I beg to differ and agree with cartridge matching. Often it does make a difference because it helps the preamp work. It is input bandwidth limiting. We are mostly talking MC pickups . When MM it is more complicated.
Be very suspicious of a preamp that is vastly different when MC with various loadings. However I have one strange exception. The quality of the loading resistor seems important (Tyco foil). I have no idea why. The preamp I discovered this on used all Philips MRS25 resistors in the other places. I often use 47K for MC. Also 1 M for Shure. If so the RIAA needs a tweak if a M-44/7. The result is more verve. A 44-7 is a great device. It might rival a Denon 103 if the arm is high grade. Stereo is about 20 dB. It is enough. 9.5 mV output makes for interesting preamp designs.
Be very suspicious of a preamp that is vastly different when MC with various loadings. However I have one strange exception. The quality of the loading resistor seems important (Tyco foil). I have no idea why. The preamp I discovered this on used all Philips MRS25 resistors in the other places. I often use 47K for MC. Also 1 M for Shure. If so the RIAA needs a tweak if a M-44/7. The result is more verve. A 44-7 is a great device. It might rival a Denon 103 if the arm is high grade. Stereo is about 20 dB. It is enough. 9.5 mV output makes for interesting preamp designs.
That will work. I do it the other way round, because when I start out, I cannot foresee exactly what I will need to make it work as I think it should. For example, I might guess a 0.5W resistor, but eventually it may become a 2W resistor, or vice Versa.
As for what it will be by birth, that's a known - Beyschlag, of course.
Large capacitors - Fisher & Tausche, of course.
Metalize film capacitors - Wima, of course.
Power devices - preferaby Motorola/ON Semi or Toshiba.
I do not claim these to be the best there are, it's simply that I have most experience with them and over the years I got used to their reliability.
Hahahaha.
I hope "The Wire" I'm going to make doesn't fall into "top component dogs food" land =)
Sounds like a fun competition, by the way.
As for the rest of your post, I'm slightly amazed by how important power supply noise is around here, in this forum.
I guess what it comes down to is we all have different shoes. In my shoes, I've never heard it =))
I reccomend you read
http://waltjung.org/PDFs/Picking_Capacitors_1.pdf
http://waltjung.org/PDFs/Picking_Capacitors_2.pdf
A two part paper written by Walt Jung and Richard March a long time ago, but still true today. Great reading, most informative.
Nigel, with the M-44/7 I would focus first on RIAA pre overloading.
It was one of the highest output MM cartridges, 11mVrms from monaural, 9.4 from stereo grooves @ 1kHz, 5cm/sec.
Cartridge loading as a second (Inductance 720mH, DC Resistance 630 Ohm).
It was set for 15 d VTA with a spherical tip 0,7mil (white), 1mil (blue), 2.5mil (green).
George
Last edited:
Hearing it as such on its own means you would need about the worst PSU ever made.
You hear it indirectly, when it masks what sould otherwise be there.
If you want to hear it directly, switch off every source, crank up the volume to the max and put your ear about 1 cm away from the tweeter. You will probably hear a more or less distinct hissing noise - well, that's the noise from your PSU.
I am talking about MM cartridges, all mine are MM.
And you can afford to differ, in fact you have a duty to differ, because you, Sir Nigel of the Groove, are British and are therefore expected to be eccentric.
The amps you described when you first came to this forum should be very resistant to noise. They might be less so at > 100 kHz. Amps with JFET inputs seem to do better.
Valve amps have very poor performance on paper. This is well known and usually well compensated for. The advantage is they seem less affected by the > 100 kHz noise.
These contrasting facts catch people out. They are very lazy when transistor and obsessional when valves. To be honest for almost similar reasons the same design principles work universally. Many transistor design would benefit from the hand of a valve designer. What they do by instinct still works 150 years after these things were well understood ( Faraday, Hertz, Maxwell, Tesla) . We touch on it when talking of capacitors. One of us the other day pointed out the series inductance of a lower grade capacitor can be exploited. That is to have a large high grade on the power amp close to the output devices. That forms a CLC filter which should loose the > 100 kHz a bit. Myself that would be 22 000 uF followed by 2200 to 4700 uF high grade . Panasonic FC series is an OK cheaper high grade.
I will be in Sri Lanka for 10 days, rain forecast. Sea will be 27C so I will be happy. Off in 16 hours.
I am talking about MM cartridges, all mine are MM.
And you can afford to differ, in fact you have a duty to differ, because you, Sir Nigel of the Groove, are British and are therefore expected to be eccentric.
Bless you Dejan. And you are not ? In fact just the fact we write here is proof. Mr Wayne pretends to be not so. We have caught him out time and time again. Those facts that pour out prove it. Colleen and I met at the school quizzes . We often get the best scores in music. Me classical and she anything else. She hides her eccentricity very well. That is until someone says something daft and she floors them. You can be sure that includes me. My one claim to fame is she has A level French, I am more fluent.I really must relearn as I am not so good now. How you kept your English going I will never know. Those 3 years were not wasted. I told Colleen she is a changeling when I first met her. She instantly knew what it meant and nodded. She got my attention by being very rude to me. I instantly fell in love with her for doing that. I deserved every word, I was being a bit one sided in my point of view. She has decided I am a socialist, that surprises me as I don't think I am. Humanist more likely.
An initially poor quality recording will sound good if nothing in the replay chain exacerbates any of the negative qualities inherent in the recording to any further degree - what happens then is that you can hear past all the recording "problems" and focus in on the music, your mind filters out the ugliness, you only "hear" the performance. This is not a theory; I fell off the proverbial chair when I first heard it happen, and it's something I've always used as a measuring stick since.
Complex music is always going to cause more grief, higher stress on the system, can it retain its composure? If the worst of the worst passes through with flying colours, then everything works ...
I use that technique because it works. The recordings I want to listen to have to behave, that's why I'm in the game - I have zero interest in listening to the "correct" recordings ... on that angle, it was only recently I heard the "mandatory" Jazz at The P... - for me, it was a huhh? Just another recording, I've heard plenty Jazz albums that give me the same sort of vibe as that one - what's the fuss??
Your "inner detail" is part of the answer, though - incredibly congested snippets of music should not mask that information, your hearing can separate out the subtleties ...
Okay, quiz time - someone just mentioned "Let's Dance" by David Bowie here, http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/music/261347-can-bad-music-damage-my-gear-new-post.html. I had a listen to a decent YouTube version - I don't have the album - and thought, yes, this will separate out the systems ...
Put this on, crank it right up - how does it come across ... ?
Put this on, crank it right up - how does it come across ... ?
Not really relevant - that comment was more in the context of amplifiers having to drive significant power into speakers. Foobar has a flat, dead quality to the sound, it sucks the life out of it to some degree, which is invariant with the power being fed to the speakers; in contrast, Nero will quite clearly differentiate the level of "sparkle" in the two music samples, say - it gets the treble better IOW, on my machine ...
Youtube video or mp3 is never any complex music reference. For 'complex music' take some good recording of philharmonic orchestra. Mahler might be a good choice. As far you are using recordings with huge dynamic compression and lossy compression as a reference, as you are doing, I cannot consider your posts serious.
This is a complete nonsense caused probably by some crappy hardware you are using for your listening tests.
The hardware, taken as a whole, will certainly be the cause of the difference in perceived quality between Foobar and Nero - for my setup. It's not nonsense, it's how it is for my situation - I'm not fussed about it, so long as the overall is good enough for my purposes that's all that matters.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.