Bill333's System

Bill,

Well, I couldn't wait. I just added the 8 watt integrated with the 60s and wow. More body and treble sparkle. Overall more balance and detail. The 60s needed more juice that they craved and everything sounded much more balanced. My integrated is no longer offered but it is said Steve Deckard borrowed the design for his Taboo amp which can be run as a single input integrated. The Decware Taboo is an EL84 power tube single ended pentode with some feedback and is rated at 6 watts. It is more detailed than the Mini Torii that you enjoyed. If you did not hear the Taboo, you might go back for another visit. Over the long run, I suspect you might be happier with no less than 6 watts with the 60s.

Keep in mind that most of the Decware speakers are veneer over heavy MDF, not the true wooden cabinets of your 60s. Also note that Steve has his listening room accoustically tuned and some other tricks that make amps sound more powerful than you might expect. When I visited his place the only speakers that caught my interest were the built in corner horns which are not practical for most home installations as they were built into the walls of his listening room. Don't get me wrong, Steve is a dedicated amp craftsman and his housesound leans more to neutral and detailed. I liked his Mini Torii and I have compared the Mini Torii to my MR system and my MR system has more body and naturally bigger soundstage than the Mini Torii. You, however, may prefer that sound, but you must live with 3.5 watts. I think the 60s need more SE power to work their best.

Hey, Bill333,

Just wondering what your take is on all that's been happening at your place lately? We have only heard from Mr. Green so far. Are you getting nearer to what you seek or, like U2, have you still not found what you're looking for?

Robert

Quote :

Are you getting nearer to what you seek or, like U2, have you still not found what you're looking for?

It would be more accurate to say that I've decided to look for something new. The tipping point came when Michael demonstrated what the sound of his voice and my guitar were like in my loft area. In my mind, I had always imagined sound sources as point sources, or at least no larger than someone's mouth or the body of the instrument producing the sound. And I've been trying to get my stereo systems to reproduce that. But when I closed my eyes and actually listened, what I heard was not a point source, but a whole field of sound energy interacting with entire areas of the room. Sometimes I might be able to point to the source of the sound, but even then the source is just the strongest point in a strong field of sound, not the 'source' surrounded by a faint halo of sound that I had been imagining.

What all this means is that I have been trying to reproduce a mental construct of sound I had in my head, but which doesn't exist in the real world. If I can't identify a point source in a person speaking to me live in a real room, why should I expect that from a stereo? How can that be on a recording if it doesn't exist in real life? The answer is it can't.

The more interesting question is why I thought that in the first place. I think most of the reason is that I had become accustomed to listening to bad hifi which shears off harmonics and shrinks the sound field around images, and had started to think of this presentation as accurate. The shrunken sound field by itself would be bad enough, but it carries other repercussions with it. If the sound field around every sonic image is diminished down to its fundamentals, then so is the musical information. Of course, Michael has been trying to tell me this since forever, but I just wouldn't listen to him. If I had a dollar for every time Michael gestured with his hands close together (diminished musical information) and then with hands far apart (the musical whole), I could take us all out for a nice dinner.

Well, the past is the past and things move on. The musical paradigm with which I have pursued this hobby for the last 20 years having been exposed as false, I find myself asking, 'If not this, then what?' It turns out that the last couple weeks have held some tantalizingly promising experiences. When Michael set up the first system in the loft around the Magnavox, the Sherwood and the 60s, it had this floaty, relaxed quality about it that was very beguiling. I've been trying to get back to that ever since, but the Beauhorns will not do it. The system in the newly rebuilt tunable room has the same Magnavox, Sherwood and 60s, but the system and the room are too raw to do the 'float' thing yet. What it is doing well right now is presenting A TON of musical information. I listened to Electric Warrior by T. Rex last night and was shocked at how much more there is going on in this recording than I ever heard before. I've had that disc for 20 years, but I had never really heard it. A very pleasant revelation.

At the moment I'm really just focussed on listening to and getting used to music in the expanded sound stage/sound information that Michael creates without judging it or comparing it to anything else. There's a three week hiatus until Michael returns and construction/tuning continue on the room. I'll be listening to a variety of music down there and enjoying it for what it is, rather than what I might like it to be. Eventually I will start making some choices about where I would like to go soundwise, but for the next several months, and possibly longer, the tunable room is Michael's to take where he wants to go.

I'm not sure where my sonic preferences will end up, but it won't be where I've been. You can't have all the beauty and richness of music with only a quarter of the musical information.

Hey, Bill333,

I understand your former mindset. There was a time I was trying for the same result, believing it to be what one should strive for. Yet, what did I do? Buy a set of big old dipole panel speakers instead of some so-called controlled directivity speakers. Obviously, I was looking for the best of both worlds, i.e. spaciousness and pin point imaging at the same time, yet following the advice put out in the magazines and online sites, with their varied recommendations. I recall one website that claimed that you could (or should) not have any sound emanating past the horizontal boundaries of your speakers. Funny how depth was stressed frequently, yet "guitars in the neighbor's yard" was frowned upon.

It's like the THX sound system concept - you should hear what the director heard in the dubbing stage. Taking that concept to music, I can't see Michael Green even WANTING to re-create what most mixers heard in the mixing suite.

Robert

Hi Robert

Here's the interesting part to your comment for me. I've been in my fair share (if a fair share is up in the hundreds lol) of mixing rooms and have yet to hear two of them sound the same. If there is a standard this is one boy who missed that class. And for these guys giving lessons on playback, I hope they have good retirement club houses with lots of chess players cause their not going to have many visitors from those who have been turned on to real space sound stages. The thought that a microphone only knows how to pick up flat plaines is a new one for mic designers I'm sure . Have these guys ever looked at mic patterns? Audiophile theorist can be so brain dead at times. They miss the easiest most common sense stuff there is and they do it everyday with the authority of the galactic lost.

If soundstages were supposed to be flat why would there be so many recording schools teaching micing? I mean there would be no need for pickup paterns at all. It really just blows my mind that guys in this industry can be so removed from it. And these nuts have been around forever, which is what freaks me out. It shows me how young this industry really is and that the need for tuning has yet to meet it's stride. What needs to be done more is for someone from each category in the industry (all the way through) to have beginer classes in how the chain works. It's when techno-nerds get stuck in their own thinking that things get screwy. They have a hard time with the obvious and fail to see the recording to end process as one progressive motion. Sad really, and it's not just the audiophiles fault. Take a tour of recording studios for example and see how few have true playback rooms. Not many, and that's a big mistake. Their making all these recordings based on their own standards and it's confusing the heck out of the audiophile cause they want to plug a play. So here you have all these recordings done 50 million ways and the poor audiophiles are setting up systems they think are going to play everything. Then they give up and go with the little soundstages that reproduce the compressed sounding messes there are. These folks then end up listening to extremely simple music and call the rest bad recordings.

I could never live in that world, nor could I in good faith ever recommend it. Not as long as the guitars can play on the neighbors lawn

Plus I have never heard a flat stage ever play all the music. The more compressed the stage the more music is hidden. How do these guys account for that. These flat stages are so distored that you have instruments sounding squished or they don't any sound like instruments but more a slur or noise. Yet these audiophiles have no explanations for these sounds. They just simply play simple music and forget the rest. That's why many of these guys hate rock if you notice. They can't get near anything with production value. I see these guys at the shows all the time trying to play the simplist thing possible.

To bad I have to shut down and travel right now I really feel like posting on even some of the listening I'm doing with Bill's two systems while he's at work . Sounds sneaky but really isn't, just don't want to make things confusing by displaying my crazy world in front of Bill while he's going through this learning curve. I have been doing my own testing on the side though comparing the upstairs system to the downstairs. It's too early to really do this as the downstairs system is only on to vibrate the room, but I can't help myself and have been running up and down the steps since he has left making comparitive notes. It doesn't take long and the difference between the compressed stage and the open one is huge .

I'm very happy with Bill's discoveries over the last couple of days esspecialy. I know how hard it can be for long timers and as he and I have talked about, engineer types. As he said though with me doing my thing over the next few months he will be able to see things that he never did before. Even he hearing how much more music there is, is a really big step.

Uh oh, I might have to sneak out during my lunch break and hear what's going on down there...

Well, Bill





...Welcome To The Machine...





(Hint: try playing that cut in your room when its ready)

I'm going to be making regular updates on how the room and the system are sounding as we go through the rebuilding/settling/tuning process.

As of a week and a half ago, the room has been squared and trued and all panels have been reattached. We threw the 60s, the Sherwood and the Magnavox in, more just to get the room vibrating than anything else. The new equipment platform is composed of two parts: the platform itself and the sub-platform. The sub-platform is done, but the main platform is not, so the Sherwood and Magnavox are sitting on the sub-platform. The Sherwood is on a bridge made of two half-finished 2x4s and everything else is sitting directly on its platforms.

The trim is not up in the room yet and there are no acoustical products of any kind in the room. Just the walls, the speaker platforms, and the speakers. Given all this, the sound is astoundingly good. When we first put the system in, it soundstaged well, but the tonality was too high and it had a kind of crabbed quality that was unpleasant to listen to. Just a week of settling seems to have fixed a lot of these problems and I have spent hours this weekend listening to music in there and really enjoying it.

The tonality has lowered, although not as far as I would like to see it go, but the crabbed quality is pretty much gone. This is especially surprising since most of the screws have not been detorqued yet.

If you're not familiar with how these rooms are built, every hole is sprayed with polyurethane before the screw is driven in and the polyurethane coats the screw and the screw hole and it dries into the wood over time. When the poly dries, it becomes like a glue that sticks the screw to the wood. Poly-stuck screws actually don't sound very good, so the last part of the process is to break the poly bond by unscrewing the screw a little ways. If everything went right, the screw will release with an audible 'crack!'.

If it's this good now, what will it be like when the screws have been worked on? When the room has acoustical products? When the speakers and the listening position have been carefully set up? When the room itself has been tuned? When the equipment platform is completed and in place? When the equipment has been tuned? When the electricity has been tuned?

The future is looking very bright.

I return to the room on the 16th to start tuning the screws. First thing I will do is listen to my sounds and to the material I referenced the last couple days I was there to hear how it is different. During these trips I have asked Bill to not touch anything so the settling process can happen. I believe Bill is on the edge of breaking through the audiophile small to real life big so I will do my best to relay my own interpretation of this. As Drewster says "everyone goes through this" and we all experience the new world in different ways till we except a more true stage.

Bill, one thing I would recommend is to list the music you are listening to while describing the sound, and try to paint pictures of specifics. Like for example the voice that happens on 5 years in the back ground. Specifics will help to make things real in our minds as we read. I will be sharing thoughts on both here and on "tuning Chicago" https://tuneland.forumotion.com/t164-tuning-chicago . I will probably sound like two different people at times cause on tuning Chicago I'm going to be more me and on here trying to look at things a little more through your eyes. This may not work but I will give it a try.

I also think a description in more detail of where you came from in the past is helpful and how that past intermingles still with the now and potential future.

Bill, a question that I have for you is do you still feel that things are settling up in pitch?

Quote :

Bill, a question that I have for you is do you still feel that things are settling up in pitch?

No, things are clearly settling downwards, at least right now. It would be nice to see the last of that problem, but I'll need longer to be convinced that we're permanently past that.

Hi Bill

Here's what I believed happened. In the past you were tuning things with an upward shift. As a result, when the harmonics started to fill in the shift was more present. This last trip I tested this and saw that it was true, plus my experience has shown me that folks who live in that smaller squeezed world do this almost always. I don't believe there was an upward shift on it's own at all now as vibration settles in a widening process (unless there is dampening and stress). What you heard before was a squeezed stage with a tilt. I even thought maybe you had a gremlin for a while but after my first few days there on this last trip saw that this wasn't the case. It was that you were shrinking things causing that tilt.

Michael,

I think you're right about the above post, but I feel like I should issue an update. I went in to listen last night after I came home from work and the system had shifted into a noticeably different state than it had been in the day before. The treble had gained both volume and forwardness, giving the system a significant push upwards in tone. The bottom end is still there, but there sounds like much more treble than before. At the same time, I'm hearing an increase in clarity. Complicated passages with massed instruments that had been kind of mushy are resolving more clearly into individual instruments. I listened again this morning and the sound was the same. I'm not sure if this is a case of things settling upward again, or if it's just a stage in normal settling.

Disclaimer: I have not attempted to make adjustments or tune at all. All I do is turn the volume up and down and change CDs. I'm a little concerned that the cat may have disturbed the wires, but I looked carefully and I don't see any evidence of it.

Hi Bill

I can start making comments but need to know what your listening to first. If it's something I have heard in your place over the last visit it will be easier cause then I can call notes.

One comment though before we get into this. Remember when I had you sit down upstairs after work one night and you listened and said that the sound shifted up but I said in fact during the day it actually filled in and lowered? These mental notes I think are very important for you as we look into how you listen and compare it to what the system is doing.

Why don't we go back to Ziggy and explore the sound of it downstairs.

Hi Michael,

I'd be glad to get Ziggy Stardust out, but I'm thinking maybe we should look at the speaker wire/speaker terminal connection? In the past this pattern has been very typical where the system starts heading up after several days, but loosening the nuts on the speaker terminals immediately fixes it. In fact, the sonic character of what I'm hearing really reminds me of that. Do you want me to try adjusting them?

Nope, stay on course young Luke.

And give me a list of what you've been listening to.

95% of the time I'm listening to either my 'Surfin' Hits' surf music compilation, or 'Some Nights' by Fun. I think you've heard the surf music disc, but it's been a while.

Is the surfin music something we listened to while I was there?

What we need to do is track the music if you are wanted to make references or we just let the room break in till I get there.

Reason I'm saying this is because from the 23rd to the 1st the system had been breaking in with the pitch dropping then overnight it started shifting up. This is unlikely, but the only way to truely check this is with something we have been referencing.

It's all about getting back to the basics like we talked about and making cues to follow so you can track the music.

heeeellllooooo what have we here



or should I say, what have we here



There's a story to tell and it will be spread over a couple of threads one being Bill333's thread.

OK, it's been a couple of months since I last posted a room report, and there has been quite a bit going on. One major thing that has happened is that Michael discovered that the screws we used to build the room here are not the same as the ones he used in Vegas.

The original screws were 7 guage, while the rebuild was done with 8 guage screws. That might not have been a big deal, but the 8 guage screws were of a low manufacturing quality and they often didn't drive straight. The result was that the sound was kind of 'off' and adjusting the screws in and out didn't cause the wood to tune the way Michael expected. Michael bought several boxes of the good screws while he was back in Las Vegas and we have been in the process of replacing the 8 guage screws. The good news is that the smaller guage screws drive effortlessly into the 8 guage holes. Getting screws to drive easily in and out of the holes is a key part of getting the transfer right in a tuneable room or in any type of platform or rack. It often takes months or even years of hand labor to get recalcitrant screws to drive smoothly. So this has actually turned out to be a real gift.

The other big thing that's been happening is that the screw holes in practically all of the panels have swelled to point where they are engaging with the threads of the screws. The way the connection should work is that the screw grabs the frame while the panel attached to it is held on only by the head of the screw. That is, the screw threads do not touch the panel, only the frame. So the screw actually clamps the panel to the frame. When the hole in the panel is not large enough, the screw grabs it at the same time as the frame and this allows for a lot of mis-threading between the panel and frame. When you multiply this situation times 12 or 16 screws per panel, that is a lot of different ways for a panel to get cock-eyed and end up sounding wrong.

So we have been systematically taking panels down, drilling the holes out, spraying them with poly, allowing them to dry, redrilling and then putting the panels back up. Results of this are really something to hear. We did the first panel as a test and it literally transformed the sound. At this point about a quarter of the panels are done and we will be making more progress on this in a couple of weeks when Michael returns.

At the end of Michael's last visit when we put up the first batch of drilled out panels, the room unsettled and the sound was not good (tilted up pitch, chaotic soundfield) for a few days. After that, it settled itself into a very musical place. I haven't done anything to the room or the system except put up four cornertunes, but I'm hearing sound which is as good as I can ever remember hearing. At some point during the day last Sunday, the room went 3D just due to settling. So at this point I'm just leaving it alone and enjoying listening.

In a recent email, Michael wrote:

Quote :

My goal is to make the room almost play itself. If you let me keep going this direction you will see that I can take it to places you didn't know existed in audio.

I'm definitely looking forward to hearing things I didn't know existed in audio. When we get there I hope everyone reading this will be able to come over and listen.

Now that's progress...congrats Bill333!

At Bill's now and am very happy the way things are shaping up here. The upstairs system has settled into this B&W 801 sound I was telling him. The downstairs settling was spetacular I thought. Very excited to get this to a place of listening.

Working on voicing panels to the TR.

When all this is done it will be interesting to see how Bill's taste in listening will have changed. I've seen it change quite a bit over the last 2 months.

Hi Guys

Wanted to give a listening update. Last night with Bill's listening (I was off to done land) he said that the stage was small and things were in the speakers but that the bass was nice.

This to you may sound like a bad report, but to me it sounds like heaven. Bill333 is becoming a listener and as his taste may yet not be totally defined his awareness of what is different or going on is improving with every step he has been taking.

The upstairs system is doing something I have heard a lot of systems do. It fills up the area with a decent sound but when in the chair the sound shrinks. This is mostly do to the heavy carpet in the room. After Bill's coment I wonder if maybe this effect was one that he was starting to become aware of. In some ways when I arrived and the system was playing I felt like the sound downstairs in his sitting area the system sounded at least better than it ever has from a distance. With the exception of once. You could hear his open area full of music that made a lot of tonal rightness. Because this was so relaxed and pleasant it becomes a little disappointing to then go sit in front of the speakers where things go from big all over the acoustical space to much smaller in the listening chair. This session this is far more noticable and I wonder if this is something Bill picked up without thinking about it. One thing for sure is he is starting to shift from small to bigger sound. Secondly, earlier in the day I did a listen and the music was definately not in the speakers. Throughout the day though humidity rolled into the area and I could tell the upstairs was doing the oven effect. Even though I did not listen at the time Bill did to see if his findings were the same as mine I have heard this at his place before upstairs. The system changes from morning (in the summer) to night, and when that humidity rolls in the upstairs starts to do it's changing and can be a little hard to follow. Fun but hard. Maybe this trip I will monitor a session of his to compare what he is hearing as compared to myself.

Third, the amp he is using seem to have a cycle of about 7 hours before starting to lose their dynamic range. This is true with almost all tube products and maybe even more so with single ended triods (not sure), but I will reserve this judgement till I do further testing of this in my own world hopely someday as I plan on taking these amps to perhaps a Michael level of listening.

Forth and maybe most importantly. Many of us are mood listeners, and Bill is an obvious case of this. I can almost tell what he is going to hear by the way he is talking about things before and after he listens. This is something I have been paying attention to all along and do with all my client/listening pals. How much mood plays in listening is far bigger than anyone has ever put down on paper but it is something I have been tracking for many years. It's something I do with myself as well as many others. We have a built in zone that when we enter into it our brains are able and wanting the listening event to take us if we are ready. We also have a zone that when we are in it we want the system to do what we are specifically telling it in our minds to do. We will get focused on a couple of areas and when doing so the rest of the music almost vanishes. This has largely to do with what areas of our brain we use to evaluate things. For example an artist listener will listen for things completely different from an engineer. I have for a long time been training myself to drift in and out of both. This is doable by shifting my thinking from emotional settings and learning focus settings. Let me give you an example.

Put on a movie and watch it two different ways. One way pay attention to the colors and resolution only and don't follow the script. Look for lines, movements, pixs, balance, contour, texture and warmth. Then put on the same movie and don't pay attention to any of this but only the story line (falling into the virtual part of your brain). All of those other parts disappear because you are following the emotion (virtual reality) of the content. You completely forget about all the right and wrongs of the screen and are unaware of your surroundings. When in this state something may take your attention away from the story line, but in time you float back into this virtual mode.

I have seen this happen many many times with listeners. Sometimes they are following the emotion of the music and drift into their virtual senses fast and other times they will stay in "evaluation" mode. Some people have the ability to click this on and off smoothly and others it's a huge road block and they have to put up signs saying "emotions keep out". Many times a system can even be sounding very bad but because the virtual side is wanting that musical content emotionally the badness is all but gone. Other times it's like a forced listening and the parts that you want to hear differently or you want to focus on is about all you can see. Learning how to go from one to the other and or mixing them can make or break a session. But this is something extremely real and some have stronger abilities in this area and others can learn but it takes them longer and yet others almost have to have it happen without their knowing. In Bill's case I have seen him in both modes and rarely will he shift gears until you point something out. When Bill is in the mood to fall into his virtual sencory he almost goes there reguardless of what the system sounds like, and when in the more evaluating mode sticks to things that he is wanting to focus on (usually things that are bugging him). However, and the reason I bring this up, I am seeing a shift in his process. He is starting to blend the two, going outside of his normal range of experiencing data and learning new parts to his awareness as a listener. Things have gone from black and white to shades.

I love watching not only these systems grow but also Bill as a listener. His thinking process has opened up dramatically from the first few visits. How far he will go is up to him, my job is the make the toys able, but watching the process of change in him and all of us who constently grow in the technical and art form of this is fasinating.

Bill's visit was all about wood prep and boy could you hear the difference as the wood was being reinstalled. Major good move for Bill to have the screw adjustment. The threads on the 7's glide into the 8 holes. Something to keep in mind for future builds. Maybe even doing this on purpose.

Not much new on the upstairs system except break in and that means a  ton. I'm now  able to hear inside of  a spaces  space and this setup wasn't doing this before. Again the platforms are the big news here. They are breaking in nicely. 

I would love to hear this big space without  carpet is  what  runs though my mind everytime I sit down. Not often do you get this big beautiful concert spaced horn in front of you  to  listen to.

I didn't tweak though this trip  cause it  was all about getting those panel ready.

A trip later "the end of July" the turn around starts to take place. This is the best listening at Bill's by far. Much better than the summit visit some time ago with Herns, Bob, Andy, Bill and me. So much so that you wouldn't know it was the same system.

First and for most, I can finally hear the system. With the wood panels restored you can hear everything going on and this makes it easy to point and pick things. I haven't even tuned the panels and can hear decades more sound. About time  Forever now I was trying to figure out what was keeping this tunable room from doing what every other one had done. My thought is this. The Nevada cured wood is of a superior nature and when the scews were not letting the proper transfer take place God awful things were happening to the waves as they were trying to develop but couldn't. The pressure in the room is so mathematically equal now that I can feel when I am on the edge or what part of the particular pressure zone I am in. This is like turning on a huge flashlight and I with Bill's help have been able to race through setup things that in the past would have taken forever (that word again) to figure out.

The speaker placement is a breeze, but isn't that one of the nicest things about my speakers. They are always so ready to play music. With the room now part of the speaker and in such balance this also makes the use of the PZC's fairly to the point and I can take things one step at a time.

That said, the really exciting part to this trip is the circuit box tuning. Yes "we hear you" and know you have been sitting patiently "forever"   waiting to be tuned and now you are getting your chance to show how much of a part of this system you are.

GUYS, Big NOTE Here   don't fall asleep   at the fuse box  . This is such a huge component and it kills me that people are killing their sound by not understanding how easy it is to collapse things at the power end of this hobby.   Hello, see me over here. YOU ARE SCREWING UP YOUR SOUND, if you think you need a line conditioner. Back up and put your audiophile handbooks in the garbage and do your electric the tunee way. You will find more music than you ever thought was possible. If you would have heard Donovan 2 years ago you would say no way, but today in the tunable room Donovan's greatest can easily be used as a reference cd. I know now I will be buying the originals to see how they are better but a CD that has been anything but a good memory has come to life in Chicagoland. I feel like I'm in the studio and when the haze of harmonic distortion clears from the air you can see distinctive instruments and space. Yes, Bill's electric is so good now that you can hear the harmonic distortion lift during break in. This my friends is something I have heard very few systems do and for me is a real treat. I have heard before and afters but you can sit there and actually hear it happen in real time. Fasinating   and insightful when tuning cause I can hear when something is in or out of tune. This leads us to some observations and perhaps another way to know if you are on the right track with your electric. Can I describe this without you being there? Not sure, but you can clearly hear when something goes from a cloud to a vision. In this system you can also hear when something on the circuit box is just the slightest bent or twisted cause this phazy sound jumps right into the stage and you can see it twisting, again, fasinating.

I hope I can hang on to the memories to talk about them more cause this is very cool and important stuff and honestly talking about these while in a tunable room make much more sense to me cause of the real time action.

Think about it, a system built from the ground up to tune in music. Not something that is there to work around and live with but actually built to tune. Yes there are obsticles with this space (for example the concrete floor underneigh the room) but the difference between this and another room (system) is more than huge and I would say more than high end audio. Maybe I should say this is true high end audio.

We have a long way to go but boy does it feel good to get where we have come to on this trip. Don't forget to turn on the dehumidifier before going to sleep.