Building a Room Full of Balanced Harmonics

Sonic,

Your two threads regarding oversampling and Johnny Cash caught my interest as I have time to listen tonight to both vinyl and cds and read Tune land posts. Friday is a holiday for me! I will briefly say your references to oversampling sources are very familiar to me as I read TNT and I lurk on the Audio Karma forum as well as many others. In this case, simple as Michael offers is better when it comes to many things audio related. The Magnavox (Maggie) DVD player with an integrated amp and a tunable speaker can easily achieve better sound than most mega buck systems now offered.

I have lived in Nashville since 1991. As Michael has posted in past threads, Nashville really is a magical music place. It is not just country music, but a music place where the best music players call home whether it is blues, hip hop, rock, pop, jazz, classical, etc . My advantage over many reviewers or music listeners is I can go to a club or major music venue and see and hear the best that current music can offer. Most young and old artists often kick off a tour to promote a new release here in Nashville in one of the clubs. When I first moved to Nashville in the early 90s, I ran into Johnny Cash at a local store. He had just purchased a large bag of grass seed and was carrying it out on his shoulder. As he was lifting the bag to his shoulder, he almost hit me. He was very apologetic about the near miss, but I was happy to be up that close and personal to this music legend. Since that time, I have had an opportunity to see and hear many great artists live as well as chat with them. I am currently listening to Steely Dan with Larry Carlton playing lead guitar on many tracks on this LP. (By the way Michael, the soundstage is big and wide on my tube integrated and tube phono preamp as you hinted for first play). I have heard Larry Carlton play several times here in Nashville as he is a resident. Although I have been fortunate to see live performances of some the most important groups and players (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Eagles, and many more), I must say meeting and hearing many other music artists as they have passed through Nashville has been a real treat. While I enjoy listening to recorded music, live music offers so much more. You feel the emotion of what the artist is attempting to convey with a lyric, a cord, or a long solo instrumental.

I just finished listening to Dire Straits & Mark Knopler’s Private Investigations as I have commented on previous threads using the Maggie DVD player. The stage was by far the biggest that I have experienced in my listening room. Music extended to all of the boundaries of my 20’ x 22’ x 8’ listening room. It was a musical moment that I hope to achieve again. So, I am achieving big soundstages on both CD and vinyl. If I were to make a preference for my system on what I heard tonight, it would be hard. There are advantages to both cd and vinyl. For absolute stage, I agree with Michael. CD has the edge. When I look at pure music enjoyment for me using my system, I will pick vinyl most of the time. Sorry to hijack your thread, Sonic.

Hey Garp, your views are always welcome here!

And here's a Big Development at Sonic's....

Michael, what do you think of this?




and





The effect of this is KAPOW!

Sonic went to this setting of the Shutters because something (the Tune Instinct, I suppose) told me that the Pressure Zones in the front corners were not building up properly so the width and girth was weakened towards the corners.

I moved the Shutters from behind the listening seat to this installation and there is now a much larger energy field that is even across the front of my room.

Better yet, whatever overhang I heard in the Boo! test has gone and from the listening chair, the Boo! is dry and tight.

Yes, KAPOW! it is and I'm enjoying the musick hugely after this Tune.

Sonic

Hi Zonees

Michael and Drewster are travelling and may not be able to post the pix of my latest Tune till Wednesday.

So Sonic will try to describe in words what I did though the pictures will tell the story instantly without need for any lines from me.

Sonic now has two vertically mounted (2 foot long/solid wood/cherry finish by Mr Green) Shutters “bracketing” each front corner on each side of the FS-PZC. Other full length Shutters further back in the room are folded flat. All the Shutters (except the mini Shutters at the ceiling/wall junction) are 58” above the floor at their mid points in a room about 11 feet high.

So if you imagine a Right Angle Corner with a FS-PZC located across it (looking down from the ceiling). From the corner seam out at about 30 inches both ways along the two adjacent walls, there is a Shutter mounted vertically. So the whole pressure and wave formation in the corner is now controlled by the FS-PZC and two Shutter acting almost like aerofoils or air brakes.

Further up the corner is a Tune Strip, then the Corner Tune at the ceiling. At the wall/ceiling junction are the mini Shutters (balsa from Michael) in a similar “bracketing” mode but further away from the corner seam. These haven’t changed in the course of this Tune.

The effect of the Shutters bracketing the FS-PZCs and other mid wall Shutters folded flat has been dramatic. It is one of those instances where I can listen to musick, take in the new Tone and Soundstage and say to myself “I get what Michael, Bill333, Garp and Hiend1 are talking about….” That’s what I meant by KAPOW!

Sonic

Sonic noticed that Harry Pearson’s name was no longer listed in the Absolute Sound masthead. I went and did a search and found HPSoundings – HP’s new site. Here’s his account of what happened.

It is a bit sad to see 35 years of someone’s life work go this way….

Why I Quit the Absolute Sound or: Path to Personal Revelation


Last March (2012), I went to the emergency room at the local hospital for what I thought would be routine checkup. I found, when I got there, that I was in the middle of having a heart attack! Without pain, or any symptoms, I would never have known I was at death’s door had I not gone in for that minor and unrelated ailment.

In a few days, I was on the operating table, chest cut open, and a vein taken from my leg to replace the one that was jammed up. Several days later, I was out of the hospital bed and walking outside the hospital down a covered walkway, bathed in the warm, early Spring air. . . Lost in thought, realizing I had, by sheer luck, survived what might have killed me, I also realized that I had lost control of the magazine I had created.

Ironically, I had sold the magazine to save it, from my ineptitude in business manipulations, to someone accomplished in such matters and someone whom I presumed I could trust to put the love of music ahead of the love of considerable profits. In return, I was to put out a first class magazine that continued to define the art of high fidelity.

I was told I would still be in complete editorial control. But I was not. I had been replaced by those who had turned my magazine into something I would not subscribe to. I was still aboard, as a figurehead, an icon, but little more. The Absolute Sound was no longer what I had dreamed it would be: A magazine about the love of music and the highway to an appreciation of the real thing. But the highways, the audio equipment, had become more important then the real thing, and had become an end in themselves. I had also been promised complete control over TAS content, but that was not what it had become under the new “administration”. I did not want my vision compromised. It was and is.

But that can be attributed to my background as a child of those who worked in advertising. My mother was the first advertising media director in a southern ad agency and she held in the highest respect those publications, especially The New Yorker, that would not compromise its editorial policies or principles for increases in ad revenues. She knew, all too well, how quickly other publications did. It’s not, she would say, advertising that corrupts (“it makes a good many Publications possible”), but the lust for ads over content. I knew there was a strong correlation between editorial quality and advertisers who valued such a platform.

Understand I have nothing against TAS. But it no longer seems to adhere to the principles for which I founded it: Namely, to promote music as the goal of all audio equipment. The audio gear is a highway that can lead to the music, not an end in and of itself. I also have nothing against advertising per se, just against its use in exchange for favorable reviews. And one thing as controlling editor for TAS, I had always refused to do, was arrange swaps of reviews for advertising. As far as I’m concerned, the advertiser can pay for space to advertise his products alongside my copy, but there can be no connection.

So, walking away from the hospital, I realized that by surviving death itself, I had now the courage, earned it, or call it heroism if you will, to quit the magazine, leave behind all of the benefits that working for a corporation could bestow.

And so, I quit, then and there. But I only quit a publication that was no longer mine. I had then, and still do not now, any intention of resigning. I believe that I have to be of service to music itself and that is now and ever to be a lifetime task.

With the inspiration and able assistance of my second-in-command, Joey Weiss, we decided to go at it online, and named it HP Soundings. I knew I had the reputation, based on long-time credibility. I knew I had the right partner in Mr. Weiss. I knew we shared the same philosophy to carry it on; that of the love of music itself. I believed then, as now, that the music needed me, but not, perhaps, as much as the other way around.

Having survived, I knew I had more work to do and that to do that fearlessly, I knew I had to become my own hero. So be it.

~ HP

Hi Zonees

Sonic has been listening to more analog than digital over this last week. Most enjoyable even though my tuned Audio Technica AT LP120 is not the last word in analog disc playback like the great Denons, Micro Seikis, Garrards and Technics.

The happy thing is the AT LP120s is good enough to let a listener tell the difference between recordings and it is able to retrieve detail that is really impressive for a $400 device with run of the mill cartridges -- in Sonic's case Shure M97xE and Stanton 500 -- 5217.

Sonic's Tune: I found that the sound of my turntable is more pure, detailed and whole if I switched off the stylus cueing light while playing SPs, EPs of LPs. A subtle but a change that grows on you in audibility as settling takes place.

Sonic

Hi Michael

I got a question for you -- Sonic knows and agrees with your views on damping equipment chassis, speaker cabinets and rooms but what's your thought on viscous damping of tonearms (vertical and horizontal movements)?

This may be something Sonic is going to try – there is a kit available here for the Technics 1200 and since the Audio Technica is a near dimensional clone, the damping kit might fit and work for the betterment of musick from my turntable.

Sonic

Tonearm Damping

Article By Bob Graham

The BAS Speaker Volume 3 No. 4, January 1995

From: enjoythemusic.com

After reading Leigh Phoenix's article on damping, I was sufficiently impressed with his findings to re-evaluate my own tonearm's performance. I remembered my earlier days in hi-fi, when the Weathers turntable "mounted on a seismic platform" (as the ads used to say) together with its (then) revolutionary 1-gram cartridge mounted in the Weathers damped tonearm generated "oohs" and "ahs" whenever a salesman would toss the arm onto the spinning disc. Nothing bad ever happened, of course, because of the viscous damped arm; it just settled very gently into whatever groove happened to be beneath it at touchdown. Very few of us thought of this as anything more than an impressive demonstration; I certainly didn't realize the importance of damping then, and it has been only recently that I've even encountered damping again.

A couple of years ago, I owned the absolutely beautiful/ugly (take your pick) Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference turntable. It was impressive, with the records sitting on those 24k gold pads; too bad the Transcriptors' idea of anti-shock-suspension was to mount the whole thing on hockey pucks. But the Fluid Arm — that was different! It was a single jeweled unipivot, surrounded by a thick, gooey damping material. The arm was very low mass, and, together with the damping, which I now realize is very important, probably made it one of the best tonearms around. I sold the Transcriptors, hockey pucks and all, and resurrected my AR turntable, eventually improving it by adding the SME 3009 Series II arm. Now we come to the real reason I'm a believer in damping. When I added some of the newer cartridges to the old SME a couple of years ago, I began to notice some trouble. An ADC 10E Mk IV, for example, wobbled all over the record — I just couldn't keep the stylus from moving around, independent of the tonearm. Likewise, the XLM was less than spectacular, and warped records were now a real annoyance. Happily, SME came out with their new series arms, and I purchased one. NOW I would have perfection — I thought!

Almost, but not quite. True, the arm did perform a lot better, but there were still some warped records, particularly organ discs, where the arm bounced several times after each sharp warp, and I could hear the organ tones being modulated by this. Still, it was better than before, and the XLM was now my favorite, so I couldn't bring myself to give up the combination. Well, all the problems are now in the past. After reading the article on damping, I tried an experiment. I mounted a piece of thin brass rod on the back of my tonearm, and fastened two "paddles" on the end of this rod. These paddles are submerged in STP oil additive, which is held in a small metal trough. The paddles are mounted perpendicular to each other, so there is force applied whenever the arm assembly is in either a vertical or horizontal motion (see sketch). The principle, of course, is viscous damping. You can demonstrate this principle by placing your hand, fingers together like a paddle, in a bucket of water and moving the flat of your hand slowly through the water. You will feel almost no resistance. If, however, you try to move your hand quickly, you will feel considerable resistance; the quicker you try to move, the more resistance you will feel.

This is the principle on which a damped tonearm works. It will follow the relatively gradual motions of a warped record, but the damping action will "put the brakes" on any bounce following a particular warp. This is superior to merely taking an undamped arm and tightening up the bearings so that you increase the Coulomb friction, which is constant with velocity; that would only cause the arm to stick and do other unpleasant things. By starting out with a low-mass, lowfriction arm and then adding controlled resistance with fluid, you will have a really first-rate damped tone arm.

As for my own arm and cartridge, the XLM has never sounded so good. The previously annoying records are now playable with absolutely no "bounce," no warbling tones. The stylus stays virtually motionless (to the eye) relative to the tonearm, so I'm not generating low-frequency tones to modulate all my music.

Although my system is somewhat clumsy-looking, the improvement in performance is so profound, particularly with a high-compliance cartridge, that I would not consider being without it. I'm sure that adding fluid damping to the old SME arm would have made the XLM very usable. How many cartridges like the XLM are considered "too fussy" for most tonearms, when the addition of damping might have made them compatible?

The only maintenance that might be required would be an occasional oil change — perhaps every 1000 miles of stylus travel or so, to get rid of accumulated things that might end up in the bucket of oil (like dust or a housefly). This device could be added to any tonearm, even those that could not otherwise have viscous damping. You could use a heavy paper clip for the rod, and glue some small paddles on with 5-minute epoxy. The container for the STP could be just about anything. It should be wide enough to allow the full horizontal motion of your tonearm, and deep enough to completely cover both paddles with fluid. The amount of damping force exerted can be varied by changing the size of the paddles. I've found that the vertical motion paddle works well if it is between 1/4 and 1/2 inch in diameter. The horizontal paddle size is somewhat less critical.

Traveling beat the snot out of me LOL, but I'm slowly regaining my footing.   Traveling use to be fun right   I need a transporter.

If you guys want to go back a page and look at Sonic's zone control you will see that he is getting a picture of what the front zones are doing.

One note is that it is harder to get the boundaries of a hard wall room figured out as opposed to more flex type walls. Finding the edges of the zones can be a challenge.



Sonic appears to be closing in on where this edges are and what they need to sound like and the amount of energy needed to balance out with the other zones.

Greetings Michael and Zonees

With the new wall Shutter placement settling in, the Tune instinct started sending messages to Sonic – “you need more barricade area in the rear of your room by extending out the Bookcase Wall to build up pressure round the rear sides of the room.”

Yes, and I also need proper storage for the LPs and SPs that are piling up as I bring them in from various collections and have them cleaned, not to mention the bunch of tubes and things that Sonic is gradually amassing.

Sonic thinks….I can get shelves and use their sides for Bookcase Wall extension and they store things. Off to Ikea and back with two Expedit shelves.

This how I placed them:



The initial effect is so similar to what Michael posted on his thread  -- he said, “Looking forward to playing with my SAM wall and even making it a little bigger to see in steps how much more body it adds as it increases it's presence in the room.

With it settling while I was gone I can tell how the harmonics have filled out and become more....fluffy is the word I think. I'm not sure if this will make it as an audio term but it sure is fun to hear the sound roll in and in such a gentle way. Acoustical guitars notes are plump on the top end as if the higher notes have been in an oven, very pleasant and easy going.”

“Plump” and “fluffy” are exactly what Sonic heard.  But as settling took place, an internal thickness started to creep in. This is a “dark twin” of “plump” and “fluffy”.  A year or more ago Sonic would be despairing at the possibility of the waste of money and effort.

Not now….the Tune Instinct tells me the DecoTune stacks have to be adjusted or moved and maybe some of the Ceiling Shutters over the listening seat.  So this is coming up next.  Till then the forwardness of the energy zone in the centre and a stronger and more prominent bass (getting too plump by the day) is what I am working with.  The friendly audiophiles who think Magneplanars are analytical and thin sounding must hear this.  As the Tune advances in a system, each step gets audible with no uncertainty and the room starts to appear as a map.

This is fascinating!

Michael – comments on this and my question on tonearm damping if you please.  Sonic is off to buy a Dr. Feikert stylus alignment protractor so I can set my cartridges to Baerwald or Stevenson (it can do Lofgren B too).  The thing is expensive but if the cartridge is not aligned right, we cannot make any real opinions and assessments of turntables, arms or cartridges can we?  Sonic is of the view that only when properly aligned we will know how good (or bad) the Audio Technica arm and Shure system is (and the Stanton).

Then I can make a studied decision what direction to go in the LP/SP system rather than following the latest buzz around the audiophile crowd which is always buzzin’.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Well two very interesting topics.

First the tweaking of tables never will end. If someone is a serious table guy they have to be prepared to experience some interesting sidetracks and detours just like we experience with mechanical tuning. Tubes and tables are fun and it's what got me into tuning somewhat. Sometimes this is a happy world sometimes frustrating but what I have learned never ever a fixed world. First off, all vinyl is not equal nor are the pressing machines.

The more tweakie I got with vinyl I started to become aware of something pretty important and in the long run was the deciding factor for me to step away from this part of the hobby. I found that every vinyl sounded different and the more intune I got one LP the next Lp suffered and I ended up spending time tweaking for it. At first it was fun and I thought I had a handle on this but the deeper I got the more I realized this was never going to end and all the reviews I ever read on the topic of tonearms and cartridges were meaningless because this whole thing became vinyl dependant and the reviewers were not making their comments based on a large range of LP's but a few of their references. Hmmm..... this is not right I thought and the more I explored I found I was correct in my thinking that the vinyl was different and so was the individual pressing machine's sound.

What is a press?

It is essentially a hydraulic pressing machine with a closing force of 100 tons and is fitted with molds. Labels and a “pattie” (pre-heated plastic blob) are placed in the mold cavity while the molds are being steam-heated with an ideal steam pressure of 140-170psi (this varies). Stampers (metal plates, one for each of Side A and Side B) for each title to be pressed are fitted to the molds. The stamper contains a negative image of the grooves. The molds close and through the process of compression molding the material fills the cavity and takes the form of the finished product, complete with grooves courtesy of the thin metal “stamper”.

Water at a pressure equal to the steam pressure is then admitted to the molds which both expels the steam and cools the molds down. The machine opens and the LP is removed from the molds. The overflow material at the edges is trimmed and the albums are stacked and allowed to cool. Cycle time for a 12″ LP about 25 seconds.

At each step of this process and condition the vinyl is subject to sonic signature changes and if you are a devout vinyl man can even track the machine or use to to see if you bought the vinyl pressing you really wanted. This is an art long ago passed up and one that as you are making judgements to the sound you are going to sooner or later hear this.

Your LP, table, tonearm, mat, stand, cartridge, cables and pre all have a particular setting that is best for each side of every play through. For me when a TT listener says my table sounds like this my mind takes a trip back to the time I spent trying to get this right and it doesn't take my memory cells long to remember how insane I got over this just to find I couldn't realy make judgement calls based on a fixed template.

Everytime in this hobby I have tried to say this is fixed I find a situation that makes this not so. The dampening does sound good with some and on some but then a couple of LP's later I am back to square one sitting there feeling my blood pressure raise as I slap myself in the forhead saying "of course". That's what makes this great and it's also somthing that doesn't get talked about enough. The hobby of audio is about the moment and everytime I try to catch that absoluteness about it I realize that this was a reviewers statement and not reality.

In the long run there is no answer for the damped tonearm cause there has never been an answer for the uniqueness of every vinyl ever pressed.

The second topic "the wall"

Within this you are going to fine a ton of sound but I warn you. Listen closely to when you take stuff in and out of these shelves cause this will change the sound, a lot! I don't put anything near my SAM's cause the affect is so great and the slightest tweak to it can do remarkable things both good and bad. Studying that wall behind you is going to be quite the job and you are probably going to fine some variable tricks to tweak per recording once you get the hang of it.

Greetings Michael and Zonees!

Super comments from Michael. I didn’t know that the pressing of LPs had that type of effect on the sound – of course, early run stamping and later stamping and the thinning of vinyl discs affected the sound but what Michael described is enlightening.

The issue is to an extent how much a listener wants to tune. If you are a static tuning person with a reasonably tuned room and system as opposed to a knife edge super set up, this might be no problem but as Sonic found out, the tune grows on you.

I have carefully aligned my cartridges to quasi-Stevenson, which is what you get in the Technics SL1200 and clone arms when the stylus tip is 52mm from the headshell washer (where it attaches to the arm) and the cantilever is parallel to the headshell sides.

Sonic didn’t get the Dr Feikert protractor. I couldn’t in all conscience buy this device costing $300 in this townb when I know the process to get an accurate quasi-Stevenson alignment using a ruler and some basic tools and sighting processes. Requires more care but produces a result that is known, documented and measured. So I did the alignment very carefully and along the way found my setting for the Shure and Stanton were off by around an mm. In the micro world of a record groove, 1mm out is equal to aiming to arrive at one house address but end up at two or three houses away. It is a lot.

The sound was excellent after set up. I played Swingle Singers singing Bach, an old 1960s LP, and the tracks were clean all the way to the innermost groove where Stevenson and quasi-Stevenson gives is a null (zero tracing error point). The subtle cymbal and snare drum work on this LP were beautifully real. This from a Shure M97xE in an Audio Technica AT LP120….but set up on a Michael Green rack properly balanced and MG’s cables taking the signal from the phono stage to the rest of the tuned system. I’ll be hearing the SPs shortly and I expect to get some even nicer musick.

As for the Expedits. Yes, loading them will change the sound. I'll have to live with that and work around it. The Expedits will probably end up filled with Sonic’s SPs, EPs and LPs. The tubes may be accommodated somewhere.

The sound got heavier and plodding the more settling advanced. I’ll take the ETs on the rear wall corners above the Tunestrips down to give more liveness in the rear of the room and see what happens.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Yeah, there are some that will read what I said about vinyl and be seeing this for the first time. When thinking about the fact that each press proceedure has that big of an affect you start to rethink why people use to seek LP's with the lowest press number.

Each machine had it's obtimum run and sweet spot. And the guys who knew their machine and were listeners could tell you the best picks from that particular pressing. And art form all of it's own.

I find that this hobby has so many attached hobbies that it's hard to keep on track as far as the goals go. It all comes back to something that is very physical and the deeper you go can become more and more tweakie on many levels. Over the years I have enjoyed following those levels and different parts and pieces and find that depending on who it is and what view point they have of the hobby is to how they see the industry as a whole.

Hi Michael

If that is the case with LPs, what is it like to have reel tape as a source? And your experience with cassettes and the high-end players like the Nakamichis?

As for Sonic's room -- the rear ETs just below the Corner Tunes and above the Tunestrips were taken down. The effect was not good. The thickness and heaviness was still there (slightly reduced) but the removal of the control from the ETs meant the room started to sound more live in the top, a very undesirable colouration here. So ETs will have to go back up and it will be the stacked DT that will have to be moved.

Sonic

"If that is the case with LPs, what is it like to have reel tape as a source? And your experience with cassettes and the high-end players like the Nakamichis?"

Hi Sonic

Like with TT's I once did the reel to reel and to a lesser extent the cassette tape. Nakamichi was one of the brands I carried they told a great story. As with tables anytime you have a storage that is exposed to whatever elements the sound is going to slowly deteriorate.

"Until recently, the popular belief was that information stored on audio is permanent. Magnetic tape has become the archival storage medium of our age.

Now we realize that with audio tapes there is no long term. Magnetic media has a very limited life span and priceless sounds are in danger of being lost.

Audio collections require specific care and handling to ensure that the recorded information will be preserved. Special storage environments are necessary to ensure that the recorded information is preserved for longer than 10 years. For information that must be preserved indefinitely, periodic transcription from old media to new is necessary, not only because the media are unstable, but also because the recording technology will become obsolete.

The magnitude of the problem of magnetic tape deterioration is just starting to be realized. Virtually all of the magnetic tape ever recorded older than as little as 10 years may be in serious jeopardy. The threat comes from several sources, but the largest threat is chemical in nature, coming from the breakdown of the binder, or glue, that holds the magnetic particles to the polyester base of tape. As this hydrolysis process (sometimes known as "Sticky Shed Syndrome" ) occurs, the tape often gets coated with a tenacious adhesive that makes it extremely difficult to play. In some cases the problem can be so severe that the magnetic material literally falls off or sheds from the base leaving a pile of dust and clear backing. The problem of hydrolysis has been known for some time, but the extent of both the problem and catastrophic effect it has on magnetic media is just now reaching widespread public visibility."

So that's one problem and to me a big enough one. I have spent so much time playing with different sources that I'm at the point where I start to count the days of listening I have left and how many recordings are out there to enjoy. Looking back for me, since finding Red Book and the maggie, is becoming more and more a distant memory. With tables it was endless tweaking and the same with the tapes and with the tapes they were even built with more mass. Tuning a reel to reel or studio machine is a very bulky adventure and tape machines were right before we started doing things (for the most part) horizontal. tape has it's own sound and a cool one but those darn machines are so hard to work on   and when I look at the little magnazox and the huge soundstage I get it's really hard to get my mind back into that mode.

I would be so surprised if 10 years from now I have anyone coming to me to tune a R t R or table. We will have a computer source that will be the size of the maggie and I will more than likely be all over that. I will also be getting picked on for being so old fashion with my CD collection and I will smile and say "yep I'm pretty old" then walk back into my room and fade away.

I may someday (who knows) do systems for the sake of history but that would be more of a side track and not the real me unless I change a lot. To me I think I have found music heaven in that I now know I can have a very simple system that is more wood than electronics. More acoustical signal than electronic signal path. And in the back of my mind I still keep thinking something more along the size of the RCA SA I was playing with. However taking the transformer outside of the sherwood may wipe that thought right out of my head.

Hi Zonees

Sonic got to understand the reality of my room. Due to its brick walls and RC ceiling, it is ringy with emphasis in the mids and treble. This is made worse by a loss of bass energy through the glass windows and the wooden doors. Glass is a hi-pass filter letting bass out but reflecting the mids and trebles back into the room. The wooden doors have a similar effect.

I think anyone with this combination of room materials -- hard walls and ceiling, glass and lossy wood doors will have this mid emphasis with ring. For those with tile or stone floors, it gets even worse.

Sonic removed the DT stacks out of the room and I could hear again that "relaxing" of the room acoustics again. Only a bit too much liveliness was observed.

My room needs a net amount of absorption to sound right and this absorption needs to be distributed properly in the room. This optimal amount of absorption will be a lot less than what is used in "conventional" audiophile rooms but will be more than what Tunees will normally apply to rooms made of drywall. If this minimum amount is not met, a noticeable liveliness returns.

There is a fine balance to be struck. Sonic can overdo the amount of absorption or over-concentrate it in one spot. Remember my attempts to tame the room using curtains over the windows and how that sucked the life out of my music and had to be taken down?

With the new Shutter placement and the extended Bookcase Wall, I understand that I should not have too much damping in the rear of the room. Just enough to keep the echo gremlins away and I have to bring the DT stacks back into the room to maintain the optimal absorption for the room. But where to put them?

Sonic

Also something to consider. When I changed my 4' wide SAM to a 6' wide last night my ceiling acoustics change enough that I needed to readjust my pressure zones. I spent a little time reshaping things on the ceilling till the new balance happened.

The new pressure directly behind you will dictate the amount pressure and sound of the other zones, so be careful not to make too big of moves till you explore this.

Many times when I make a move and first hear it I'm tempted to make a big jump, but when I sit there a while I realize that the pressure zones have changed a little and just want to be reshaped. This might be a very small adjustment or a rethinking of the ceiling. It doesn't necessarily mean more dampening but many times re distributing.

Also remember you have just changed the front to back a lot and the wall unit may want to have it's position tweaked some. Here's a hint. With the new size "think square". You may have your new wall too far back in the room even a few inches. This could also be the opposite, but my guess is there's a hindden gem there to be found. Also revisit hanging tunes above your wall unit hanging horizonal. You have created a different zone now behind you.

Hi Zonees

Sonic did the next step logical thing with the Shutters in the front half of my room -- now that the 2 ft Shutters on the front wall and the forward side walls worked some tuning magic, I tried to move the mini-Shutters at the ceiling-upper wall junctions to 29 inches from the R and L corners.

This didn't work. The sound lost focus in the middle of the soundstage and the bass went funny -- kind of uneven.

This may show that Sonic's room is complex where the ceiling and floor zones are largely different acoustically and need separate tuning. Perhaps there might be even an intermediate band vertically to tune given this is a nearly 11 ft high room when most of the rooms Michael is referring to are 8 ft tall rooms.

Re-distribution of tune devices in Sonic's room that Michael says....this is something I am now working on.

Sonic

Hi Michael

Here's how Sonic re-distributed the "acoustic burn" in my room by relocating my DecoTune stacks.



Early to tell but seems to work well.  Very well apparently!

Here is the rear of the room facing the extended Bookcase Wall looking up.



How do you suggest I can "think square"?  There are RTS and some stuff from the MGA reps here that I can buy and put up.

Sonic

What's the dimensions from the bookcase to the front wall again? and the side to side?

The room with the Bookcase Wall will be: 16.3 ft long x 14 ft wide x 10.6 ft tall.

The extended Bookcase Wall is 7.75 ft wide x 6 ft + 1 inch tall.

This means there is:

a. 3.1 ft on each side of the Bookcase Wall

b. 4.5 ft above the top of the Bookcase Wall

The full size room is 20.8 ft long x 14 ft wide x 10.6 ft tall

Sonic listened to an LP of Mozart's early piano sonatas 1 - 5 on Columbia. This record received rough treatment on equipment far from anything we would consider Tune-grade. Likely to have been some changer with a ceramic pickup. After cleaning, the record had few clicks, below any level I would fined annoying, the dynamic range was there and low tracing distortion. Followed by an Archiv recording.

A great evening of musick listening and more proof that:

a. you can get very nice musick from a low cost direct-drive turntable with a good Shure cartridge -- but have the head properly set up to one of the correct geometries, Stevenson in Sonic's system.

b. vinyl for all its limitations and flaws is a very forgiving and enduring medium that retains musick despite the abuse from misaligned cartridges. Sonic got a story on this shortly to come.

c. analog trounces digital

"c. analog trounces digital"

Kind of a funny statement   must have been a good night of listening  

I remember those days when I would make a statement like that, and sometimes I'll put on a CD and go  "they couldn't do a better job of mastering than that" but here's the thing.

You can't have a direct comparison on the same system. The system tuned to a CD is going to be different than a system tuned to a table, and a system tuned to a particular vinyl is going to be different from a particular CD.

For myself I have all but had to remove my thoughts from the idea that I will ever be able to make a fair comparison.

Still though, a magic moment of listening is a magic moment and does makes us say in our mind "that was the best".

Thinking square! I think I'll post this in my thread.

Michael said about “Thinking Square”:

“Forever I've been teaching the listening method of using that laminar flow and pressure zone right behind the head. I spend tons of time voicing this area and am aways in shock over how the slightest change to the rear pressure can make a system go flat or come to life. Our eyes are in the front of our heads but much of what we are looking at is actually going on behind us. It's common to think that what we are looking at is making the sound but I have found there are many secrets and treasures to be found when thinking about energy as a sphere and not so directional.

The back wall has this great energy and when able to balance and use it, it can be mans best friend (I apologize to all the dogs out there). But does this wall possess all the goods as far as tonal structure that the SAM does? The SAM doesn't neccessarily replace the back wall but is stimulated by the pressure the back wall is creating. It's like this powerful cushion of energy waiting to be utilized. When I have been able to make my SAM and back wall into a big rear pressure zone controller magic happens.”

Very true – my Tuning journey really got moving after I took Michael’s advice and turned the bookcases around so their backs faced into my room and moved them so the Wall is within 2 feet of my listening seat.

I could go closer and get some benefits of Tone but the soundstage gets unbalanced – images on the Left get closer and larger while those on the Right stay the same so it feels like I moved a few seats to my Left in the concert hall. This slight pulling exists in mono too though central images stay centred.

Michael – how to fix this?

After reading the Think Square piece on you thread, Sonic still don’t know what to do beyond moving the wall a bit forward or back and seeing what happens. A daunting task that I may not attempt. I remember an experiment a year or so ago of moving the Wall forward (closer to the speakers) by 6+ inches ended poorly. The bass went oversize, heavy and the sound was lifeless. So we know what lies forward. And further back (to the rear wall) the less effective it gets.

So looking at the pix of how Sonic redistributed the DTs to the front and the rear of room, Michael can I improve this with available DTs and RTS?

About analog, given that my turntable is a cheap one and almost untuned, the sound is remarkable. The Audio Technica used to have its rubber damping feet removed and the base sat directly on MW. This sounded odd after a while and I noticed some motor noise audible that was not present when the elastomer damping feet supported the table. Apart from the removal of a 6lb block of steel in the base to weight down the table, no other tuning has been done (or should be “no other Tuning that Sonic knows how to do with turntables”.)

Sonic

Left room or right room drift is very common and getting away from it can be a challenge.

Must be something in the amp right?

Switch the interconnects so the amp is recieving the left in the right and the right in the left, then flip the leads on your amp to do the same thing.

This clears the amp right? Maybe

Must be the CD player?

Again flip the channels. Yes your channels are reversed but you can still hear the problem.

Must be the speakers?

Flip the leads on the speakers, still there?

Move further into the room, away from the back wall. Listen carefully, listen again, and again. When you leave the back wall your losing info. ( the distance will vary based on the materials in the wall). But lets say you have a SAM or ok wall (one that has flex). If you listen very carefully you are going to hear that the drift is still there even after you lose the info. Yes things may shift to center again but one side is still thin as opposed to the other.

It's all about signal and pressure. I should post this on Robert's thread too, cause he has brought this up a few times.

Every time I put on a piece of music in my current room I go through a bit of biting my lip. I for a moment lose a grib on the settling truth and want to start "fixing". Some times I start to go down that road and before too long am greeted with harmonic distortion to the order that I have to stop listening. This is something that I have had to just learn and face. Fixing things based on a partial signal gets me nowhere in the long run and makes me frustrated while tweaking. Instead I have taken on a better approach for me. I wait to listen until I can the music doing certain things.

In my systems (being so low mass) the change between a recording playing an hour later and it playing a day later is like a different piece of music. It's bigger than big, more like 3 or 4 times as much info. With this info comes a ton more balance and thickness (richness). Most of the time (not always) the channel out of balance comes into balance. Keep in mind, I don't make the rules, I only listen to them.

here's what I have found with drift

It's somewhere hiding and the better your system is at telling you detail and accuracy the easier it is to find it and work on it. For me it usually comes down to (a) am I doing a quick listen or settling in (b) a tweak that I have found that fixes it temporary that I can return to when needed.

Is there a perminant fix to drift?

Not in rooms with hard surfaces and limited space. I've had maybe one or two systems that never had drift at least during warm up.

Hi Michael

Sonic has done the channel and cable swap test end-to-end in my system and the problem doesn't reverse side. Now the good thing is the drift -- and it more an image size, front to back position and bias focus than an actual drift -- is less noticeable after the system has been warmed up playing musick for an hour or more. It is most evident on a cold start and lessens as the warm up advances.

Let me have your views on how I can tune my Bookcase Wall from what you see in the pix I posted.

More on Sonic's analog listening:

After that good listening experience with the Mozart LP, Sonic been listening to more vinyl -- baroque dance musick (Archiv), Mendelsohn and Haydn Trios (Decca). I also got some pop music from a friend who wanted to dispose of his record collection [Sonic talked him out of it in exchange for some freebies] and played records by Cat Stevens and the Supremes and the Temptations (Motown). Now this fan of music is no audiophile, had little maintenance done on his LPs and played them on some changer tracking at some weight that is too low or high.

LPs are very enduring as Sonic is finding. After a good clean, there is little distortion and noise unless the record is visibly scratched and degraded. CDs are more convenient but I am finding the truth in what Neil Young said that analog is therapeutic.

I am also tuning the rack that carries the Audio Technica AT LP120 and the phono stage. The analog playback is certainly responsive to Tuning.

Sonic