John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Now we are back to the usual program: which parameters of the system determine the 'badness' - or, the deviation from transparency.
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Yet, none of these things can turn a bad recording, with no soundstage, lots of compression, bad miking, into a good recording.
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But I agree that a bad system can turn a good recording
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That's why I mentioned that "bad" has broader meaning. Assumptions are dangerous. We should not assume that "bad" as mentioned by others have the same matter as we think it should. I think we can agree that bad recording is bad recording, it doesn't sound as good as good recording. Where we might disagree is how bad a bad recording should sound.

After all, we don't listen to amplifiers distortion. We listen to speakers distortion, which is of course a product of amplifier quality, but there is no dummy load here as when we measure amplifier THD.

Regarding shaping THD spectrum, if you think it will cause inaccuracies, well, so what will determine the accuracy/transparency? THD? At which frequency? At what power level?

Let's define transparency at the speaker output as the sound that reflect the codes at the recording material. But isn't the code has no sound?

I defined transparency not as simple as ability to show micro details but these details MUST be accurate. Better not detailed but accurate than detailed but not accurate.
 
Why accurate sound is important

One success criteria in my system is how the system reproduce the sound accurately.

Imagine two guitar players playing the same guitar brand. The better player has the magic skill in how to touch the string. Similarly many instruments especially woodwinds, can be played to display emotion or soul if played by better players. A better singer doesn't need to have beautiful voice but s/he should know how to blend with the music and how to make it sounds good even at Falsetto. Imagine a great musicians and a great singer play together, every single sound is beautiful music!

So the clue is simple. A good system should be able to differentiate good singers and musicians with bad singers and musicians (because of transparency and accuracy).

I don't really care with recording quality. I care more with the musicians. Bad musicians in good recording LOL.
 
Also, a 'bad' sytem can make the difference between a good and a bad recording much smaller than a good system would show.
That is the reason that when you hear little difference between a good and bad recording, you know something is not right with your system. In fact, I keep a few bad CDs for this - if they sound pretty much the same as my best CDs, I've done something seriously wrong!

jan
Good and "bad" recordings will always sound very different, the key factor is whether one can listen to the latter with genuine enjoyment or not. Listening to music is not an intellectual exercise for me, it's the "vibe" of the thing, :D. And if the vibe is not there, what am I doing wasting my time listening to the stuff? Having bought the music, my intention is to gain pleasure from it - and for me this is not achieved by throwing a thick blanket over the speakers ... :)

A live analogy is getting a good acoustic guitar player, and listening to him in a good recording studio - equals "good" recording. Then, take him outside into a busy street, cars whizzing past, people shuffling along the pavement, chattering constantly, all sorts of background muck happening - and get him to play the same song - equals "bad" recording. Now, I can enjoy the talent of that person in both settings, I get enjoyment from the experience ... that's the angle I'm coming from ...
 
Everything is important. Good recordings, good musicians, good playback equipment.
It is a continuous chain.

I was trying to stress what Frank has just mentioned. That everyone of us is agree that bad recording is bad recording. The difference is how bad a bad recording should sound. I have no problem with any of my CDs. Actually it is the audiophile recording that I don't want to play (I have the standard versions).

I used to have two CDs that must pass my enjoyment test.

1) the very best of UB40. This can easily be fatiguing.
2) the analog recording (AAA) of Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline/Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show. I like all of the songs in this CD, but it rarely show the beauty!
 
Then there's where the message transcends the medium :

Andy McKee - Rylynn - Acoustic Guitar - www.candyrat.com - YouTube
Interesting choice - yes, the string tone would sound good on a ghetto blaster, but I got increasingly irritated by the sound of the right hand striking the soundboard, as accompaniment. Played as raw YouTube feed, and with the low bit rate audio resolution, that sound on my m/c was not 'right', had an annoying edge to it - this is where the extra steps have to be taken to improve playback, or more easily done, get a better resolution version ...
 

Yes. Have you experienced the "oh! So this is why she is a diva" or similar when the first time you break that "level" in system transparency?

Just for fun, many female singers have sung live The Star Spangled Banner. Which singer do you think the best? (please exclude African Americans as they tend to be special).

Between Esther Ofarim and Emi Fujita?
 
I'm still waiting to understanding why some people rate Barbara Streisand so highly - I'll force myself to check her out again.
Perhaps because some of the albums are overdone ... I was at a hifi club, and a chap was demo'ing his own gear - put on Streisand's Broadway Album ... man, that was heavy duty - I was hanging onto the side of the chair, waiting for the pain to stop ... :)

Got a copy later, as a test CD for checking how sorted out systems were ... :D
 
I'm still waiting to understanding why some people rate Barbara Streisand so highly - I'll force myself to check her out again.

Maria Calllas's greatness I can understand even with poor recordings played on a boom box.

This is what I mean. The question is how can you know it thru a boom box.

Many popular singers cannot sing at all (they usually are pretty or sexy). But with Streissand's qualification I believe she is that good (I don't have her CD).

The idea of this "transparency and accuracy" is that you should be able to hear them as you can hear them live.

Tube amps and single driver are usually not transparent enough. We need multi way. But then the crossover (and multi stage solid state amplifiers) makes the accuracy even worse than single drivers.
 
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Tube amps and single driver are usually not transparent enough. We need multi way. But then the crossover makes the accuracy even worse than single drivers.

Hi Jay,

Recently I bought and built a two way transmission line speaker kit - cost about $800 including the cabinet panels.

Built as bought it sounded OK but nothing special. Drivers were Hi Vi F8 and Fountek CD3. The crossover was 2nd order at 3.1kz ( with an unusally high Q in the bass/mid driver X-over ). Laminate core inductors on the bass/mid and caps that cost about $2-5 each.

I added a Zobel on the bass/mid driver and redesigned the crossover from scratch choosing 3rd order Bessel @ 2.5kz and caps that cost $20 - 40 each ( a mix, but mostly Jantzen Superior Z ).

I have not upgraded the laminated core chokes yet, just changed the values to work as a temporary measure in the new design ( Air cored foil inductors are in the post ) but even as they stand now, the sound of the speakers has been radically transformed. Partly due to the much better damping with a zobel and bessel filters but also because the better caps sound way more clean and detailed than the originals.

I will end up spending considerably more on the X-over components than on the drivers but I'm convinced it will be money very well spent.

I agree that speakers with crossovers can be worse than single drivers but If you invest in them sufficiently it's my view that the end results can be better than anything a single driver can manage simply because single drivers by definition lack bass weight or treble extension & transparency or both.

mike
 
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Lots of opinions thrown around here. Does it really give us anything?
Musical talent is separate from musical reproduction, except that superior musical reproduction MIGHT introduce what the musical source more closely sounds like to someone who has never heard the source live. BUT classical musicians can use a table radio for almost all info, because they KNOW what live sounds like. Some people perhaps have never heard a live symphony orchestra or even a live classical guitar, and they could be helped to understand why we bother if they had a better hi fi.
 
I will end up spending considerably more on the X-over components than on the drivers but I'm convinced it will be money very well spent.

I agree that speakers with crossovers can be worse than single drivers but If you invest in them sufficiently it's my view that the end results can be better than anything a single driver can manage.

Agree with multi way versus single driver issue.

About crossover, IME correctness is much much more important than audiophile quality parts. I have come to a conclusion that a tweeter crossover without notch filter is not good enough. High order filter with standard component values is bad. The only solution is to make it complex but precise. My speaker has 4 coils in series with woofer. Side by side with a single driver, the multi way wins in every aspects (I mean including characters usually in favor of single drivers).
 
Most of the time (in most systems) we cannot appreciate great artists. All sound similar.
Really?

No, not really, and may I add "Of course not!" People have been able to appreciate great artists over AM radio, 78RPM disks, and countless bad recordings played on countless bad sound reproduction systems for decades. What a conceit, that only a great hifi can allow one to appreciate great artists! Sure, sometimes a really good hifi helps one hear some subtle details, but the ineffable quality that makes an artist of any genre "great" does not require a "great" sound system to understand. One can hear the "greatness" in the performances of Patsy Kline or Oscar Peterson or any number of great pop bands (names elided to avoid arguments) over an AM radio in a moving car.
 
No, not really, and may I add "Of course not!" People have been able to appreciate great artists over AM radio, 78RPM disks, and countless bad recordings played on countless bad sound reproduction systems for decades. What a conceit, that only a great hifi can allow one to appreciate great artists! Sure, sometimes a really good hifi helps one hear some subtle details, but the ineffable quality that makes an artist of any genre "great" does not require a "great" sound system to understand. One can hear the "greatness" in the performances of Patsy Kline or Oscar Peterson or any number of great pop bands (names elided to avoid arguments) over an AM radio in a moving car.

I gave logic to my explanations, such that even if readers don't have the experience, as long as he has good logic, he can be open minded and think or learn something.

Listen to an American Idol thru your TV, you might not understand why a jury praises one contestant and not the other.

Many here has mentioned something like they know the model of a guitar used by an artist thru their system. Recording engineers know that a cheap accoustic guitar cannot be manipulated to sound good. And this is only the basic required to explain more advanced thing in audio reproduction, such as what or how a sound system should sound like.
 
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