Hello from Snowy Colorado!

[Lynn Olson]

Glad to be here! Partly joined as a result of my return to the world of analog, after 25 years or so. I bought one of the very last new-in-box Technics SL1210 Mk5 turntables, and naturally am looking at upgrades (no shock there, eh?).

My 300 or so records from the late Sixties and Seventies have been crying out to be played and enjoyed, and with the slow demise of SACD and DVD-A, it looks like LP's are the last man standing for high-res media. I'm not holding my breath for widespread availability of studio-quality downloads - maybe in five years time, but then again, maybe never, considering the attitudes of the RIAA towards downloads of any kind.

Besides, LP's sound great. I still remember the Thorens TD-125 & Rabco SL-8E arm with Stanton 681A I had in college. And the Dual 1229 that followed that (hey, I was broke, and it was the Seventies). Not a fan of audiophile TT's - something wrong with the sound. Then I heard Christian Rentelen's EMT930 in Zurich and fell in love all over again. No way could I afford the astronomical prices for the EMT930 - they may have been cheap when German radio stations were giving them away, but that was a long time ago. But it did get me thinking about the character of rim-drive and direct-drive TT's. Long story short, I bought the SL1210 from B&H Photo after they told me they had 11 left in stock - after that, it's Craigslist, eBay, or Audiogon for me.

My last TT was a Thorens TD-160, which I never really warmed up to, and a Mission 774 arm, which I liked a lot, and a Sumiko Talisman high-output MC cartridge, which I never really liked either. But the Supex SD-900E that preceded that was one of my all-time favorites, along with a Grace MM cartridge. I met Peter Ledermann (sp?) at the last Rocky Mountain Audio Festival, and hope to get one of his carts in the near future. Preamps? Will probably design my own, I guess.

The rest of the system are the Karna all-transformer-coupled PP 300B triode amplifiers, and the Ariel speakers, described in more detail on the Nutshell High Fidelity webpage. Quite happy with them, no reason to change in the near future. The Ariels sound a fair amount like Spendors or Quad ESL57's, which is no accident since the fellow that commissioned the design in Portland, Oregon owned a pair of stacked Quads, and wanted the new speaker to sound like them. Cables are cotton-covered Litz wire made by Bud Purvine of O-Netics in Seattle, Washington, who also made the interstage and output transformers of the power amplifiers.

[jostber]

Welcome to the forum! :thumbsup: Quite snowy here up north as well. :)

[DSJR]

LP's hi-res????????

I'll get me coat :lol:

Seriously, welcome and hope you find your answers here regarding the Techie. This path has been well trodden and there's loads of info on this site on properly sorting it and getting it to work to a proper modern standard..

P.S. You should have kept the Dual 1229 - IDLER driven of the highest quality, a quiet bearing if lubed properly and a fine tonearm able to take the most delicate cartridges, as well as a good Supex 900E and Koetsu Black (been there and done it, as well as with my beloved 701 which has a related tonearm).

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q8/DSJR_photos/DualSupex.jpg

I don't know who does decent re-tips in the US apart from Soundsmith, who charge the earth I believe, but since the world is getting much smaller in terms of communication, getting hold of an oldie but goodie SD900E and having it rebuilt/re-tipped over here may be an affordable option. With a Sumiko or Jelco style medium mass headshell, the techie arm should take one well - I mean, Linn used the super low mass Grace 707 arm for years with the Supex....

[Lynn Olson]

The Supex was one of my all time favorites. Either a retipped Supex or one of Peter Ledermann's moving-iron cartridges are right at the top of the list. My short list so far is replacing the Technics arm with the Jelco 750D, and looking into a bearing swap and a better mat. Since I'm in the USA, the products from Applied Fidelity look interesting.

I couldn't agree more about the Dual 1229. Superb turntable, and the arm was pretty good too. *Much* better sense of timing and rhythm than most audiophile belt-drives, which sound "slow" to me. It was the steady sense of timing from that Dual that made me question not so much the sound, but the sense of pace of most audiophile TT's.

All of my suspicions were confirmed when I heard Christian Rentelen's EMT930 (http://www.nutshellhifi.com/library/europe.html). That had a sense of pace like a German locomotive, and was built like one, too. If I had the money, I'd buy one tomorrow.

I have very mixed feelings about digital. The PCM high-res formats are pretty good ... 96/24 or better. The only times I've ever heard SACD reach its true potential was in a studio setting with professional gear; every consumer player was only a pale shadow of the studio experience. Red Book is a long, long way down from high-res PCM; at the minimum, Sony and Philips should have chosen a sample rate of 60 khz and a bit depth of 20 bits. As it is, the filtering requirements are much too extreme, and artifacts from 16 bits are noticeable - dithering only partially conceals the lack of resolution. All of these criteria are relaxed when the sample rate and the bit depth go up, simplifying the requirements for the analog electronics.

One of the dirty little secrets of digital is the current-to-voltage converter has to have a slew rate in excess of 1000V/uSec. This is no fairy tale; I've measured a comb spectra coming out of a Burr-Brown PCM63 extending out to 20 MHz, and only descending into the noise floor of the spectrum analyzer at 50 MHz. If the comb spectra is slewed by the op-amp converter, there are program-dependent amounts of IM distortion that fold down into the audio spectrum. This why I like passive current-to-voltage converters; the signal can be passively lowpass filtered right after I/V conversion, protecting the analog electronics from slewing. Once things are slowed down to a more reasonable 100 kHz bandwidth, most electronics will perform just fine (although 5532 opamps are still pretty marginal).

Slewing is also surprisingly common in RIAA preamps; it exaggerates pops, ticks, and mistracking, since these have a slew rate much greater than anything intentionally cut into the groove. Faster preamps, against intuition, have a subtler, more open sound that preamps that slew, although vacuum-tube and transistor slewing sound very different. Since even the best phono cartridges spend a fair percentage of time bouncing around in the groove, mistracking in the transient sense is very common, and stresses out most preamps. Thus the desire to design my own preamp, rather than mod a commercial one.

[Ammonite Audio]

A warm welcome from me too. I did look at your Ariel design a few years ago, before I decided that my DIY skills were really not up to this sort of thing!

[Ali Tait]

Hi Lynn, and welcome. Nice to see you here.

[Lynn Olson]

The Ariel is very difficult to build, and the Karna amp is only suitable for folks with professional amp-building skills. I don't mess with DIY to save money; what I want isn't available on the commercial market, so I design my own.

But I have to draw the line somewhere, and building a TT, a tonearm, or cartridge is it. DACs too; I'll modify, but designing from scratch is way outside my skills.

I am really looking forward to re-joining the wonderful world of analog (sorry about the barbarous US spelling, I went to a British school in Hong Kong, and should know better).

One of the terrible things that happened in the USA was the brutal phase-out of LP's; it happened in less than a year, some time around 1982-83, and the record stores were just cleared out, wham-bam. Considering how fast the shelves were cleared out, I strongly suspect millions of records were recalled and destroyed by the record companies. American companies are very fond of forced obsolescence; just pay for more advertising, and the public will go along.

Replacing them were miserable Dolby-B cassettes (at the same $7.98 price as an LP) and the shiny new discs, at twice the price of the beloved LP's ($15.98, if I recall right). I gather that in the UK the changeover was much slower, due to extremely high CD pricing and buyer resistance to the new medium.

I was so annoyed at the cynical nature of the forced transition that I avoided buying a CD player until about 1988, when Philips finally came out with a decent model. It took getting the Monarchy DAC with the Burr-Brown PCM-63K converter to have CD's that finally sounded halfway acceptable, maybe even hifi at times. I slimmed down the record collection from 600 to 300, but at least kept that many, despite 5 moves and not having a phonograph. I just couldn't let go of those records - too many memories, and I knew someday I'd have a good phonograph again.

Let's see now: re-arrange the equipment, if necessary get a proper stand, get a better mat, swap the arm out, pick a cartridge, and oh yes, design and build a phono preamp from scratch. Piece of cake. Dunno if it'll be ready for the RMAF or not.

[Barry]

Welcome to AoS Lynn

You have some awsome looking gear there!

Interesting your comments on the rapid demise of the LP in the US. As you correctly say, things here were slower and during the mid eighties many LPs were sold off cheap in newsagents and supermarkets, so as to make way for new CDs. A situation I took advantage of.

I have to confess I'm happy with both CD and vinyl and my collection consists or similar numbers of each. I do find myself going to a lot more trouble in playing vinyl and like to experiment with TTs, arms and cartridges. At the moment I have four (idler wheel) turntables (including an EMT 930), eight tone arms and about 15 cartridges (a near equal split between MM and MC designs), whereas I have just one CD player - I must be mad!

What sort of music do you like to listen to Lynn?

Welcome again

Regards

[Spectral Morn]

Welcome to AOS Lynn :)


Regards D S D L

[Lynn Olson]

Music - well, many kinds of rock from the Sixties and some from the early Seventies. Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Youngbloods, the Airplane, CSNY, etc. (I went to college in Los Angeles, and the music scene back in the late Sixties was one of the wonders of the world). I recently picked up a copy of one of my favorite (and very obscure) groups from then, The United States of America, which was a precursor to Dead Can Dance.

I get the impression that London and Berlin are where it's at now - I like German ambient and techno a lot, as well as UK/Indian club music. (I was very impressed with music in India when I visited in 1991 - and it only seems to have gotten better since then.) Like Ulrich Schnauss a lot.

Large-scale symphonic and choral, and I listen to opera occasionally. Real gospel music from the American South, which is rarely heard in the rest of the country and is very beautiful. *Not* the awful "audiophile blues" you hear at hifi shows, but the real thing from Memphis - I've been there, and what you hear for free on Beale Street is a zillion times better than anything I've heard at a hifi show.

Almost never listen to jazz - no emotional connection there. Zero country or rap, but bluegrass (the real thing) is fun to listen to. Boulder, Colorado (only about 10 miles from where I live) is a big bluegrass scene, for some weird reason, and of course plenty of bands play at Red Rocks, just west of Denver.

In terms of design requirements, the music I connect to emotionally is dense, not sparse, so the equipment has to handle it with grace and ease, and not collapse into harshness and buzzing sounds. A lot of audiophile equipment sounds fine with the kind of sparse instrumentation heard at shows, but can't handle symphonic or choral music at all. The technical reasons are straightforward: music that has a dense spectrum will create a lot of IM distortion sum-and-difference products if the amplification or loudspeakers are not very good, and this is audible as electronic-sounding artifacts.

Class AB transistor amplifiers with high feedback ratios and many, if not most, DACs and CD players really fall down here, creating a roar of distortion at the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, for example. If the electronics have inherently low IM distortion in the forward path, and the speakers have low energy storage (resonances, cabinet-edge diffraction, etc.), even the so-called "bad" recordings can sound really gratifying.

These same "bad" recordings can sound like the shop floor of a steel mill on many audiophile systems, which on closer inspection, suffer from slewing distortion, rectifier hash emitting current-pulse RFI into the rest of the system, slow and nonlinear driver stages, overshoots in the feedback path, standing-waves in speaker cabinets, rough crossovers with phase errors, and narrowband resonances in the speaker drivers, to name just a few. Get rid of the design errors one by one, the sound improves, and you can enjoy a wider gamut of recordings, on all media. A surefire indication of major system problems is only having a few audiophile-grade recordings sound acceptable (typically caused by tweeters with narrowband resonances, crossover errors, and marginal Class AB electronics).

Interestingly enough, when you remove certain kinds of design errors, the emotional connection to the music becomes stronger and more intimate. This isn't the removal of an identifiable coloration, which is a simpler process of find-the-problem-and-fix-it, but an overall emotional impression, quite aside from audiophile-noticed colorations. It seems to happen when IM distortion falls below perceptual thresholds and energy-storage problems in the power supply and loudspeaker are resolved. TTs play a role here: time-domain problems seem to affect the emotional connection to the music in a way that is not obvious.

[Alex_UK]

Great insight there Lynn. Just a quickie -by coincidence I'm playing the new Ulrich Schnauss collaboration with Mark Peters (http://www.amazon.com/Underrated-Silence-Vinyl-Ulrich-Schnauss/dp/B0066LY3N2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1329432314&sr=8-4) - in case you weren't aware of its release. :)

[Lynn Olson]

Well, I know I'm pretty out of step with the rest of the industry, and most of magazine and Internet reviewers. I've visited the homes of several reviewers, and their systems were not to my taste at all. To put it more strongly - I prefer the sound of my Toyota car stereo to the $200,000 systems I've heard. Not being snide or anything, that's just how it sounds to me.

But they listen to completely different kinds of music than I do. Diana Krall, various jazz pieces, heavy metal, etc. Things I never, ever listen to. They're also listening for things I don't consider especially important - exact localization of a handful of instruments, while I listen for overall spatial impression - is the room big or small, and does it all sound real, or like a synthesized artifact?

My first design in the audio world was the Shadow Vector Quadraphonic Decoder, for Audionics, back in 1973. That sensitized me to spatial impression and the peculiar distortions of multichannel systems - most of all, to "phasiness", which I suspect most reviewers don't hear at all. I can very easily hear it in loudspeakers; it's caused by a phase angle between LF and HF drivers of more than 20~30 degrees, and is very severe and noticeable for phase angles in excess of 90 degrees. I can hear this across the room, and it sounds extremely unnatural and unpleasant to me. But unless you've done your own crossover design with particular attention to inter-driver phase angles, or worked with quadraphonic decoders, it's a coloration that is hard to describe - but is very common in the high-end world.

Phase splitters in power amplifiers have a similar-sounding coloration (a sort of "shattered", or incoherent sound), which partially explains the popularity of SET amplifiers. But there are ways to avoid the phase-splitter coloration - I like transformers because they are free of dynamic errors in phase inversion.

To go into more detail, most phase splitters in transistor and tube amplifiers have different harmonic spectra coming off each side of the active device, and when recombined in the final stage, the sum-and-difference products are not constant, but modulated by program material. (Different portions of the transfer curve in the active phase splitter produce different harmonic spectra, and when recombined in the output stage, created very complex, level-dependent cancellations and additions.) This is audible as a sort of incoherent sound - a bit unfocussed, like an out-of-register color photograph in a newspaper. Remove the dynamic-tracking problem, and it snaps into focus.

With program material with a sparse spectrum, like a jazz trio, or minimalist audiophile blues, this problem is only subtly audible - you really have to listen for it (if you haven't designed your own amplifiers, you are unlikely to identify it). But with program material with a dense spectrum that is also highly dynamic, along with reverberant environment, the problem is gross and obvious, and sounds like a roar of distortion that is program-modulated. Get rid of the program-modulated IM distortion, and things really clear up.

Feedback? Well, it corrects the gross, first-order errors (as theory says it should), but it also creates very low-level sum-and-difference products of its own - a sort of dynamic noise floor. The audibility of the dynamic noise floor depends on whether it is above or below the thermal noise floor of the active devices. The other dynamic element to the noise floor is power-supply noise, which is typically program-modulated (rectifier switch noise is a function of current draw from the amplifier, which is program-modulated). The ideal solution is linearizing the forward path as much as possible, and getting switching noise in the power supply as low as possible.

My best guess is that the majority of the high-end business is aimed at satisfying the tastes of the reviewer community. A single negative or damn-with-faint-praise review from a prominent reviewer has the power to bankrupt a small start-up company, so new manufacturers understandably want to cultivate this audience, and the well-known manufacturers already know what they want. That's why most high-end gear, particularly at the top of the market, has a certain kind of sound - it's aimed at the same reviewer community.