Originally Posted by
Clive
My experience is with the Hagermann Piccolo head amp and S&B TX103 SUT feeding a valve phono stage. It's hard to pick a winner, it's more down to personal preference. The Piccolo to some will be a tad clinical and the SUT will be a fraction soft or alternatively some will find the Piccolo wonderfully open and transparent whereas others will find the SUTs flowing and musical. Aspects such as sound stage, bass, treble etc were really very similar. The Piccolo has the advantage of being easily configurable for gain and loading, it is however a little hissy at the highest gain setting.
I don't get why there has to be one approach which has to be seen as superior. As ever it's down to the design objectives and quality of implementation, in my opinion.
By and large yes. Which is why I've gone on a bit of a quest to quash the false assertion, sometimes propagated by those who don't know a resistor from an op amp, never mind their arse from their elbow, that "SUT's are definitely better than head amps and if you have a good MC cart and want the best from it only a SUT will do". This is simply wrong.
As an electronic engineer, a manufacturer and an audiophile, and not in any order, it really boils my piss to see certain things in this hobby of ours (not just this) become "accepted wisdom", when in fact completely WRONG and just because enough people, who sometimes don't even know what they are talking about, repeat the same falsehood, from often a flawed review in which a journalist has got it wrong.. sometimes other sources too...maybe even at a bake off a best in class type of product A was compared with 3 average examples of product type B and all declared on a forum that "products of the type A are always better than products of type B"..... This process of "Chinese whispers" grows what is sometimes a load of balderdash into being "the facts of the matter".... Usually if you try to get to the source of why something is apparently "a fact" it'll come down to "well I read it in Hi Fi Weekly... "... "several people on the xyz forum said so..." (probably cos one of them recalls reading it in that "hi fi weekly" article 3 years ago and written by a journalist who studied History at uni... or media studies)
This can unfortunately reach a point where the magnification effect of the Chinese whispers results in nobody believing it when they hear the real facts!! It gets to the point of "why should I believe you when I've read/heard the opposite in 30 other places".... Ask yourselves whether the 30 other people you've heard it from actually know what they are talking about or are they all in turn repeating what they've heard/read from an inaccurate source in the first place
Edit: Here's some more guff for you lot Manufacturers and dealers can themselves be the source of techno-bollocks... for marketing reasons etc
"Lay people" in hi fi often believe that a 2 box solution is always better and a separate, bigger PSU is always better.. Now I went into a pretty full explanation of this a month or so ago so won't bother repeating it here but will instead give a true example of how things can go...
In a land far away some know as That London there was a hi fi company that we shall call Musical Fidelity who made an FM tuner to match their B1 integrated amplifier. Now after some time a MkII version came out at a higher price having apparently been "redesigned and improved" and part of this process and what one was paying for was a separate power supply.... The truth? The tuner board was bought in from a far east manufacturer and put in a MF box, you could buy the identical tuner under the Marantz brand name for half the price incidentally. In the Marantz application they had been wise enough to place supports under the mains transformer which was soldered directly to the PCB. MF hadn't done this and maybe half of the tuners they sent out were faulty on delivery due to the transformers weight fracturing the PCB in transit! The solution? De-solder the mains transformers and put them in a small plastic box with an umbilical cord to connect it to the main tuner! Yeah! Now MF weren't happy with this as it cost them a wee bit more to make and someone had to de-solder the transformers from the raw boards received from S. Korea... so they announced it was a redesigned and improved MkII with. amongst other things, a separate PSU for sound quality reasons.... The price was increased from about £270 to £380 (or £150 for the same tuner from Marantz ) and the dealers and magazines duly reported how much better the MkII was.... Total bullshit! It was of course identical to the MkI and the transformer had been put in a separate box just to make sure they actually worked upon delivery!
This sort of thing goes on all the time folks... and if this model of tuner had risen to be one of the audiophile forums favourites, where "everybody knows" how good they are and that the MkII thrashes the MkI, how many would have believed me if I came along saying "it's bollocks. The Mk1 sounds the same but is less reliable blah blah etc etc"?.... If I hadn't been there and witnessed this whole process?
Last edited by Arkless Electronics; 11-01-2017 at 18:33.
Arkless Electronics-Engineered to be better. Tel. 01670 530674 (after 1pm)
Modded Thorens TD150, Audio Technica AT-1005 MkII, Technics EPC-300MC, Arkless Hybrid MC phono stage, Arkless passive pre, Arkless 50WPC Class A SS power amp, (or) Arkless modded Leak Stereo 20, Modded Kef Reference 105/3's
ReVox PR99, Studer B62, Ferrograph Series 7, Tandberg TCD440, Hitachi FT-5500MkI, also FT-5500MkII
Digital: Yamaha CDR-HD1500 (Digital Swiss army knife-CD recorder, player, hard drive, DAC and ADC in one), PC files via 24/96 sound card and SPDIF, modded Philips CD850, modded Philips CD104, modded DPA Little Bit DAC. Sennheiser HD580 cans with Arkless Headphone amp.
Cables- free interconnects that come with CD players, mains leads from B&Q, dead kettles etc, extension leads from Tesco