just kicks any of the rubbish you often hear these days on normal radio, etc, completely out of the park. Which is why I never listen to any current stuff, . Noting, Bev just said this morning, it was a glorious session ...

[fas42]

Yesterday was a good day, because it gave me an experience that I find is key on this road of listening to music recordings, an essential part of the journey. And that is hearing an album the "best I have ever heard it". The album in question is a very ordinary CD copy of

 

 

which I purchased on impulse many years ago - have no particular interest in the band, otherwise. And every time I played it up to now, it never particularly connected; many of the tracks seemed like filler material - they fell into the "why did they bother recording this?" basket; rather pointless exercises. Plus, SQ can very easily come across as being aggressive, in your face ...

 

But yesterday, this all changed ... the sense of the instruments, and structure of the songs was superb, and in many cases it was about the drumming, and bass line! Quite brilliant to listen to, very intense at times ...

 

So, what had changed? Certainly not the recording, ... it was all about, as always, the status of the playback chain: its shortcomings, and pluses, at that point in time just very nicely aligned, to allow the clearest insight into the capture of the music being made, back then. This is what is so important in this audio game ... to have these moments where recordings which for a combinations of reasons never match up to what one hopes to get from them, prior to that time, finally 'bursting through' - a 'peak' experience tells the bigger story, which is that there is always something more to plumb from every instance from the vast archive of music recorded to date.