Ken, brave declaration, and I have been pondering the same thing, and have come to much the same conclusion.
Exactly... And aspects of it will remains subjective to each human being, despite the "thousands years of observations".
If we look at a great car design, everyone of us might notice different features and have different criteria.
The same can be said for audio components, even power cables. A significant difference here is, we are comparing visuals versus sonics.
As analogy, like observing a picture of a specific car and analyze it, you have to listen to a specific audio system to get an idea of the sound image.
And even if you do, there is no guarantee you will be able to notice details others might do. Experience, criteria, tastes will influence this. Tubelab gave good examples.
In this case, denial of the audibility of a specific component is just another claim, without proof, having the same weight as the claim of its existent audibility.
And I've a batch of output transformers waiting for assembly and coils connections 🙂 . Let's shine these dark corners with some light.
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Thanks, Kevin. Except, that I'm not quite so brave. There was a small typo in the following sentence, which should have read: "Just some pondering, withOUT any declarations of certitude by me." 😛
Well put. To me there's nothing controversial about using objective means to achieve subjective end. An audiophile can only playback the sound as faithful as the signal that's baked into a recording format, ie, CD, record, tape, etc... But having absolute fidelity to the source does not guaranteed fidelity to the original acoustic event because we the audiophiles have no control over the recording. We are only reproducing the recording engineer or a producer's idea of good sound. The problem with most audiophiles is that they just cannot accept what they like in sound may be a result of distortion to the SIGNAL. Not me, I like pleasing distortion. I'm okay with it and accept it as part of audio enjoyment. I still want measurement to confirm what I am hearing and measurement is a powerful tool so why not use that objectively to achieve subjective goal?
This reminds me of a quote by a designer of tube audio: "Measurements can tell you when something is wrong, but they cannot tell you when something is right." -Kazutoshi Yamada of Zanden Audio
Nothing in life is absolutely certain, but for me the question has been answered. I don't represent that as necessarily the right answer for anyone else.
My system is somewhat unconventional, with a mix of old and new technologies as I pick and choose what fits my current goals, so I have mixed electronic crossovers, DSP, DHT SE power amps with horns, and Onken bass bins. I like to build things, and design and build to keep myself entertained.
That sounds like what I have said about the simulator, in my case LTspice. It's pretty good at telling you when something will NOT work, but not so good at telling you when something WILL work, and especially poor at telling you how good it will work.
Done with the soldering iron for today, but I am setting up for some "frying pan" SMD assembly.
Not the gist of what my reply to directdriver was. You can judge the performance of preamp, amp, cables and speakers by comparing input vs output. Higher the faithfulness of output to the input is, the higher fidelity it is. As for the high end DACs, preamp, amp and cables comparing to average priced ones in level matched and bias controlled listening tests, if audibly indistinguishable, then what's the point of paying more? I can think of couple, bling factor and bragging rights.
Not totally subjective. People have more things in common than not. It's been narrowed down and documented through experiments and observations.
Again, people have more things in common than not even the visual senses. It's just that some are more sensitive to it than others and or trained at it thus makes them stand out but our basic visual observing sense is very similar.
Electronic sound replaying components are born out of electrical science. We created it very recently in human history timeline. What mythical electronically produced sound property is there that is yet to be documented?
Debunking of sound quality claims made by high end audio electronics companies happened many times. They are all over the internet. What proof do you know of that support those companies' claims? When I say proof, I don't mean someone's opinion or subjective impression.
George, that last your version of IR? I do a lot of SMD stuff, but not enough to justify investing in a pick & place machine (they're comparatively cheap now) and my employer offered me a compact IR oven so I would no longer have to hand solder, but I have no space for it and it needs to be well ventilated or outside in use. I also try to stick to 0805, 1206, 1210, 1812, and 2512 packages for passives and can handle any SOIC, SSOP, TSSOP, SOT-23, and SOT-223, etc. The bigger semiconductor packages are pretty easy as long as you preheat the board.
Going back to the first post of this thread, I had a chance to hear an EAR preamp before, not the phono preamp but the custom AMPEX ATR tape machine card made by Paravicini at a mastering studio in NYC (Forgot the studio's name, but it was around 48th street). His preamps sound fantastic. We ended up "choosing" the stock Ampex card, but I was told those rare Paravicini cards are very popular in that studio.
The recorded and distributed musical materials are not as pure as some fundamentalists want to believe. Microphones, eq, console, tape machines, all the signal chain are subjectively selected by human ears, not by the measuring tools. What we hear is deformed from the beginning. Also, there is another reason that we should not believe that the reproduction signal chain should be as transparent as possible. The producers have making a decision with colored playback chain, possibly more colored than yours at home.
The recorded and distributed musical materials are not as pure as some fundamentalists want to believe. Microphones, eq, console, tape machines, all the signal chain are subjectively selected by human ears, not by the measuring tools. What we hear is deformed from the beginning. Also, there is another reason that we should not believe that the reproduction signal chain should be as transparent as possible. The producers have making a decision with colored playback chain, possibly more colored than yours at home.
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I don't do enough SMD for even the usual hacked toaster oven.
I did buy a hot air reflow tool from the MicroCenter on a trip to Cleveland last year, and it works good for small areas.
I was doing a lot of prototype RF design and assembly work at Motorola with some large SMD RF power parts. In many cases we would solder the back side of the board to a copper heat spreader which has a pedestal that protrudes through the BC board and then solder the RF device to both. Here is an example. This is a 20 watt RF power amp that is tuned to the 902 - 928 MHz ham band.
The PCB is screwed to the heat sink. Then solder paste is placed on all the pads with a syringe. All the parts including the large RF device are placed in the solder. Then we fire up an industrial hot plate to about 270C (real lead solder). The board was placed in an old frying pan, which is then placed on the hot plate until all the SMD stuff reflows. The pan is then moved to a big heat sink to cool.
After stinking up the place with an overheated Teflon frying pan a couple times, the boss got a mechanical engineer to draw up the plans for a custom "frying pan", and we got the machine shop to make it. The name frying pan SMD stuck though.
Here at home, my heat source is a "Aroma" single burner cooking hot plate from Amazon, and my frying pan is a 7 or 8 inch square of 1/8 inch aluminum clamped in a pair of vice grips. I do the rest pretty much the same way.
I did buy a hot air reflow tool from the MicroCenter on a trip to Cleveland last year, and it works good for small areas.
I was doing a lot of prototype RF design and assembly work at Motorola with some large SMD RF power parts. In many cases we would solder the back side of the board to a copper heat spreader which has a pedestal that protrudes through the BC board and then solder the RF device to both. Here is an example. This is a 20 watt RF power amp that is tuned to the 902 - 928 MHz ham band.
The PCB is screwed to the heat sink. Then solder paste is placed on all the pads with a syringe. All the parts including the large RF device are placed in the solder. Then we fire up an industrial hot plate to about 270C (real lead solder). The board was placed in an old frying pan, which is then placed on the hot plate until all the SMD stuff reflows. The pan is then moved to a big heat sink to cool.
After stinking up the place with an overheated Teflon frying pan a couple times, the boss got a mechanical engineer to draw up the plans for a custom "frying pan", and we got the machine shop to make it. The name frying pan SMD stuck though.
Here at home, my heat source is a "Aroma" single burner cooking hot plate from Amazon, and my frying pan is a 7 or 8 inch square of 1/8 inch aluminum clamped in a pair of vice grips. I do the rest pretty much the same way.
Attachments
George, that is a great looking layout! I'm very impressed, layout at those frequencies is an art. (In the very ancient past I hand taped multipliers and power amps in the 1 - 3GHz range, the active devices were GaAs mesfets made in the lab down the hall.)
After giving it some thought, this thread has been moved to the lounge.
I disagree about that. I think it very much recognized the gist of the particular segment of your response to direct driver which I'd referenced in my response to you. As for the rest of your response to me, it strikes me as actually missing the gist of my comment. Be that as it may, I'm disinterested in engaging in yet another pointless subjective vs. objective forum debate. I know from many past such experiences that it would ultimately prove non-productive for either of us. So, I will simply leave this here. Cheers.
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I'm surprised they left the remaining 12ax7 section to "float".
Coulda used it in parallel with the 1st for some nice artificial 2nd harmonic generation. A user selected jumper in/out
Coulda used it in parallel with the 1st for some nice artificial 2nd harmonic generation. A user selected jumper in/out
Not totally, but significant. One word to call it, is taste. There is taste in audio reproduction as well.
I'm not denying this, neither I'm being absolute. It's not wrong, but the same applies to audio.
Yes, electrical science is the fundamental part of audio systems. We all know this. But this is exactly where you seem to lose the track. I am not talking about mythology, neither magic.
Okay, I hear the excuse with high end audio companies claims again and again. On this rare point I can agree with you and with anyone else who contradicts their claims, mainly due to the fact they're based on pseudoscience which cannot be justified.
But this is not a reason to absolutely deny a possibly occuring phenomena. And it doesn't have to be due to mythical, neither pseudoscientific reasons.
For example, in my previous replies I gave another aspect of cables it's worth pursuing research into - intelinking vibration to components.
Although other's opinions and subjectivism aren't lab grade proof, they are already a good start for a reason to pursue science into this. And closed minded denialism is not its friend.
I'm adding some colours to what seems to be a gray enough conversation. But if will only turn around in the same direction, there's no point continuing this.
Another can of worms 50AE, many associate gain with voltage only & no one thinks about current, current itself in ways minimizes cable sensitivity but what's most important is the drive it gives to the music.