john curl said:
My main turntable is a Goldmund Studio with an ET arm. Currently I've got a Lyra Helicon cartridge on there, but I've got another arm tube and keep meaning to put my old Koetsu (Onyx Sapphire) on it.
I've got the ITTOK arm on the Linn with a Grado cartridge--forget which, but it's one of the cheaper ones. I had the Koetsu on the Linn, but took it off when I put the turntable up in the living room. My wife's a dear about most things, but I don't trust her with expensive cartridges.
No mat on the Goldmund. Black felt on the Linn.
The Linn made it up through Valhalla before I moved into the wilderness and lost track of my original dealer (I was told they later went out of business, anyway). I have no earthly idea how many versions the LP12 has been through since then. Probably don't want to know.
There are any number of turntables out there that might be of interest to me, but they've gotten so *******' expensive that I'm sidelined; since I'm no longer in the industry, I don't have access to accommodation pricing. Yes, the VPI Scoutmaster has gotten good reviews and isn't all that bad by today's pricing standards, but it's still more than I can justify even if it's as good as they say. Besides, there aren't any serious high end dealers closer than an all-day drive.
lumanauw's kind offer to buy me a new turntable to replace my older, colored ones appears to have gone astray somewhere in cyberspace. Bummer.
(Oh Lord, won't you buy me...a Mercedes Benz...My friends all drive Porsches...I must make amends... That song needs a new stanza regarding hi-fi gear. Perhaps: Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Blowtorch preamp...my friends all have Levinson...I must put them down...)
Not set up to work metal, so a DIY turntable isn't in the works. Any DIY I do is limited to electronics or speakers (I know about enough about speaker design to get myself in trouble, and I am set up to work wood to a fare-thee-well).
The Linn is remarkably stable where it is. There's a load-bearing wall running right underneath, between the legs of the table it sits on. No wobblies at all. In the Dungeon, everything sits on a 4" concrete slab so the Goldmund (which is also a bit prone to wobbling, though not as bad as the Sondek) is stable also.
Grey
EDIT: Gawd, the bluenoses sure are picky about what you can say...those asterisks actually represent something most people would regard as pretty tame. Oh, well.
Turntables are Linn Sondek LP12SE (standard mat, ekos se arm, akiva catridge) and Brinkman (mysoniclab eminent +breur arm).
Mr. Curl, what is really happening with Linn Sondek. Why is the sound seems more live compared to the others.
Mr. Curl, what is really happening with Linn Sondek. Why is the sound seems more live compared to the others.
Breuer arm? Lucky guy, I lost mine in the fire. It was GREAT! Remember, black felt mat is standard mat.
john curl said:
Theoretically a bad match because it's too compliant, but my records are flat so I don't end up with 3Hz oscillations (don't play Tchaikovsky's 1812 on that turntable, either). It had the added benefit of being in my box of available cartridges and comparatively expendable in terms of what it cost--not a small consideration when my daughter starts doing somersaults across the floor without checking to see if she has clearance for her rollout.
Actually, my biggest problem isn't ITTOK/Grado mismatch, it's SP9/Grado mismatch. The phono stage is geared for a moving coil and it gets too loud, too fast. I've got a phono stage that I built a while back that has adjustable gain. I may pull that one upstairs and jack it into one of the line level inputs.
Grey
Grado is OK, but not with the Linn Arm and table. It is like putting Sears passenger car tires on a Porsche.
No comparisons going on--at least not on that system. Aside from trying to balance the too little-ness of the SP9 against the too much-ness of the DH-200, it's not something I've spent a lot of time (or money) on. If I ever take a notion to begin using it as a reference system, a lot of things will have to change, beginning with that execrable Sony DVD player. The SP9 would go next, I suppose. The Koetsu did nicely in that arm and would be an obvious candidate, but I'd have to padlock the turntable when not in use. And banish the kids from the living room. And unplug the confounded telephone. And wait until everyone was done cooking and eating (kitchen and dining room through separate arches). And...oh fooey, it's just easier to go downstairs and turn on the big system...
Which is in the middle of a revamp and isn't listenable at the moment, but that's another story for another day.
I'm still waiting for UPS to deliver the 48-hour days I ordered long ago. I fear they were lost in shipment.
Grey
P.S.: Those who spout knee-jerk cliches about how all tube equipment sounds slow, dark, fat, rubbery, or whatever should run, not walk, to listen to an SP9. Sounds a lot like solid state, actually. Yes, it's a hybrid unit, using both tubes and transistors, but of the two it leans heavily to the solid state side of things. Unfortunately it does so in all the wrong ways. I'd sell the thing in a heartbeat and either buy or build something better, but I've got to give the guy I got it from first refusal rights and he's not the decisive sort. So I use it for background music and it works fine. One of these days...
Which is in the middle of a revamp and isn't listenable at the moment, but that's another story for another day.
I'm still waiting for UPS to deliver the 48-hour days I ordered long ago. I fear they were lost in shipment.
Grey
P.S.: Those who spout knee-jerk cliches about how all tube equipment sounds slow, dark, fat, rubbery, or whatever should run, not walk, to listen to an SP9. Sounds a lot like solid state, actually. Yes, it's a hybrid unit, using both tubes and transistors, but of the two it leans heavily to the solid state side of things. Unfortunately it does so in all the wrong ways. I'd sell the thing in a heartbeat and either buy or build something better, but I've got to give the guy I got it from first refusal rights and he's not the decisive sort. So I use it for background music and it works fine. One of these days...
With CoolEdit (now known as Adobe Audition). First, I generated pink noise, then I filtered it (Butterworth bandpass filters from the "scientific filters" section, highest possible order, 40 IIRC), last I applied constant gain to push the samples up in level. One (still missing) final step would be to apply raised cosine fade-in/fade-out envelopes, of some 5...10 peroids of the lowest involved frequency to get smooth/click-free samples.rdf said:
I generated some 70 samples in total, spanning 10Hz...20kHz. Each sample is 1/3rd octave wide and overlaps the next one by 1/6th octave, using the ISO center frequencies digits.
100 (90..112)
112 (100..125)
125 (112..140)
140 (125..160)
160 (140..175)
175 (160..200)
200 (175..224)
224 (200..250)
250 (224..280)
280 (250..315)
315 (280..355)
355 (315..400)
400 (355..450)
450 (400..500)
500 (450..560)
560 (500..630)
630 (560..710)
710 (630..800)
800 (710..900)
900 (800..1000)
1000 (900 1120)
... and so on...
By the way, this noise doesn't sound much like noise. It has very a fancy tonal character, especially in the midband around 1kHz. Sort of "star-trek" movie soundtrack quality...
- Klaus
One of the things I want to do once I get a balanced/bridged amplifier going (prototype still has only one bank of output devices) is to go all-film on the power supply capacitance. I did this on my main tube amps (not bridged) and it was simply marvelous. The reason you can get away with it on a non-bridged tube circuit is that what really counts in storage is not uF, it's Joules, and the voltage component is squared. Or better still, look at J/W as a ratio. With tubes, you can do a lot with what looks to be a relatively small amount of capacitance.
Okay...so why am I saying I want to do all-film on a solid state bridged circuit?
--You can look at power supplies in any number of ways, but one of the more common ways is as a low pass filter to knock out ripple from the rectification.
--Once you've got enough to filter the ripple below some arbitrary level, you're then looking at ways to increase short term supply of current to handle peaks.
--But if your circuit is class A bridged and the current draw sums to nearly DC, all you have to do is supply enough short term current to cover the asymmetrical portions of the signal, and that's a whole heap less demanding than supplying full coverage for peaks. Any old dumb power supply can supply DC--it's the AC that's the killer.
So my thinking is that I'll do something along the lines of a decent bank of electrolytics, followed by either an inductor, a regulator, or a cap multiplier, then follow that with a pure film cap bank of relatively small size (hence not as terrifyingly expensive). Solen would be one obvious possibility; they've got a 330uF 250V polypropylene unit. Bypass them with something like the RTX polystyrene caps and you should be able to get somewhere for a tolerable amount of money.
It's not all that remarkable to see something along those lines in a low level circuit like a preamp or phono stage, but an amplifier is another thing entirely. Even if it doesn't work well full range, it should make a raging mid and high frequency amp.
A preamp with a couple thousand uF of film caps should be a worthy contender.
Grey
Okay...so why am I saying I want to do all-film on a solid state bridged circuit?
--You can look at power supplies in any number of ways, but one of the more common ways is as a low pass filter to knock out ripple from the rectification.
--Once you've got enough to filter the ripple below some arbitrary level, you're then looking at ways to increase short term supply of current to handle peaks.
--But if your circuit is class A bridged and the current draw sums to nearly DC, all you have to do is supply enough short term current to cover the asymmetrical portions of the signal, and that's a whole heap less demanding than supplying full coverage for peaks. Any old dumb power supply can supply DC--it's the AC that's the killer.
So my thinking is that I'll do something along the lines of a decent bank of electrolytics, followed by either an inductor, a regulator, or a cap multiplier, then follow that with a pure film cap bank of relatively small size (hence not as terrifyingly expensive). Solen would be one obvious possibility; they've got a 330uF 250V polypropylene unit. Bypass them with something like the RTX polystyrene caps and you should be able to get somewhere for a tolerable amount of money.
It's not all that remarkable to see something along those lines in a low level circuit like a preamp or phono stage, but an amplifier is another thing entirely. Even if it doesn't work well full range, it should make a raging mid and high frequency amp.
A preamp with a couple thousand uF of film caps should be a worthy contender.
Grey
Be careful with Solen, they can change value over a short time. Don't worry so much about big film caps, but you might put 10uf or so out there. Just my opinion, nothing written in stone, except Solen PP large value caps were a BIG disappointment to me. They use zinc, rather than tin or aluminum..
Hi John,
The only way I can think of a value change would be foil burning (arcing) off. Surge currents?
-Chris
The only way I can think of a value change would be foil burning (arcing) off. Surge currents?
-Chris
No, they changed 10 times in value in STORAGE. However, you are right about arcing. I once replaced a cap in a MAC computer with a 'quality' film cap. It was destroyed in a few months, and reduced its value to almost nothing.
Hi John,
What were you using to measure the capacitance?
Was the instrument zeroed for the test leads or fixture before your measurements?
Same test frequency and level?
What was the capacitance variation?
Same ambient temperature?
I use an HP 4263A and have not seen this behavior with any film caps to date, so I'm interested. I normally use the HP Kelvin clips, but I often use the test fixture as well. It gives more repeatable readings at higher frequencies.
If I was seeing this, I'd be grabbing a standard capacitor to check which is drifting.
-Chris
Interesting.
What were you using to measure the capacitance?
Was the instrument zeroed for the test leads or fixture before your measurements?
Same test frequency and level?
What was the capacitance variation?
Same ambient temperature?
I use an HP 4263A and have not seen this behavior with any film caps to date, so I'm interested. I normally use the HP Kelvin clips, but I often use the test fixture as well. It gives more repeatable readings at higher frequencies.
If I was seeing this, I'd be grabbing a standard capacitor to check which is drifting.
-Chris
Hi John,
Wow!
I didn't think the difference would be this large. Sounds more like a manufacturing defect and you are losing entire sections of those caps.
Did you ever speak with Solen. Years ago, they were fairly decent to deal with. This sounds like a serious "known" issue.
-Chris
Wow!
I didn't think the difference would be this large. Sounds more like a manufacturing defect and you are losing entire sections of those caps.
Did you ever speak with Solen. Years ago, they were fairly decent to deal with. This sounds like a serious "known" issue.
-Chris
GRollins said:
I once made such a test with a SOZ (balanced amp, based on a single differential pair) and a 20.000uF film cap CLC filter. (10.000uF - 5mH - 10.000uF)
Your assumptions are right, unfortunately things turned out rather huge, so I left the idea behind as a pleasant memory 😎
Magura 🙂
anatech said:
Counterfeits maybe? I have some Solens that show appallingly bad quality control. One pair have leads that will not take solder. Some are shaped as if the tape was wrapped when the cap was still soft. Another flat out failed under safe rated conditions an equivalent ASC motor run shrugged off.
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