John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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It doesn't make sense. Unless you did enjoy the music, or you're not in the 5% club 😀
Being wowed by sound system that produce 'real' sound is not equal to enjoying music. It is equal to being amazed to anything. Equals to an audiophile who plays a recording of an helicopter with an exciter. "Wow! Hear that sound!" 😉
Don't worry, it's purely subjective, so why would anybody want to measure it?
 
It doesn't make sense. Unless you did enjoy the music, or you're not in the 5% club 😀

Being wowed by sound system that produce 'real' sound is not equal to enjoying music. It is equal to being amazed to anything. Equals to an audiophile who plays a recording of an helicopter with an exciter. "Wow! Hear that sound!" 😉

Singers are trained to create musical sound through voice, melody and emotion. Musical instruments are designed so that they can produce musical sound. Musicians are trained so that they can produce musical sound using the instruments. A simple guitar strum does not sound 'the same' with oscilloscope falling down from the table.

May be the music was 'broken' by that. Some music requires the existence of (phase accurate) low frequency sounds to be musical. Some music like Beethoven's Fur Elise will not sound gorgeous with small speakers. And our ears have unique non linearity with sound level (The Fletcher-Munson curve changes with sound level). At low volume level, our ears perceived the bass as attenuated.

I suppose if you’ve never experienced it might be hard to understand,
It’s like someone opened a window .....even the music you otherwise might not like becomes engaging,And literally does make your hair stand on end and in extreme cases brings a tear to your eye for no other reason than it’s so overwhelming.
 
It doesn't make sense. Unless you did enjoy the music, or you're not in the 5% club 😀

Being wowed by sound system that produce 'real' sound is not equal to enjoying music. It is equal to being amazed to anything. Equals to an audiophile who plays a recording of an helicopter with an exciter. "Wow! Hear that sound!" 😉
There's a certain difference between a playback system with 'all the notes in the right place' & a playback system that seems better able to convey the performance - it's about realism of the illusion - it just seems that our auditory perception senses the sounds are more realistic & automatically pays more attention - this affects us at a higher cognitive level
 
There's a certain difference between a playback system with 'all the notes in the right place' & a playback system that seems better able to convey the performance - it's about realism of the illusion - it just seems that our auditory perception senses the sounds are more realistic & automatically pays more attention - this affects us at a higher cognitive level

Yah....what he said! 😀
 
Current measurements don't do that & you will never get an playback waveform at ears that exactly matches the input waveform
I know, that is the challenge and one of the reasons why Linkwitz became interested in binaural recordings, ultimately he chose to design his own speakers which rendered the recording "good enough for me" 🙂
so what tolerances do we use, what parts of the waveform do we focus on, what weighting do we apply to certain factors in the waveform, etc.
I don't know, do you, does anyone, and what waveform are you talking about, the one that hits your ears?
 
scottjoplin;5824303............ I don't know said:
Some of us are guessing about what are the important factors based on their experience

Yes, it's about the waveform that hits your ears - once you start moving back from that towards the source you end up making assumptions about the waveform at the ears
Eventually you end up measuring isolated devices with simplistic test signals & declare all (put in your qualifier of choice here) devices are the same
 
In stock implementations it to my ears lacks dynamics, particularly in the bass. Higher frequencies seem to me to be less than pristine clean. Could be expectation bias though as I know the OPS is fed from a charge pump which won't exactly have low impedance. What tweaks have you implemented?
The board design looks to be pretty good and Wima type caps are used for decoupling and in series with 3.5mm output, RCA outputs are DC coupled.

You asked so here it is....I have applied my Goop© to board input and output connector active and ground connections and to oscillator modules.
This has very effectively settled/quietened the sound, lows are solid, powerful and tuneful and go down forever and highs are clear and detailed and extended, are never offensive without hint of being 'polite'.
Mids sounds are really nicely real with great sense of power/dynamics, depth and 3D placement and no hint of the hardness/harshness that can plague vocals reproduction on so many systems.
Subjectively this is due to ideal damping giving natural attack and in particular natural decay/tail characteristic which is vital for correct sense of timing/rhythm, clarity, intelligibility and above all total lack of fatigue.
I can modify the Goop© formulation (BQP putty) to contain particular elements and compounds.....gold and silver each impart characteristic dynamic signature, turntable sound is strongly dependent on the record actual vinyl formulation, and so on and so on......

According to my findings, electrical designs are generally well good enough and it is implementations that are the downfall and that does not just mean layouts.
Materials in particular dielectric materials can have far greater influence on behaviour of baseband systems such as audio systems than we generally realise or acknowledge.
The subjective manifestations of sounds of materials is frequency dependent energy store/energy release behaviors which can lead to perceived resonances and dips and tonal sculptings.
These 'resonances' also present as loss of information/intelligibility due to perceived distortions and maskings.

Some materials sound brash, others harsh, others shrill, others dull etc, some combinations 'play nice' and some don't, and one combination is 'just right' and for deep reasons.
There is current discussion about physical and emotional responses to sounds and sound systems, I say listeners' responses can be universally moderated and subliminally so.
That's enough for now, but the takeaway is that modern audio schematics are quite fine, it is materials that determine the 'deep down' subjective character of all audio systems.
This determination has far deeper ramifications than first inspection reveals and in fields far away from audio.

Dan.
 
Most don't care because they find sound/music is not that important to care about. Others are negatively biased so that they do not care to be open about what they hear. And finally, there may be some who really do not register better sound.

Is there a place for those that just care about the music, culture, and people behind it and simply can not be bothered to worry about the details? You say sound/music I would leave the latter off of that list.
 
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