Bollocks. It's the big players who determine what the people "want" to listen to. In the meanwhile, psychology is evolving a new subfield, related to "must have gadgets".
Completely agreed, no argument here. In this new cheapskate world, ANY horse dung product which enables you to play free dowloads is sure to succeed. Never mind quality so long as it's free. This mentality is, most unfortunately, mirrored by lower tier products of most significant manufacturers, because "that's what the people want". The famous comment which whitewashes anything the have for sale.
Whoever doubts that, go out and buy for peanut money vintage gear, replace just the two main filter caps with new ones, and compare with brand new equivalent product. If you have half a decent hearing, the difference will soon become obvious.
The only part of audio which has evolved no end is the marketing.
Thank you for the advice, you must be joking again. Correct level setting :lol: Would you mind posting measurements of spectra of basic test signals from your iPhone? And S/N unweighted. Regarding "sounds pretty good" we may argue up to infinity through web at 10 000 miles distance. But you are a rigorous person and you like scientific proofs, so please provide me with them
.
Or maybe the other way around?
Anyway, Peter Walker went on record saying that the first time he listened to one of his new amps was after they were produced and found their way to dealers' rooms. Maybe he knew something we don't?
But there's another angle to this. If we extend the now-pretty-much-agreed fact that your listening perception depends on many things beside the objective sound, what is the value of an opinion formed by listening to a product of your own labor, eagerly anticipated and with lots of time and money sunk into it?
Probably better to ask others to do that critical listening....
Jan
Last edited:
Level, yes. Also turn off EQ and play uncompressed files. Sound Check off as well.
I never bothered to measure it, I just set the controls properly, plugged it into my office system, and played music (I usually keep about 500 songs in rotation, replacing 100 of them every month). I saw your measurements a few months back and have no reason to doubt them- for my office system, more than good enough.
Perhaps, Jan, perhaps. The odd thing about him and me is that I have always had much respect for him, and loved his old 33 amp, but was severely let down by his first generation of 405 amps. I'd really like to hear the latest generation, I suppose they improved it zero load tolerance, in my view its greatest fault. The visual design is debatable, I hated it, but others loved it.
I'll have ask Nigel when he returns, he should know.
Yes the 2nd gen 405 is better, on two counts: they fixed the intrusive protection system that cut in too often. What they did was produce a new subcircuit on a small add-on pcb, conformally coated, and you'll see that sitting upright on the main amp PCB, that's a 405-2.
The other thing is that they biased the dumpers slightly on with iirc a single diode bias for the N/P output pair. Enough to take the edge of the xover.
Jan
You know, I have heard it said that everything we knew about the CD in its early days was told us by Philips, but that Philips never told everything they knew about the CD.
I don't know if that's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me, that's very human behavior. By analogy, perhaps Peter Walker acted in a similar way, Quad was a well known and highly regadred name, he must have been aware that he would soon be copied.
Good point! I have thought much about that myself. My answer is twofold.
The most important aspect to me is that I like it, that's why I'm doing it. This quite aside from its measurements, it has to sound pleasing to me especially using my AR94 speakers, they are sort of "bad boys" in my home, quite capable of sweating a cheap amp to death.
The second aspect, if it is to have any meaning at all, must exclude myself from any evaluation 100%. I should not even be present during audition. Let it rip and let's hear what other people have to say about it. Obviously, I am hoping for the best, but there are no guarantees, and especially not in the first iteration. With luck, I'll get away with just 3 iterations.
I feel I owe that to the good people here and not here who have been kind enough to offer their help, and have helped me a lot, and I do mean a lot. And we both know that changing the value and/or place of a single capacitor can make or break the lot easily, not to even mention component outlay, component selection, etc.
What do you think?
Attachments
Richard, we've been here before. By trial and error it's possible now, but it would require a bit of smart software to do it semi-automatically, an exercise for down the track ...
Interestingly, if the system is working at the highest level of quality these recordings still are 'correct', you don't hear any distortion or problems with the sound. However, emotionally they are very heavy "meat", the constant onslaught of intensity, which is what the compression achieves when well reproduced, is just too much - it's like eating one huge meal after another; there's a point when you just have to walk away from it, your nerve endings are saturated - no more, you say ...
SY is correct in saying the portable media players can do the job - a friend has gone down the route of using Cowon devices both for on the go background music, and serious home listening. Built to take SQ quite seriously, and correctly interfaced to the amplifier - he uses a DIY buffer for that job - it does an excellent job, most times quite superior to the heavily tweaked TT, and modified Quad CD player.
Ok, then define funny, delicious, happy, loving, joyous, cute... you get the idea. All the best things of life can't be "defined".
An experienced, focused, and wise designer will make a better product than a committee or a triple blind test. Every time.
Last edited:
- Status
- Not open for further replies.