You are contradicting yourself here.
If what you do isn't effecting the sound, then how is it that you sense a change in sound through your modifications?
No one is going to criticize you because you deliberately alter the sound of your CD player to match your preference.
For to be entitled to say that, you would have first to quantify your “effect”.
Then compare it to the various minimum and maximum effects that can be introduced in a recording chain.
You see the problem you put yourself into by adopting a defense mode?
Again, for the time being, enjoy the music and try not to make any claim about “better” than this or that (unless you enjoy arguing for the sake of argument)
I agree to the rest of your post.
George
I fully agree with you, but at least i am honest about it 🙂
The ideea is that you do perceive that the sound is better, not distorted...as the "distorted" connotation is a bad one...And that is the case with tons of overkill designs, applauded valve amplifiers, exotic mc carts and so on...
Many of those who don't like the cd's never had properly "modified" cd players and you can see countless "non-oversampling" whatever you might name it over the whole internet, but you can't argue with people's subjectivity!
Lampization is made now by guys who have no electronics knowledge at all and their clients consider them the new Gods of electronics! I may be competing for a God role too 🙂)
I'll see if i'm lucky!
The price i payed for this is 20 pounds per player + mod and about 2-3 days of trial and error work per player...I can see in the future new audio guru's offering 50 pounds per any damn cassette double deck just for the tape-heads inside and maybe the cd-players will rise in price again like the cassette players! If you have tons of useless cd players and the worst quality cassette players that nobody was paying a penny even in their good days , this might be an occasion to contribute to this topic and sell them for real money 🙂
So being a bit less sarcastic, if i say that my mod is the best for the cheap cd players it is because it's the cheapest mod that works to my ears!
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Just to understand the sheer proportion of this madness that took over me...I just bought another 15 cd's for 5 pounds(very good to as new condition , not the ones up right, I bought those for two pounds... ) and a Pioneer pd m603, considered to be a worthless piece of technology by many, including me as i have another identical one at home...Unfortunately i won't improve this one , i'll just make it a donor for organs to be used with the cd951...as it needs a bit cleaner sound that it has now. And...a smal surprise as in the Pioneer there were more cd's with Rod Steward and Celine Dion.I payed 10 pounds for the pioneer and the cd's inside are allready woth it!
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Now there's even a tougher question to put: should i destroy the Pioneer to improve the Phillips cd951 or the other way around, to get parts from Phillips to mod the Pioneer as every single review of this Pioneer is negative.I am actually listening to it right now and on my headphones it doesn't sound really bad compared with the stock Phillips! I might sound even more misleading to some as i like many cd players in their stock form too...given that you have a well mastered cd to play, but i am mostly a headphones listener and i don't even have the best of them...
Tried to cancel the internal noises of the cd951 from the tape heads by transforming the new Pioneer 603 into a full playback preamplifier attaching also the modified njm4556 headphones amp to it. with no success.With no filter and shielding before the rec tape head it looks like an impossible task.
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I doubled the gain of the playback amplifier , modified into a complete pioneer ct 777 playback amp with the original components values, sacrificed the CD951 for just 6 resistors and 4 capacitors to decouple the power supplies of each module, modified the whole wiring o that i can have no audible hum at maximum gain and maximum rec head drive.Now it sounds like a professional "effect box" 🙂
The noise that you here in the movie is caused by the camera. Be aware that i removed all the muting transistors everywhere in the audio signal path as well as canceled the lm833 based filter stage after the I/V.It might be the time now to look for better op-amps , but i really doubt that any op amp on the market is able to make this thing sound better than it is right now.
I doubled the gain of the playback amplifier , modified into a complete pioneer ct 777 playback amp with the original components values, sacrificed the CD951 for just 6 resistors and 4 capacitors to decouple the power supplies of each module, modified the whole wiring o that i can have no audible hum at maximum gain and maximum rec head drive.Now it sounds like a professional "effect box" 🙂
The noise that you here in the movie is caused by the camera. Be aware that i removed all the muting transistors everywhere in the audio signal path as well as canceled the lm833 based filter stage after the I/V.It might be the time now to look for better op-amps , but i really doubt that any op amp on the market is able to make this thing sound better than it is right now.
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Thank you!
From the start i didn't consider that i need a tape saturation or its noise at all. I have a friend who owns a small, but reputable recording studio in my hometown and i had a discussion with him last summer if there's any need for a real tape distortion nowadays and i had a starting point in my assessment of how useful would be this technology and most of it was that it would not be useful at all these days.
You can equally buy a tape saturation software from Abbey Road , simulating the most sought after effect of the real Studer C37 for a few bucks. So i thought whats in all this equation that cannot be easily done by a software and that is the Tape Head saturation itself!
Actually i worked for two months on a real cassette player, the Pioneer CT-777 to be adapted with my Denon dcd 1560 .You can see in my photos that i actually modded the cassette player to the best possible .I explored even more by changing the whole input preamp with 3 versions of it and presented my ideas here and there:
Pioneer ...NO Dragon Killer - Tapeheads Tape, Audio and Music Forums
Pioneer CT-777/CT-95/CT-1100 playback input replacement
Unfortunately i can't find now the photos with the fet input mods that i added to the CT-777 and the Denon DCD1560 itself as i adjusted the Denon output (with an invert-ng subunity gain=1/4x or 0.25x gain stage ) to fit both the input of CXA20188 Dolby B/C processor or it's output bypassing it. I've made so many different mods to the whole cd-player-cassette player system that i can't remember, but I wanted the essence of it, so i took the decision to scrap the tape entirely .Unfortunately i found the time for this thing when i got 2600 km away from my lab ...At least i enjoyed modifyung a Phillips CD player as i never worked on anything but my Denon and some Marantz players before.
I just wanted to go in depth with this design to the level where I altered the i/v stage gain and adapted all the stages the best way. I don't also need all the mechanics , i have no bias oscillator to fight or disable or shield (i did this to pioneer ct-777 though) and i can choose my own playback amplifier and op amps or discretes to give the whole thing a gain.
With my last mod i simply have no audible noise at the maximum gain of the headphones amplifier , only a bit more White noise introduced by the njm4556 driver when i go all the way with the drive knob, but there i am also in very high distortion mode too. now i have anything in between cery clean sound to annoyingly distorted sound with only one knob.
Next thing to do will be to simply build a Nakamichi playback amplifier, get some really good tape heads from a good reputable cassette deck, replace the njm4556 with a lower noise op amp, but still powerful enough to drive my REC tape head and that is all you need to have a really good CD player. This simple experiment of mine made me buy about 70 cd's in the last two weeks , a handful of 30 years old cd players and i couldn't be more happy than this for this Christmas, me being alone for 12 days in an empty house and treating a seasonal fever too...
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I'm thankful to Tapeheads guys, because they've given me new wings and especially to @Lucky user for his posts and pm that i read last year and found truly inspiring.
I run some tests today regarding the saturation behavior of a TDK Type D (Type I ) cassette on a Tandberg 3044 deck
George
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I'm not sure if the Tandberg is a good deck to have this tests because it has the Dyneq system which automatically fight the tape saturation unless it can be deactivated:
http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Theory/Tandberg_Actilinear_Dyneq.pdf
it's the same system as the one on Nad6300 which is making these players to sound way better over many others, being more powerful than the hxpro. I think that this is not working only at high frequencies but i can't be sure about that now.
I just realized that the 4.7nf after the 2k2 output resistor after the playback would cut me the highs up to 4 db at 20khz compared with 1khz so i made it back to 1nf as per ct-777 original schematic. I hear no weird sounds though...The ct95 filter version is probably different because of the playback head which is superior to the ct777 version as the tapehead capacitive compensation suggests .It's not that i really hear anything over 15khz, but somehow (unless it's a placebo) i have the sensation that the mid-highs are a bit stronger.Now the highs are back in town thanks to LtSpice, as i still have no way to measure the output. It was only the "Sade Best of "cd that made me aware of it as i have both the vinyl and CD version at home and i remembered the highs being at a higher level here and there.I have some problems with the short term memory, but the long term and emotional memory is at its best with me.
http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Theory/Tandberg_Actilinear_Dyneq.pdf
it's the same system as the one on Nad6300 which is making these players to sound way better over many others, being more powerful than the hxpro. I think that this is not working only at high frequencies but i can't be sure about that now.
I just realized that the 4.7nf after the 2k2 output resistor after the playback would cut me the highs up to 4 db at 20khz compared with 1khz so i made it back to 1nf as per ct-777 original schematic. I hear no weird sounds though...The ct95 filter version is probably different because of the playback head which is superior to the ct777 version as the tapehead capacitive compensation suggests .It's not that i really hear anything over 15khz, but somehow (unless it's a placebo) i have the sensation that the mid-highs are a bit stronger.Now the highs are back in town thanks to LtSpice, as i still have no way to measure the output. It was only the "Sade Best of "cd that made me aware of it as i have both the vinyl and CD version at home and i remembered the highs being at a higher level here and there.I have some problems with the short term memory, but the long term and emotional memory is at its best with me.
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I made lots of recordings on Chrome tape on my Pioneer ct-777 and i was literally in tears when i was listening Metallica's Orion or Norah Jones on my Denon player through the Pioneer with the dolby C activated before starting any mod, but even with the best tapes i had, i felt some sudden drops in level from time to time and perhaps that is something that systems as Dyneq can fight too, but i have no experience with a Tandberg .I found the Chrome tape to be better than a metal tape i had and anyway it's significantly harder to saturate than the Type 1 tape.
Saturation on reel to reel is even harder to get because of the higher speed and probably it's needed only as a very mild effect not a very aggressive one as a guitar head crunch or drive.The Abey Road C37 saturation tape simulator effect must be also about the valve-transformer coupled sound as C37 is not solid state.
Saturation on reel to reel is even harder to get because of the higher speed and probably it's needed only as a very mild effect not a very aggressive one as a guitar head crunch or drive.The Abey Road C37 saturation tape simulator effect must be also about the valve-transformer coupled sound as C37 is not solid state.
It has no deactivation provision and it works effectivelly but to a degree (see DYNEQ expected effect at Fig. 2)
http://sportsbil.com/tandberg/tcd-440a-tech.pdf
There are three more decks of mine waiting for their repair and some tests
DYNEQ can not help with the tape drop-outs.
Drop-outs are due to either tape surface local magnetic defects or temporary change of distance btn tape and head gap (mechanical problem) .
With dynamic music it’s not very noticeable except when it is severe (>6dB drop). It’s when you record and play back a steady tone, that you understand how common the problem is.
I have used mainly Type 1 (ferric oxide) cassettes. See what your friends write about:
Cassette Type 1, 2, 3, & 4 Strengths & Evaluations - Tapeheads Tape, Audio and Music Forums
See how R. Neve does it
http://rupertneve.com/static/media/2014/12/portico542manual-rev-A-master.pdf
http://mediaschool.ohio.edu/Websites/ousmas/images/origwiki/5042userguide12-6-5.pdf
George
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Thank you for the info! I will study it when i get enough time.I need to buy a cheap usb sound card as my laptops have no line in...I need to make a proper recording and analysis.
Now you are talking.
If it has a microphone in, you can use that (only attenuate the incoming signal using a potentiometer)
George
It would be too noisy...i already tried that by simply turning the tpa6120 output volume down and the sound appeared to come from the other world ...
Here you have the last reincarnation of the whole chain i'm using now.I simply can't make my mind which RC network to choose best with the R1 valued n between 2k2...3k6 and C1 31...39nF.R2 should be 62k instead of 68k as in the original pioneer schematic, i have no 62k resistor at hand, but i'm also 41 so i do enjoy a bit more bass and highs...All the values should be different for other tape heads and should be tweaked accordingly .
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