John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Yes, you know, one of the many small compromises spoken about in the text that you quoted. it was clearly and repeatedly demonstrated in the measurements that you have either conveniently ignored because it gets in the way of your argument about a component youve never heard, or not understood.?
I am curious now to get to the bottom of this .. has Sennheiser been contacted and asked to comment about this "problem", in their premium product, at any time? Any links to any discussion beyond just user impressions and conjecture?

Frank
 
About vibrations problems, we used to test our amps on a vibrating machine yet in 1970 for the 2 type of trouble: generated noise, induced modulation.
Trouble is, there can be, as a way of simplifying the concept, two types of problems: obviously audible effects, little glitchy noise, buzzes, etc; or, that the sound just "doesn't sound right". Both are distortion, both could be measurable, but they are at different levels of intensity. One is easy to point the finger at and say, there it is!; the other just gives you a headache over some time, makes the sound dull, fatiguing - far harder to say in that case there's a problem with the build quality, far easier to claim that it's just "bad recordings" ... :)

Frank
 
i'm sure they have, they have a booth at RMAF and CANJAM every year. they arent going to change the tooling to suit the people who usually dont have the product any more.

Any links to any discussion beyond just user impressions and conjecture?
very predictable of you, yeah conjecture, i'm sure Tyll would be happy with you labelling the several page technical article he wrote about a headphone hes owned for years, sold for years and his ability to interpret measurements made on a high end analyzer... conjecture. hes probably measured more headphones than sennhieser

measurements of stock, measurements with the damping removed altogether and measurements of various other damping materials and their effects, both positive and negative of a resonance in a specific frequency band around 6.5khz.

you can only be trolling, so i'm reporting you. feel free to argue that you simply dont understand the words and pictures so well. So quickly the love affair fades with the words you wield....

directly above this post you seem to be arguing my point again.... are you taking it in turns with someone else?
 
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And Paul Tanner, wonderful trombonist, sterling educator, and outstandingly nice person, just passed. He played Theremin on that Beach Boys tune.

glad you picked up on it ;) it was a partial reminder to myself as well. thats sad news alright, I love a good Theremin, a friend of mine made himself a midi Theremin, one of the most bizarre instruments ever, taken to a whole new level of weird.
 
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To be precise, the Tannerin. Named after - guess who? :) Similar sound and circuit, different technique. We've been trying to build one at work as the Theremin and all the hand waving had gotten tiresome.

One learns something new every day (if one is fortunate).

The obit suggested the Theremin so I leapt to that conclusion. And some other BB apochrypha evidently makes the same assumption.
 
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glad you picked up on it ;) it was a partial reminder to myself as well. thats sad news alright, I love a good Theremin, a friend of mine made himself a midi Theremin, one of the most bizarre instruments ever, taken to a whole new level of weird.

My father worked intensely for a full year on a fancy Theremin. The development was funded by Richard Simonton, the west coast Muzak mogul (if mogul is the right word). It had stops like an organ and was in a rather antiquated-looking cabinet. The hope was it could catch on like a Hammond chord organ. In 20-20 retrospect it sounds at best fanciful, given in particular how difficult the instrument is to play to begin with, and how poor most people's sense of pitch is.

He referred to it thereafter as "Wood's Folly" :)

I used to haul it to experimental music jam sessions. I may still have a reel-to-reel of some of the bizarre results.

Alas, I abandoned the guts, which were tube and included a beautiful OD3 voltage regulator, shining brightly with that inimitable purple argon glow, when the family business went broke in 1989.
 
very predictable of you, yeah conjecture, i'm sure Tyll would be happy with you labelling the several page technical article he wrote about a headphone hes owned for years, sold for years and his ability to interpret measurements made on a high end analyzer... conjecture. hes probably measured more headphones than sennhieser
I am being straight up and down with you; if there is technical discussion out there about why the headphones have these characteristics, from people who actually are involved with the design and construction of headphones, I would be interested in seeing it ...

Frank
 
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On a real note here, how can you expect the designer to presuppose the placement of every piece of equipment? Perhaps some may have the offending piece of equipment sitting on a vibrating shelf or even sitting directly on top of a speaker enclosure and transferring vibration directly into the device? But yes you are right that the equipment should be subjected to the entire frequency response range of a typical speaker system to see if this is happening. That is just a reasonable request of anything that is producing audio, not to self vibrate and produce spurious sounds from acoustical coupling.

I have asked many audiophiles and reviewers why they insist on having the equipment in the near sound field of the speakers and then buy a lot of VooDoo to deal with what may be obvious. Even moving the system to a far end of the room would help. Move it to an adjacent room and close the door with wires through the wall and then you may have a real chance of hearing the system. However the audio shrine would be moved from prominence perhaps letting the music become the center of attention, and that would be blasphemy.

However, I have been moving to the opinion that people like the reverb that comes from the acoustic field reentering the audio system after a delay and the VooDoo is just tuning the balance to get it more pleasing. Perhaps all that is really needed for ultimate audio is one of these:
 

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I am being straight up and down with you; if there is technical discussion out there about why the headphones have these characteristics, from people who actually are involved with the design and construction of headphones, I would be interested in seeing it ...

Frank

I am involved in the design and construction of headphones, but I lost track of the issues you are kvetching about.
 
Demian, he cannot accept the HD800 has confirmed mid/treble resonance with some people, despite having never heard them. At the same time hes being outwardly critical of the previous dynamic flagship headphone sound quality (HD650) while pretending to be baffled that they havent fixed the HD800 when only some people report being sensitive to it.....

as far as I can tell hes kvetching about anything i'm not when talking to me, but simultaneously bitching about the prevalence of maddening equipment resonance issues on expensive equipment when talking to Kindhornman....

another thing, not all the HD800 design/manufacture is carried out on campus either.

Tyll confirmed this 6.5k resonance independently just recently (see page 2 in particular), I had not seen the article until last night, but have issues with the sound, always have (cant stand them, its like theyve got fricken like laser beams pointed into my ears). he likely undertook the task after the many mods to the headphone and repeated reports of this problem from some owners.
 
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