FORUMS
For years and years we've been reading about build quality. Somewhere in the audiophile collective mind the heavier something is the better it sounds and the better it is built. Where did this thinking come from and how true is it? I have found for example that light weight components for all practical purposes are many times built better than the heavy products. Lighter products treated with the same care as the heavier ones actually in most cases have a longer life and need fewer repairs. I would say back in the 70's the heavier arguement held more "weight" than it does today, so why are people still buying heavy components?
It's pretty obvious from a design point of view that lighter weight parts that go inside of our components give off less electromagnetic interference. If you measure the distance in relation to part size and the fields created it's easy to see that the bigger parts used in our high end audio components are out of balance as compared to the smaller parts and board sizes used for them.
In the last few years I've been putting light weight up against heavy and can hear a big difference between the two. I've also taken the time to spread out the parts to see how to match the size and field balance. If you take a mass produced light weight simply built product and compare it against a typical high end audio product using audiophile parts, what you can do with the simple built product using a 8" x 8" board, you would need a 40' x 40' board to have the same field and size separation.
Lets paint the picture another way to give you an idea of what is going on. If you take a typical mass produced light weight product and did the same measuring of part spread and compared chassis height. If the light weight product was 4" tall the high end audio product would have to be 8' tall to match the space ratio.
Something we have been doing in high end audio that has caused us tons of signal distortion is loading up electromagnetically charged parts in metal boxes that are causing field interference.
In my listening test, I took components in our factory and laid them out so I could compare the sound through the different stages.
First we listened in the chassis, then with the tops off, then the chassis gone, then as much as we could the bigger parts moved away from the smaller ones. In uncovering the parts the sound changed from small stage to slightly bigger with more dynamic range and the soundstage holes started to fill in. With chassis gone, you were able to hear how much they affect the overall sound. It was like going from dead to live, from canned to set free. There was only one commponent that we found fell apart with the chassis removed, and looking at it you could see that the parts themselves were way over dampened so we cut away at their dampening and it too joined the others in opening up.
After having many people listen to this we came to the conclusion that chassis have really not been explored as much as the industry would have us believe. They are used as more of a marketing fasade and as they get thicker and more constrained the worse the sound gets.
We wanted to take this a step further with our proof so I ordered in chassis made of light thin metal power coated and took two of the amps where the parts happened to fit and placed them into the lighter chassis, and even though the sound of the non-chassis was better, the same amps in the light chassis smoked the original chassis.
another test
We took several components listened to them, then took the transformer lockdowns out and clipped the tie wraps from everywhere. We compared the stock product against the product with ties and locks out and the top off, and even with that step the difference was huge in almost all cases.
So do the big heavy chassis play a part in quality build? Not in the slightest, their there for show not for sound.
michael green
MGA/RoomTune
