Bill333's System

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply on this difficult subject.

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I found that once I got the simple system at your place, be it the Pioneer Maggie or Sherwood Maggie, I could do about anything I wanted. I don't think your problems are equipment based, I think there experience based, along with some construction issues.

That could certainly be true.  When there's a problem I always tend to look at the equipment side first, I think partly because I have no sense of what's possible with the room, (and only a rudimentary sense of what's possible with other tuning tools) and partly because changing the equipment and the wires is what I'm used to doing.

Quote :

You got a tool in there that was too complicated for you, and honestly with the frame design (making the room portable) it gave so many points of tuning that you never got a chance to figure out what each piece and part could do.

That's undoubtedly true, I have never had a handle on tuning the room.  Most of what I have accomplished with the room has been fiddling around with the screws until I luck my way out of a bad sound and then having enough sense to leave it alone while things are good.  Hearing a recording, figuring out where I want to go and then using the room to get there has been out of my wheelhouse.

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When I came to your place the last couple of times I would sit there and go where I wanted to easily. Not where I would have taken it if I had time but to the place where I knew I could get there. Then I would think "how do we get Bill to that place". First thing was to understand that you have a sound in your head that you want that may or may not be the recordings purpose, still doable, but it was like you wanted the music to bend a certain way to get you to reach that place of comfort. I would know when you were there because of the times you would stop after a song and sit there a while reflecting upon the feeling. You would come out of the room with a huge smile and say "can it even get any better than this". I also got the calls of help from you, and could see that you needed the room to be far more simple than it was with fewer parts. You needed something that would play itself a little more, and you work a little less. There were also some shifting problems that pushed the room toward one wall and corner, and one more problem, the sound of the floor.

I do have fond memories of pausing the music after a song so that I could sit there and absorb the power of what I just experienced.  Moving on too quickly after a really good song felt like I was pushing two powerful experiences too close together.  Sort of like watching the Godfather and then immediately after watching a Mel Brooks movie.

There are probably people out there asking, 'If the music was so good and so powerful, why weren't you there every night?'  The answer is that I couldn't keep the system there.  I would move on to a different piece of music and I wouldn't be able to get there.  A lot of times I would get frustrated, do other things for a week or two and then come back to it.  Looking back, I think the music I was having these experiences with was the recordings that are particularly easy to reproduce.  'The Road I'm On' by Dion is a good example.



The arrangements are simple, the music is very beautiful, and for some reason the treble didn't activate the difficulties the room had with high frequencies.  So I had some very nice listening sessions with this album.  I love Dion's music, but there is a lot of other music I love which is quite a bit harder to reproduce.

Simpler with fewer parts would definitely be a good thing for me.  Working less would be good also.  There were many evenings I would come home after a long day at work and feel like trying to tune the system into a decent place was more than I felt like doing.  My desire to hear great music and my interest in this hobby would prevail eventually, but I took many nights off to do something less demanding.  I don't have a problem with doing the work it takes to learn tuning the room and tuning to a recording, but the easier we can make that process, the better.

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Thinking about it more I believe the lean of the room was doing the most harm but putting the room up on a joist design and going from the cured 2x4 to 2x6 LTR hung on pine framing, sitting on PDF super low tone beams with levelers resting on brazilian pine footers, well bye bye concrete floor , this makes me pretty darn excited. Going from portable, not really squared the way it should have been when installed, sitting directly on shims and concrete, to what is heading Bill's way is hitting the lottery.

We are definitely heading into a new chapter with Tunable Room 2.0.  One of the things that will be different this time around is that I will be doing the joinery for the entire room myself.  Michael is finishing the wood, but not one piece of it has been drilled, screwed or cut to size before it gets here.  I will be doing all of that myself and assembling the room as well.  (with some help from Andy, the master carpenter)  Hopefully, this will allow me to become familiar with every single screw and bolt in the whole structure.  That should give me a head start towards learning the screws from a tuning standpoint.

One other thing - we haven't talked about this much, but I am dead serious about putting a full set of tuning bolts into the room.  We would need 20 pieces of redwood 2x4 at 14 1/2" long and an additional shorter piece for the door.  I think the tuning bolts will be a lot easier than working on screws, and it will give me a way to quickly 'activate' the room before a listening session.  What do you think?

I think that's a great idea especially with the full size panels.

Dion is way cool, I sang backup for him at a couple of concerts during the "only Jesus" tour.

Hi Bill333

Just like you, Sonic is on the tunable learning curve too. However our listening conditions and problems faced are rather at opposite ends.

From what I see, your system has a subtractive issue -- not enough of the warmth you want, instead you get a sterility that drives you away.

Sonic instead had an additive problem, and just one problem (happily).  It was the BOO! which I have recounted my adventures in dealing with in detail in my threads.  The BOO! has been fixed so from that angle, I have nothing to complain about with my room/system.  

Other than the BOO! which is a very specific problem that Michael has recently offered a good explanation of the root cause, all my "subtractive issues" have been significantly improved through application of the Tune. You should have heard this room when it was set up and treated in conventional hi-end audio thinking -- the difference is very large.

Yes, it is still a hard surfaced room, I could do with more warmth, soundstage width, a few more Hz of bass extension and more sheen in the treble but now with so many records to play, I have reached a stage where I can look at my glass as 3/4 full or 1/4 empty. It is 3/4 full, yes!

After the exorcism of the BOO! plus finding lots of wonderful records at nice prices, Sonic is just spinning LPs, SPs and CDs and enjoying the musick.

In truth, I would never have reached this quality of sound in my room with its hard surfaces etc (with "cement sound") without Michael's Tune products and advice.

As for the "warmth" you are experiencing a shortage of, how do you set a benchmark for the amount you want -- do you for instance use live concerts as your guide?

As you know some things in our hobby are measurable (eg: the system will give you a solid 35hz at the same level as 1kHz or it will not) but other things like "warmth", "sheen", even soundstage width are subjective in character and determined by expectation and taste.

For Sonic, I have not had the opportunity to listen to a properly and fully Tuned system, and certainly not a Wood Room Within and Room by Michael like you have. I presume you have heard Mr Green's systems in Vegas. I recall Michael has tuned your Wood Room so that Robert Plant was singing from the roof surface over your head!  What I would give for a similar experience.  So you have heard the full capability of the Tune, given that you have gone so far with the Magnazox, Sherwood and M Green speakers, with a Wood Room, I would think sterility will be the least of your problems.

Sonic

Hi Michael,

I feel like I should add a counterpoint to the above post.  There is no doubt a lot of sonic ground to be gained in learning to tune the room properly, but I am still not convinced that equipment isn't a part of my lack of musical involvement.  The thing about it is that the room has really sounded pretty good for a while now.  The leaning structural problem you referred to was fixed nearly two years ago (March 2013).  Since then we've done a series of moves with the room which have greatly opened up and relaxed the sound.  The last one occurred last September, and in the couple of months I had with the room before disassembling it, I often remarked to myself 'this really sounds good'.  But yet... still watching TV more than listening.  And I can hardly get my wife to come down to listen to anything at all.  I can tell you that the day my wife comes home from work and asks to listen to the stereo instead of watch TV is the day I will have truly succeeded beyond any doubt.

It is possible that nothing more than fine tuning needs to be done, but I think the right mix of equipment may be a key factor.  Once I have the room back up I'll be working hard to learn to tune the room, but I am also going to make some time to do some listening tests with different equipment.

In any case, I'm always curious about new equipment and new technology, and I love building things.  I also think there are some real advantages to going with a computer based front end if one can be made to sound good enough.  Having instant access to any song in your library is a nice thing, and the streaming music services are even better.  Digitally compressed streaming music may never sound as good as full bit-rate files or CDs, but these services cannot be beat for music discovery.  I often read your thread and look with interest at the albums you're posting, but I have to confess I don't rush out and order them.  But with the streaming music service I can immediately go and listen to what you've been listening to and see if I like it.  I have a subscription to Music Unlimited through my Playstation and every album I've looked for has been in it.  That's a very useful thing.  So I'll be working on putting together a computer front end again.  Can it be made to sound as good as the Magnavox?  I don't know, but I'm going to try.

I'm on for the ride

I enjoy the journey of others, and sometimes it's best to let them explore without it being a "michael" thing.

I'm here to do the R & D and to turn that R & D into products, methods and results. From that point I like to explore how far something can go, but after that, after I know something can get there and back, it's all about the listeners own curve. My part is to know it can. The listeners part is to have fun inside of this new land and unlimited opportunities.

However one comment about the room. As good of job as Andy did to put her straight, having the room done in joist & full length tuned studs is going to kill the old version. The newer version will have tons less stress at play.

All this said, personally I wouldn't throw any new electronics at it until I tuned in my reference first which in your setup would have been the Sherwood Maggie combo.

Hi Sonic,

I should probably say that warmth is just a theory.  The real problem is that I am not connecting to the system musically, at least not on a consistent basis.  I am tending to blame the Magnavox and I'm pointing out things that I feel are shortcomings in its sound, but I really don't know if the Magnavox is the problem or not.  Only experience and extended listening tests are going to tell me if I'm right or not.

I'm sure you're right about expectation and taste, the trouble is I don't really know where my preferences lie.  I need to do some experimenting to zero in on a sound I'm comfortable with.  Perhaps the tonality of the new room will place me closer to where I'm trying to go.

Regarding having heard Michael's systems - the actual truth is, I haven't.  The only time I ever heard one of Michael's systems was right after the test build of the first tunable room in Vegas.  But the room and the system were so raw, they couldn't be said to represent Michael's sound and I haven't been back to Vegas since.  As far as Robert Plant singing over my head - well, that was really the result of some weird anomaly going on in the circuitry of the Pioneer amp we were using at the time.  It only lasted a couple minutes and was emphatically not the result of intentional tuning.  In actual fact, I really don't know Michael's sound any better than you do.  I'm still kicking myself for not jumping on a plane and going out to Vegas the next day when he achieved float in that little apartment a couple years ago.

As for sterility being the least of my problems, hmm...  That's a subject that deserves a serious discussion, but I'm running out of time right now so I'll pick that up in a future post.

Actually

"was really the result of some weird anomaly going on in the circuitry of the Pioneer amp we were using at the time"

I did make the adjustment with the tuning rod, and the over the head sound is something that can be done pretty easy.

I'm seeing your wheels turning, but think that the first thing you need to do is learn the tune, and stay focused on gaining control of the system. As I've told you many times if I knew what your sound was it wouldn't be so hard to get it, but if you don't know the sound and other tunees don't either it makes it a bunch of shots in the dark.

Your particular sound has nothing to do with correctness and therefore when others are trying to go after it things become tricky. Also I noticed while tuning for you that the types of tuning changed per recording and your own personal moods. There's something within your own sense of music that is pretty unique to Bill. It doesn't have much to do with the way the music is recorded and even anything that can be put into words from someone else looking in at your sound. It is a place that is uniquely owned by you and only you. In the end you will need to be the one that finds it, and I'll do my best to give you the knowledge of the tools, but I want you to understand that this is not the audiophile adventure you are on but something that I can only describe as your personal journey.

I say this because when bringing others to play on their own with your system they got to their place quickly. As far as me, I tried to set things up differently each time to see if I would hit on your sound. When it was just me playing, as I have said I went all over the place with the sound, but when you would listen it was more like a doctor trying to find the symptoms and cures of something rare. I don't want to paint a bad picture, but more a picture of "Bill's Sound" which as it has turned out so far something that I'm not sure if anyone can put their finger on, or at least not be able to for a very long period of time. There were times when you would say there it is, and I sat down and couldn't find it. It would be something that didn't make sense to me musically.

But, the system is not about me but about me making something that can do anything. Personally I don't think I can find it for you, but I do think when I get a Tunable Room set up here you should fly in a couple times a year, or even more, and explore things on my turf where I'm not trying to fit stuff into a short time frame at your place. At your place most of the time has been about trying to figure you out as a listener and engineer, at my place it's much more about the actual exploring of a piece of music and the many ways of getting there. Different worlds.

Keep in mind at your place we barely started to actually listen, even after all this time because of many side tracks and explorations that you wanted to go on that were really outside of the tuning realm (well maybe). As fun as those might have been they weren't tuning times.

Can't remember the names of the nas or the cool storage toy.



What was the name of that thing?

Anyway, none of these things are bad, but I think it's important as people read that most of the time spent on the project were not really about you learning the tools but going on audio adventures and having me go on them with you. I'm not knocking it at all just saying that you the last I visited were just starting your room learning curve. If you read your early posts they tall about me walking through things with you on the phone, and to me this is barely getting started on the good stuff. Before this it was about trying to find your sound.

I'm enjoying these posts but I think we need to keep them in balance for what really took place so as not to paint the picture that you have been exploring the room for 4 years without finding your sound. I think we need to be clear about the fact that the room part for you was barely getting started and the time spent before then listening was more about a lot of different issues, not bad issues but more focused on fixing construction things and exploring other audio goodies.

I feel there is a chapter that has yet been discovered by you, and that is gaining control over all the parts of the system, so that the system is not playing you, but you are playing it. There is nothing like having the worlds most tunable system, but having it and playing it is I feel the part that needs yet to be done, and having enjoyment along the way is a plus. I'm with you on this but we also need to separate the you who is exploring with his brain and the you who is actually tuning.

The best part for me besides the adventure is the friendship that has developed. Artist meets Engineer is something that isn't always able to be put on the same page but watching you grow as a listener has been and continues to be something that gives me great joy, and you as a friend is priceless! I'm honored to be in your world of not only the music but your family.

I'm looking forward to the next steps

Busy day

But here's something I really do want to look into. My gutt has been telling me for a while now that music is going to go to this



I don't know how soon but the thought of a mini system where you only have this stick in a small amp with free resonant speakers is very appealing to me.

Hi Michael,

Regarding the room, I am also looking forward to a beautifully unstressed room.  I actually have all kinds of ideas for making this the most unstressed tunable room ever.  I've learned some things (I think) about how to join wood from constructing the 2x4 and plywood equipment subplatform.  So I'm going to try to incorporate what I learned into the building of the room.

I agree that I need to start with a reference setup before I start experimenting, but at this point I really consider the Topping and the Magnavox to be my reference.  But we can use the Sherwood if that's your preference.  I know you have a Topping there, what ever happened to it?  Did you not like it as much as the Sherwood?

More later.

The NAS is the QNAP TS-219P and I'm pretty sure the cool storage toy was the Squeezebox Touch.  

It's true that there have been some sidetracks.  We have experimented with different equipment at various points along the journey, including a major computer based system that I shipped to Michael years ago for evaluation and tuning.  (Oops, sorry I had forgotten about that one! )  But on the other hand, it's been at least three years since anything has distracted from the development of the tunable room system.  Playing with other equipment since then has been in side systems or back in Vegas.

Reminiscing over past experiences with Michael and other tunees, it's clear that I don't hear things the same way that most other people do.  Back when Michael, Herns, Bob and Andy were here we listened repeatedly to Love Potion #9 where there was a subtle rumble of a train going by on its tracks about a minute and a half into the recording.  Most people were able to hear it, I wasn't.  Later when Michael and I were listening to the Beauhorns, Michael identified a phasey sound which completely ruined the speaker for him and made it unlistenable.  I never heard it and couldn't really understand what he was talking about.  I did hear the speed, the detail, and the single driver coherence, but not the phasiness.  And I often find certain live instruments irritating when other people feel they sound just fine.  Steinway pianos are a glaring example.  The long and short of it is that the tuning that works for other people often doesn't work for me.  I just need to find a sound that does.

So getting to my version of the tune is going to require some skill and some experimenting.  That's ok, I'm all in for the ride.

Hi Michael,

The future of digital audio is becoming pretty clear at this point, and spinning disks are not going to be part of it.  Streaming video has already put Blockbuster and Hollywood Video out of business, and streaming audio continues to grow every year while CD sales shrink.  I expect CDs will continue to be available, but more as a niche market the way that vinyl LPs are now.  I think the mass market for audio will eventually center on streaming music services with most people's music libraries entirely on smartphones, if they have one at all.

It looks like what you want is a DVD player or a receiver that has an input for music stored on a USB flash drive.  The good news is that those DVD players and receivers are already here, just google 'dvd player usb' and 'stereo receiver usb'.  Most of those ports are intended for ipods and smartphones with mp3 files, but I think many will also work with wav files stored on a flash drive.  The bad news is that the usb protocol was never designed with audio in mind and the reports I've seen on computer audio forums is that audio files pulled across the USB interface don't sound as good as the same file taken from SATA or across an ethernet network.  Hopefully, that will turn out to be wrong, but it should be easy enough to test a DVD player's USB input against a CD played in the drawer of the same unit.

Also in the good news category is that there have been recent breakthroughs in flash memory technology which should make 1 TB flash drives of the same size as the one you pictured a reality in the next few years.  So you'll be able to store a thousand album uncompressed library on that stick, or two thousand albums in lossless compression like flac.  The downside is that browsing through a library that large on the DVD players or receivers we're talking about above is going to be an unpleasant chore.  You really need software control through an iPad or other tablet app and that kind of feature set hasn't penetrated into the bottom of the market yet.

Streaming music services are the future, but how to get good sound from them will be the trick.  Fortunately, there are now services which offer uncompressed 16/44.1 files through streaming, so there is at least some movement in the right direction.  I expect there will eventually be an audiophile demand for network 'renderers' which can successfully buffer streaming files for best audio quality.  

Based on what I've been hearing, I think you might be better off with a network renderer like the SotM SMS-100 or the Squeezebox touch feeding a good dac than you will with the USB port on a receiver or DVD player, but there could be some diamonds in the rough out there.  For certain, getting good audio quality out of a computer has been far more tricky and difficult than anyone expected.

Has anyone been experimenting with computer audio lately?

Here are some devices to look at:
http://www.adorama.com/LODP132.html

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Naxa-ND856-High-Resolution-2Ch-Prog.-Scan-DVD-Player-USB-Input/28501791

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Supersonic-SC-31-1080p-DVD-Player-with-Karaoke-Microphone/23204419

http://www.walmart.com/ip/LG-BP335W-3D-Blu-ray-Disc-player-with-Built-in-Wi-Fi/29502521

and

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Technical-Pro-IA25U-600-Watt-2-Channel-Integrated-Receiver-Amplifier-w-USB-SD-/351167387316?pt=US_Home_Audio_Amplifiers_Preamps&hash=item51c33516b4

http://www.amazon.com/Pyle-PT270AIU-300-Watt-Receiver-Subwoofer/dp/B0071I3MUY/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1420163389&sr=1-2&keywords=stereo+receiver+usb

http://www.amazon.com/Onkyo-TX-8050-Network-Stereo-Receiver/dp/B004UR486G/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1420163389&sr=1-1&keywords=stereo+receiver+usb

http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Pro-Professional-Receiver-Inputs/dp/B00AQCW8NO/ref=sr_1_14?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1420163389&sr=1-14&keywords=stereo+receiver+usb

also

http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Audiophile-Network-Player-AirPlay/dp/B00AW0SV8G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420166991&sr=8-1&keywords=pioneer+n-30

Hello Bill333

Sonic thinks Mr Green’s recent points apply to me as much as for you. We are each in this hobby for something, otherwise we might be doing fine with portable Boombeats and BoomBoxes carried about on our shoulders or pressuring our skulls with over the top bass from some popular headphones.

What that “something” is will be where the complexity starts. It is complex because it is subjective and personal. What you and I are looking for will be different, given we are different beings.

I look at it this way: we can recognise the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever whether we hear it on lo-fi car stereo, a Boombeat or a high quality audio system. Depending on the circumstances all three might be enjoyable to some degree. For Sonic I have a kind of a mental threshold of what I expect a really good system to do. To some extent this is shaped by my exposure to live classical music, but I have over time set threshold expectations for the system in terms of frequency response and extension, tonality, imaging and recreation of a soundfield. Getting to know Michael’s products and thinking has affected by threshold expectation of imaging and soundfield a lot.

Do I think the live musical event can be recreated or my being transported to the studio where the music was recorded? No, but there is enough information in the CDs and grooves to take us very far towards getting the feel and a sense of the live event.

As Sonic writes this I am listening to Neil Young’s After the Goldrush. The original LP release, absolutely quiet vinyl. I am thinking “this sounds beautiful” but if you were here your opinion of the sound might be different and I will have to respect your view.

Of course for someone like Michael, his role is different – as an inventor and as someone who has influenced musicians and the industry, he has to push us to think outside what we think possible. For sure there is a marketplace of ideas but we need to see which gels with our experience and sense of audio-reality and go with it as far as possible. I have seen people with rooms where there are Michael’s pillow products, diffusers, brass resonator cups, magic crystals and other strange stuff thrown around. That to me appears like a rather disordered approach, or perhaps the work of one who keeps buying the latest thing in the magazines and on the web.

That said, on this journey to the Tune or The Great Refuge of Musick (take your pick) I have learnt that audiophiles’ idea of good sound and realism vary enormously even putting aside personal rivalries between individual audiophiles or engaging in “High Cost Brand Worship”. Not to mention what these individuals might be trying to get out of the hobby which might not be solely musical.

So Sonic has learnt to do three things simultaneously:

1. be humble and learn from others, be ready to know when I have gone wrong, where I can do things better and be ready to change

2. have a musical/tonal/soundstage goal in mind, trust my ears and accumulated musical experience (live and reproduced) and not allow myself to be swayed by the latest fad or the opinions of the “Guru of the Week”.

3. give space to others. They may be looking for something very different from me and enjoy their personal journeys. An example is a friend who is into DIY. He has an elaborate system that is continually in a state of change. I hear him talk about this or that brand of capacitor, the inductors, tube mounting sockets, wire type and so on and is swapping things all the time. I am sure he does listen to music but he is on a journey he is enjoying.

Will you or I reach a time or state when we say “this is it! My system is done” ? I don’t have the answer for myself, let alone for anyone else. But that I am spending longer and longer periods listening to musick between tunes might indicate a prelude to a halt or just waiting for something from Michael to take me up to the next level of the mountain. Michael said, ‘there is always the next level!”

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

Thanks for your thoughts on staying true to the tune.  You are, as always, helpful and inspiring in the search for great sound.

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Will you or I reach a time or state when we say “this is it! My system is done” ?

I hope not.  One of the things I've learned about myself as the years go by is that I enjoy the journey of getting there, not the position of being done.  I love listening to music, but the engineer in me also loves finding ways to make it better.  I wouldn't want to give that up.

Ok, since I couldn't have a system for the foreseeable future, I decided I would get a headphone system.  I shopped around and got a good deal on an Elekit TU-882R headphone amp and a pair of Beyer Dynamic DT990 headphones, which are said to be a good match for this amp.  Naturally, I got the kit version and built it myself.  

Unlike with the TU-879S, this time around I decided to build the kit with its chassis:



After letting it break in for 100 hours, I wasn't very happy with the sound.  Congested, tipped up tonality, and lacking both detail and dynamics.  Actually, the entire time I was assembling it into the chassis, I couldn't stop thinking things like, 'Look at where these wires are draped, what a disaster!' and 'They're not really going to just twist these wires together and run them right alongside this piece of metal, are they?'  and 'We don't really need all these pieces of metal, do we?'  So naturally the first step was to start by removing the transformer cover:



That was a clear, all-round improvement, allowing me to hear things in the recordings that had been smeared and indistinct before.  Knowing that I was going in the right direction, I got the soldering iron out and got to work:



Another great improvement.  The sound is actually pretty listenable at this point, if not quite as detailed as what I'm used to.  It might come as a surprise to some people that a speaker based system would reveal more detail than a good pair of headphones, but that what a tunable room does for you.

Hi Bill

I love seeing this Headphone Exploring

I think there is much to learn about our in-room systems by using headphones as an info finder. Of course as you said compared to having your own full size headphone (the tunable room) there will be things that are left on the table. One of them being the full body experience of listening, which I can not live without. Feeling the music for me has opened me up to all the ways music can enter the body, and has done so since being a kid.

I'm a fan of Evelyn Glennie and think, if we can hear that much through the ears how much more when we bring the whole body into it.

headphones can be a great learning tool

Fascinating your headphone set up Bill333. Congratulations!

You are in a good place with this given that personal holographic soundfields delivered by headphones is the way of the future (with loudspeakers being the minority choice).

Have you evaluated the Sennheisers like the HD700 or 800s before selecting Beyer? Sonic uses the Sennheiser.

Sonic has also wondered how much Tuning a la Michael Green will a headphones-only system require -- lets say if I had a TT, MC transformer, phono stage, CD player, Preamp/headphone amp and the headphones.

Some of the Tune trilogy will remain valid, perhaps racks, cracking screws, cutting cable ties, transformers out, use of wood supports and springs or AAB1x1 cones, Picasso and such. But if everything affects everything else will any treatment be required for the room surfaces I wonder?

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

I know what you mean about trying to reduce your tuning.  That's why I originally built the amplifier in its chassis, I thought 'It's just a headphone amp, it won't matter.'  Unfortunately, I thought wrong.  It was unlistenable built in its chassis, even after 100 hours of break in.  I think getting really good sound out of a headphone system isn't going to be much less work than getting really good sound out of speakers.  What will be different is that the walls probably won't need any treatment and the headphones really can't be treated.  Not having any easy way to tune the headphones is probably going to hold a headphone system back compared to where you can go with a tunable speaker system.

I wish I had had the chance to try out a lot of different headphones before I went down this road, but what I really did was to read a bunch of reviews and try to find a headphone and headphone amplifier that were well suited to each other at a price I could afford.  Now that I have the amplifier, maybe I'll try some different headphones to see if I can find something I like better.  There are some stores in my area that have headphones you can listen to on in-store displays, but I would need to take a pair home to really make an evaluation.  Selection is another matter.  There are plenty of Beats by Dr. Dre and Bose headphones, plus SkullCandy and other things aimed at youths who listen to music on their smartphones.  One store has the lower end of the Sennheiser line, but the HD700s and 800s are something I would have to mail order.

Which Sennheisers do you have, and how do you like them?

TUNABLE ROOM 2.0 HAS ARRIVED

The wood for the new floor left Las Vegas on Monday and arrived at my house today.  The pallet was sixteen feet long, so we had to unpack it in the truck and carry the wood out piece by piece:



I immediately stacked the wood with stickers to let it get acclimated to the humidity level in my basement while keeping it nice and straight.  Here are the 4x6 beams which will be the heart of the floor suspension:



Here are the 2x6 joists and the 2x8 timbers for the frame:



Everything is weighted down with boxes of heavy books.  If there's one thing I've got plenty of, it's books and boxes of books.

Hi Bill

Looks like a tuning lumberyard in there.

You may not find it necessary but while the wood went through any climate changes I flipped them a couple times a day. So maybe, if you want, half way through your settling you might want to give them a flip. Also, on the beams if you see any crystals form on the open ends let me know. I believe most of it is drained but with pieces that big it's good to check.

What's interesting is now that those pieces are out of the room downstairs, my ears miss the tonality big time. I even had to re-adjust my setup upstairs a little. I sat there for a couple of days and was wondering why the system changed that much then realized I had a huge tuned port that was open to my room on the bottom floor. Fascinating . I loved the effect and before I setup for the 2 x4's I was playing the bottom floor room to tune the upstairs systems. It was a blast I probably didn't sleep for 3 whole days having fun going back a forth tuning between the two floors.

man I love this stuff

Hi Bill333,

Sonic has a Sennheiser HD700. If it weren't for the headphone effects on how the soundstage is presented, how the music moves with me as I turn my head and the feel of the phones, I would be saying to rooms and speakers "goodbye baby, I'm long gone".

Did I ever say this on Tuneland that I heard a binaural recording of an orchestra performing live with an audience? It was pure 3D realism.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

I've thought about this before with your room. If I had a room I couldn't man handle it would be bye bye too. But I think I would have simplified your room a long time ago if it were me. Even getting at least one surface to respond, then decide if I wanted to go further.

One thing about me is, if I don't have the basics it drives me up the wall. I'm not at your place but by reading I say to myself a lot, where did that go? Of course being there would probably be a different story, but it ceratinly sounds like you have some strange phantom waves in there that need to be bouncing off a different surface.

Last night I was listening to the headphone system and I had a minor revelation.  I've been thinking for a while about how important the fit of connectors is to audio fidelity.  I have a few pair of Michael's interconnects, and while they all look alike there is a noticeable difference in fit from one pair to another.  I have one set which glides onto the RCA effortlessly,  and the others require more effort.  They're tight and they have to be pushed on with some force to get them in place.  Not surprisingly, the effortless interconnects sound better and not by a small margin.  Taking things a large step farther, Michael and I constructed a pair of interconnects out of nothing but wire - the contacts are made by twisting the wire ends into a coil and setting it around the RCA.  These are far and away my favorite interconnects.

But I've posted about all of this before.  The revelation came when I said to myself, "What does this mean for tube sockets?  Those things are so damned tight they've got to be killing the sound!"  There are a couple things I could do about this.  If I'm building an amplifier from scratch I could use Yamamoto tube sockets.  These have pin sleeves which are individually mechanically adjustable for contact pressure.  Another possibility is to use inexpensive tube sockets but ream them out with a large diameter pin so that they fit properly.  You want solid contact, but with minimal pressure.

The third thing you can do is just to pull the tube out of the socket so that it is just barely making contact with the ends of the pins.  And that's what I did last night to the headphone amplifier.  I was afraid this move might trash the sound and I would have to hang up my headphones for the evening, but noooooo....

It was a major improvement in all areas.  More dynamic, clearer, better articulation of cymbals, much longer decay on those cymbals, and I think it removed about 50% of the treble forwardness I've been hearing.  I had assumed the treble forwardness was all the headphones (they have a reputation for that), but it turns out at least some of it was in the amplifier.  Wow, a really good move.

Hello Bill333

Since you posted what you did with the tubes -- barely pushed into their connectors and finding "I was afraid this move might trash the sound and I would have to hang up my headphones for the evening, but noooooo....It was a major improvement in all areas" -- Sonic was pondering this..it makes sense on one level given what we have learnt of the tune.

Reaming out the sockets may not be a good idea -- given the number of pins we will never without precision manufacture and QA be able to ensure all were done to the same extent.

I did a test fit of my tubes like you did but short of a firm insertion into the sockets anything less made the grip unstable and the tube would pop out with the smallest touch or shake of the chassis. Very risky.

Sonic got a little worried for you -- if the tube popped out when the amp is powered up, consequences could be very unpleasant particularly if the gear downstream from the popped tube is powered up and functioning. How far do you push the tubes in the sockets, how do you ensure system and user safety?

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

The way I inserted the tubes was to press them in just far enough so that they hold.  If you don't press them in quite that far, they will definitely pop out.  I can still see most of the length of the pins above the socket, but it's in far enough so that it can't easily pop out.  I've been handling the board and flipping it upside down numerous times with the tubes plugged in this way and they have not popped out, so it seems to be solid enough.  This will all depend on what your sockets are like of course.  There does seem to be a significant sonic difference between all the way in, and only in 2 or 3 mm.

Reeming out the sockets probably makes more sense if you're building an amplifier.  I, too, would hesitate to do such a tweak to a favorite piece of equipment which was otherwise giving good sound.

Regarding safety consequences, you're talking to a man who can't turn his system on without putting on pair of electrician's gloves (rated to 5000V).  I threw electrical safety under the bus a long time ago.