Sound Quality Vs. Measurements

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Tvr, you REALLY need to read 'better books' or take the undergraduate engineering on low noise design. Your speculations just cause confusion.
Like someone before: 'Low Noise Electronic Design' by M&F is a good book for understanding noise in semiconductor devices AND resistors. It is a little dated, but adequate for the task, and apparently cheap on the open market, too. When you are reasonably grounded, you will speculate less.
 
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[snip]Don't tell me none of you ever lived through a situation where maths tell you it should be a 4k7 resistor, and your ears tell you a 5k6 resistors sounds a hell of a lot better?[snip].

No, because math doesn't tell what something sounds like. Math can tell you how the freq response looks, or where the filter turnover is. But how it sounds, well, that's your call.

As someelse remarked, a false dichotomy.

jan
 
Right - the design engineer will use heuristics, not math in the process of designing. Math works at the lower level to get certain details correct but can't help actually make design decisions.

Yes. Like, "Let's assume idle current for this stage 1 mA, for next stage 10 mA, for 3'rd stage 100 MA, then calculate precision values of resistors needed" :D
 
diyAudio Member RIP
Joined 2005
book recommendations

Besides Motchenbacher and Fitchen or M. and Connelly for noise, some other books that can be gotten on the cheap and have a lot of good material:

Arbel, Analog Signal Processing and Instrumentation, 1980, ISBN 0521224691. Emphasis on opamps as building blocks but within that limitation a very good basic groundwork. The author taught in Israel and did work on nuclear science instrumentation, so there is some emphasis there, but the absence of audio shouldn't put one off.

Dunn, Gateways Into Electronics, 2000, 0471254487. Really brilliant if rather high-level introduction to electronics for physicists. I'm in awe of the amount of good material squeezed between its covers. Winifred Hill is also enthusiastic about the book, he the co-author with Horowitz of the famous Art of Electronics, which is also a worthwhile tome with tons of material.

Note that these are not per se audio electronics books. I wish I could recommend more of the latter. The first edition of the Ballou-edited Handbook for Sound Engineers ("The New Audio Cyclopedia") has some good things, particularly Steve Dove's long chapter on consoles, basically a rehash of a famous series of magazine articles he wrote; this was before Steve was seduced by the dark side of the force and more-or-less abandoned the analog domain. Later editions of the book are, how you say, erratic, and repeat material that is absurdly out-of-date (do we need to be reminded about mesa transistors for example?).


Brad
 
Think what you like, but it's gone from a fad to reason sine qua non in Scandinavia. If you don't have fast diodes in your rectifier, you don't sell.

Personally, I still prefer block rectifiers because the internal diodes are better matched.

Agree, hence my question, it seems to be a must have of late .......Wave will start to contribute after he has had his milky!!! :p
 
What about PSU with fast acting diodes and snubbers, like, dis-like ......? maybe TVR can give it a go in his Hafler...

Somewhere up there were the improved residual noise figures for the hexfred bridge and new main caps. Major improvement, but I changed two things at once so which was significant, can't say. Is it better than a standard rectifier with correct snubbers and modern caps? Don't know as the Hafler had a single cap across the bridge and 30 year old main caps. Not going backwards to find out.

Better books would be the thing. Finishing my EE is impractical. No time, no insane tuition, no energy. I tried it when I moved back here about 20 years ago. I was doing field support and got paged every night in class. I am afraid my calc is way to rusty to just go back. Trolling Amazon a little.

So, I still don't understand the criteria for selecting R5, the resistor between the CCS and the diff pair emitter resistors? Is it just managing the voltage across Q5 so I could use a lower voltage part? Is it a tradeoff of imperfect parts, who makes more noise, the CCS transistor or the resistor? It is about half and half designs that have this part or not.
 
Somewhere up there were the improved residual noise figures for the hexfred bridge and new main caps. Major improvement, but I changed two things at once so which was significant, can't say. Is it better than a standard rectifier with correct snubbers and modern caps? Don't know as the Hafler had a single cap across the bridge and 30 year old main caps. Not going backwards to find out.

Thanks for the response TVR are you going to snub that supply ....?
 
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