John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

[Kindhornman]

George,
Those results you just posted would seem to make a remote mounted trany a good idea or some form of shielding. How would you handle all of that in one of your own designs?

[fas42]

Originally Posted by Kindhornman

Ps. I would still like to hear how you make a bad cd sound like anything but. I just put on an early transfer of a Doors album and I must say it sounds like crap.... Put on a Manhattan Transfer album and it was night and day. Anyone who says that all cds sound good with the correct equipment must not have a bad cd in the bunch. I know in this particular instance that the vinyl Doors album would just blow out the cd version, no comparison. I'll take the clicks and scratches over horrid cd sound any day. I guess that cd will make a nice coaster.

This is the real heart of the matter -- the useless thrashing going on here about levels of something being -120 vs -100dB is totally irrelevant to getting good sound. If a car has crap suspension, then worrying about the right grade of titanium to use in the engine turbocharger is not going to do an ounce of good in making the car bearable to drive.

My approach in this situation is to say: right, the problem is not the recording, because all my experience tells me it is never the recording, or the transfer, but that a quality of the
system, we have to be "strong enough" to say it, a flaw in the playback mechanism is giving me "horrid cd sound"; the intrinsic, particular qualities of that recording are intermodulating in the worst possible way with a weakness in the reproduction chain.

So this is where the real battle starts, this is the garage mechanic being told that there is rattle somewhere in the car. Where? I don't know ... What's causing it? Haven't got a clue ... How am I supposed to I fix it? Just get rid of the noise, that's your job!!

The "bad" recording is your rattle, and you may have to tear the car completely to pieces to finally understand where that annoying, irritating noise is coming from. But believe me, it's somewhere there; you may punch holes in the wall with frustration trying to find it, but true understanding of the "bigger picture" finally emerges when you discover the cause ...

Frank

[Kindhornman]

Frank,
That is just to say as just in the days of vinyl recording that nobody ever made a bad sounding album. If the next ten cd's that I play sound great does that mean I have a problem or the one bad sounding one is just that, a terrible remastering of the original source tapes? If I have a great car that runs great on gas from most gas stations and at one my car runs like hell, misses and fouls the fuel filter is it the car or the gas? Nothing like water in the gas to make your day, but I sure wouldn't say I need to figure out how to make it run on contaminated fuel. Same with a poorly transfer cd, to say they all are great is just nonsense.

[Esperado]

The masters of the best sounding vinyls, if copied as-it on a cd, have all the chances to make a very aggressive and flat record.

[SY]

Originally Posted by simon7000

Now where did you get your 120 mV from?

Quick sim in PSUD2. That gives very good results compared with experiment, thus its popularity.

So, managed to break the -200dB barrier yet?

I am on a cell phone and the typos and auto spell drive me nuts

I can't get my autocorrect to inadvertently change 10,000uF to 0.1F. Or 3kHz to 6kHz. What was the trick?

[fas42]

Originally Posted by Kindhornman

Same with a poorly transfer cd, to say they all are great is just nonsense.

No, the point is not to make them sound "great". It is, for them not to have "horrid cd sound", there's a mighty big gap between those two extremes, and the "attitude" to have is, to get somewhere in that gap, preferably closer to the "great" end vs. the "horrid" end.

This said, I probably have your "bad" Doors CD album, I have 4 or 5 of them, and yes, I used them as reference pieces to work on some years ago. When my system was good they sounded very, very good; but when it was off-colour the sound of them was hideous ... I know what you're saying ...

I moved on to more testing material since: try live Ike and Tina Turner material at high volume to shred your eardrums when things aren't hunky dory ...

Frank

[SY]

Originally Posted by john curl

It's not marketing, SY, it is philosophising !

If "philosophizing" means "making unsupported and probably incorrect claims about competing technologies," and refusing to admit error and learning from the experience, then sure, you're philosophizing.

[fas42]

Originally Posted by Esperado

The masters of the best sounding vinyls, if copied as-it on a cd, have all the chances to make a very aggressive and flat record.

As you say, a "brilliant" recording can be "ruined" by the wrong turn of a dial. And to me that's a fault of the playback system. To use that miserable, dead horse, car analogy again it's like having unbelievably twitchy steering: if you concentrate like hell and turn the steering wheel in precisely the right manner, every time, the car performs very nicely and seems to be competent. But, if you over-correct even slightly, or turn the wheel a smidgin too quickly, disaster strikes - the car will skid and roll over ...

To me that's unacceptable. The car should accommodate the vagaries of the road, and your inputs to controlling it, in an intelligent, comfortable and satisfying way. That's why companies like MB and BMW are winners ...

Frank

[Esperado]

Originally Posted by fas42

No, the point is not to make them sound "great". It is, for them not to have "horrid cd sound"

Many great vinyls were mixed in what we called 'magic rooms'. There where studios where the monitoring was far from flat (means dull) and obliged the sound engineer to add a lot of 'presence' (high medium) to their mixs to make a good sound in the studio.
This presence compensate in odd that the vinyl will miss in even. But the tape sound very aggressive on flat CDs, Main reason for this 'CD sound' reputation.
I was smiling, looking to the response curves of the master tape recorder: After the mix down on the console, we used to correct-it listening "after tape". So the tape's character was part of the mix itself.

With digital recording, i'm not able to make the difference before/after tape.

[Kindhornman]

Frank,
I guess we would have to define horrid cd sound to not disagree when we probably agree about the sound of a particular album. The Doors cd that I have just sounds like I am listening to a cheap stereo with terrible balance in the sound, no real bottom end to speak of and the top is irritating to say the least. Not complaining about noise or such, just a very bad mix and eq. Given the right mastering engineer I am sure it would have sounded much better, but I sure don't want something that sounds like it was mixed on a set of NC10 speakers and tested on a set of Auratones. Just believe me that this particular cd is poorly recorder.