Hi Folks

Been pretty busy around here but I'm going to try to get caught up.

Bill said

"Hi Michael.

Please understand my intent is not to take anything you said out of context as I respond to your comment regarding the experience Dan & I had when varying mounting screw tightness on the PC board on my Gunginr DAC.

The fact that we did not hear any difference says as much about the efficacy of the one specific tweak we performed on one piece of equipment as it does about our ability to discern any audible changes.

There still is no definitive evidence to support a conclusion either way other than ‘testimonial’ reports."

mg

I don't have any problem with this statement and have been in the same place so I completely understand why what happened, or didn't, was your finding.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Bill said

"Does it not make sense to first retrieve all of source before attempting to manipulate the signal?"

The source is a language, but in order for this language to be worked with one needs parts (mechanical conduits) that host, send and recreate the acoustical, mechanical and electrical signal. As far as the listening goes there really isn't a separation between the 3 parts of the audio trilogy. All 3 parts and the conduits that make this happen are "manipulated" from the very moment the pressure hits the mic or sound is generated in the equipment. The entire operation is manipulation.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Bill said

"I ask only why would one do so before one has all that the source has to offer?"

Why would you think tuning does not support this same belief?

If you look on TuneLand you can see that we are all about working with the audio signal at it's most basic state.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Toledo said

"The first step in tuning is to minimize this fingerprint. The second, if desired, is to tune the signal.

I think we are all after the same goal ... To minimize the system fingerprint."

This is where tuning hits it out of the ballpark. Most audiophiles by the time they get to tweaking and tuning have already way over built their systems and have to start heading the other direction before hearing the benifits that having an adjustable low mass system provides.

Some of the other threads here on the forum talk about "audio math" and if we look at our systems in more of a practical sense, it's not all that hard to see what types of distortions we introduce into our systems when they are over built.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Hi Costin

Yep, I'm a soundstage nut but I think that it might help when talking to me to keep in mind that I come from the part of this hobby and biz that makes the soundstage. I think maybe it's harder for someone who has never made a soundstage on the recording end to understand the importance of size and how to detect if something is the recorded size or not. I have talked more about this on some of the referencing threads here.

Let's start with the violin recording

When you do miking on a single instrument there are of course a lot of different techniques and when you do those over and over you learn what it sounds like as you blend the mics or bring in the hall or booth. It would be hard to explain, even though I try, unless you've done it. When I listen to a recording I can usually tell if the pattern was compressed or not. Here's a nut shell of guideness that might help people when listening. If the instrument in the recording is playing back more side to side vs front to back, there's a good chance the playback system is compressing the signal. Microphones are not 2D in their pickup patterns. Some are more shallow than others, depending on the element and shell construction, but it's not that hard to hear what type of mic is being used for the fundamentals and then for the body, and then again for the space. most recordings that we listen to have all three if it is a seasoned engineer, and the more they play with the layering the more involved the depth feeling is.

Audiophiles have painted this picture of "playing the hall" that if you look at the actual recording setup is really not what took place. A good layering recording will use at least 2 or 3 layers of miking to give the three parts fundamental, body and hall/room. The recordings that use only one perspective will have different senses of relation between the three depending on where the mic was placed and type of mic, but again I don't see how someone would know what was going on unless they were a recording/acoustical engineer/tech.

the size of the violin

When miking a violin, if you have the fundamental mic setup at the middle of the violin and at the edge of that particular mic's pattern you can get the violin at real size, but most studio playbacks do not have this reference point or take the time to do this. If you back the fundamental mic up the violin will start to pick up more of the room and if you go closer the violin will grow in size the closer it gets to the element. This is how vocals or solo instruments end up being much bigger than the rest of the recording. It's not that a recording is wrong, it's just a matter of engineer taste, which is usually dependent on the engineers playback, mastering, or even final playback room, where the engineer may use for making the placement decision.

the electronic recording

The electronic recording is usually a lot easier to work with referencing believe it or not, from a recording view point. Once again though you have to know what the effects in the studio do and how to control them. But here's something you can be almost certain of with the electronic recording. The main space effect in the recording will give a space of equal side to side, front to back, and up and down. This is why when you listen to electronic music with your phones you are either going to get the image in your head or a 360 sound around your head. This is also why I listen extreme nearfield for my favorite setting. The fundamental of an electronic recording soundstage is like the room is a lake and you are in the middle of it and the sound is dropped in like a drop of water hitting in different parts of that lake. Again unless you have used these effects and referenced them back it's a little hard to explain.

But here's the easiest guideline to follow for those wondering what is real or not. Your speakers and room if setup to give the whole recording would not be a frontal stage. A frontal stage is a choice of staging preference but is not what the recording is doing in whole. This is a stage that has been adopted by listeners and studio mix down, but it is a setting and not what is neccessarily the recordings actual info. Recorded info is not frontal it's 360. Place the speakers on either side of you and you will hear this. Put on your headphones and you will hear this. Move the speakers slightly behind you and the stage will follow to the rear. Place the speakers in front and again the stage will follow to the front.

Audiophiles have created this fun world of following the music to enjoy "the frontal stage effect", but this is an effect, and one that can be placed anywhere the listener wants.

how can you tell that the stage is real?

We answered this before, but to make it clear, you can tell if you are getting the whole stage if you are getting as much front to back as you are side to side. If your speakers for example are on the wall in front of you the sound stage should be going as much toward you as it goes back from the center plain in a dampened room, or if in a controlled room would start at the center of the room and go front to back from there. This depends on how much a listener uses the room as the speaker. But the starting point to a "real stage is the stage going in an equal spread.

Next thing a person can do to judge their stage is to see if the sound stage is going as much outside the speaker as inside in all directions. For example with JMJ "Oxygene" if the speakers are setup in front you will hear the stage go front to back and side to side evenly. Move the speakers more nearfield and spread (in a well balanced room) and the stage will get to the point where it will float all around you and approximate double the size as the speaker spread.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Moving on to speakers. As you guys have read, I believe that playback should be done with less and not more so that we can get closer to the signal being played from the beginning. In doing this we have found that a lot of fat has been built into high end audio systems that doesn't need to be there, and at a point the system stops being able to react and respond to the signal passing through it. The lower the mass the better the reaction and the easier to control. This same problem has happened to high end speakers. Instead of making speakers to feed the room and letting the room be a natural amplifier, speakers started to become more complicated to compensate for particular rooms and their problems. Basically designers created speakers that worked best with the designers own conditions and not for the conditions of others. This began the high end audio power wars. Products went from easy to drive and compatable, to hard to drive and match. This worked as a marketing tool, but in the long run has left the industry's clients having to buy several times over, and many times still not able to play music collections. Like the room, the speaker cabinet many times has been designed as a non-factor. Meaning "if the speaker is inert it can be isolated from the air and drivers". This of course didn't and doesn't work, but instead of looking at the mechanical problem with designing speakers, crossovers became the "fix it" technology.

This brings us back to two of our biggest distortion makers, inductors and unbalanced fields. But before I get into this I want to tell you guys something. If you have crossovers that are more than one maybe two parts, no matter how much "goop" your encasing the parts in they are distorting. There is an amazing amount of movement inside of a cabinet, stuffed or not, that makes its way into the crossover parts. If those parts are not working with the cabinet their working against it and that's not good for the signal.

Speaker designing is one of those things in this industry that falls prey to over build. Crossovers start out simple, but as the problems are found in testing responses it's one of those things where the fix it's start to get thrown in the mix. Looks good on paper, and even looks good on the sweeps, but start playing the music and it's a completely different ball game. The more complicated the less music they will play, same as electronic components. Think about it, your electronic components have the problem of transformers being too close to parts causing field inbalance. What do you think your crossover inductors are? Again distortion creators too close to electronic parts. You can either take the approach of shielding again to "fix" something broken, or you can look at how to remove the problem altogether.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Hi Costin

I don't want to pick on 1-ways, cause I know a lot of people like them. Personally I have not been all that pleased with designing 1-ways even though I think it would solve many problems by simplifying things, maybe someday. I design 2-ways with the option of a sub.

I have found that inductors do not like being inside of a cabinet, and if a speaker can be designed with the cabinet/driver/tweeter and the driver/tweeter are well mated a single Cap crossover is the purist sounding by far. I will go Capacitor/Resistor but if the drivers and cabinet need more than that I scratch the design.

A lot of audiophiles have turn back to simple designing again and for good reason. You'll find DIY speaker builders hunting for some of the older paper cones to use or the very light weight polys. These are mostly people who use the cabinet and are not into the "inert" myth. The industry is packed with bad sounding cabinets and poorly matched driver/tweeters. It's like a crossover game that is much like the amp circuit game, stacking problem on top of problem. And it all comes down to one simple truth that audiophiles fight against for some reason. "the signal is vibration and we sould be using them instead of trying to defeat them". The industry sees or hears a problem and tries to over come the problems through electronics. The mechanics and acoustical took a back seat to techi-ism and the industry stop letting the signal be what it is. There are some simple questions that keep getting answered incorrectly and because of this the "engineer" audiophile designer or DIYer keeps getting into the same mess.

cross-overs

The idea of a cross-over is to have two or more drive units playing the different parts. Here's where things went wrong though. The science of speaker designing went astray when vibrations became an evil instead of an asset. I've mentioned this before here and is the answer to a great sounding speaker system. Why do speakers distort when playing the same notes as an instrument? In our reference recording studio we found that the only way to get the speakers to sound like the real instrument was to make the speakers the same way the instruments were made. The more we dampened and made the cross-overs complicated the further we got from the sound of the instruments. When we took a simple 2-way and used the cabinet as a hosting mechanical and acoustical instrument itself is when we were able to match the sound.

The speakers I am listening to right now have 1 capacitor and that's it. There is no distortion from sloping that I have to deal with. I get the driver to dissipate naturally into the cabinet and let the tweeter take over at the top of the woofers range. This is not easy to do and takes a lot of work to voice the cabinets right, but at the end of the day the dynamic range and purity is unmatched.

The last thing the audio signal wants from a purist point of view is to be sent through a bunch of parts, especially parts that are distorting.

quick recap

Simple electric path with no more than two or three plugs, one interconnect, one or two fuses, one or two transformers, no cross-over inductors. That's a purist system in my book.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Hi Readers

As time moves on it's nice to see others sharing their experiences with low mass and simply built vs complicated. If you look at a recent thread by Geoff http://www.stereophile.com/content/you-want-dynamics you will see another example of low mass and it's dynamic range advantages.

You might find this a bit extreme but the point is that his "new project" in low mass and simple building has made quite the impact on his views.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

The key word being "variables"! This is why I choose not to be stuck in a "fixed" hobby and industry. Doesn't make sense to say "fixed" is the answer to a "variable" question.

michael green
RoomTune

So your saying now that all recordings sound the same?

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Hi Bill

I don't mind being in a different place than you are. Everyone has different levels of wants and needs. I like that this hobby has different meaning for different folks. My goal is only to help others get to places they want to be, and to invite the extreme listeners to go to places they haven't if they would like to. How they perceive what I do is completely up to them.

“[I] have been in the same place so I completely understand why what happened, or didn't, was your finding.”

I'm sorry you find this sanctimonious. I find this being truthful. Some folks get uptight when someone says "{I}" which is what you are pointing to. Nothing I can do about that except hope that someday you will see me for who and what I am instead of that particular picture you have painted in your own thinking.

You said you've been to my site, well you don't see them calling me sanctimonious do you? People in this or any hobby tend to gravitate to their own types and likes as far as personality goes. You say Bob Carver likes your system and I say George Harrison liked mine. You have reviewers in your group, and I have reviewers write about me. This doesn't make me like your system more or less and I'm sure it doesn't affect what you think of mine, it's music and the perseption of it. You might call me sanctimonious and the next guy gracious, not for me to judge. I'm going to be myself and invite people to our world. If that rubs someone wrong, I'm not sure that has anything to do with me.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune