Bill333's System

Here's the latest progress with the floor build:  I actually haven't cut or drilled the first piece of wood yet, but I'm still in the process of gathering tools and nailing down the design.  Michael and I spent considerable time over the last month arguing the merits of different approaches to the joinery.  I had been planning to rest the frame on top of the beams and float the floor joists inside the frame with metal joist hangers, but after discussing it we decided to incorporate the beams inside the frame and to join all the wood with glue and dowels.

Up to this point I've mostly been gathering the tools needed and planning out how things will fit together.  This is one of the frame members marked out with the position of the beams and joists.  In the background you can see my new drill press - I expect to be using that quite a bit.


The new miter saw:


Some of the marking and measuring tools I bought for the job, including a try square and an Odd Job:

Ok, this is probably off topic from my previous posts, but I'd really like to get some input from the other tunees.  Along with the room project, I've also been reading a lot and thinking a lot.  One of the most interesting things I've come across is this old Stereophile article entitled God is in the Nuances.  The title makes it sound like an  essay on the finer points of music reproduction, but it is actually a review of a groundbreaking sociological research study into high end audio listening.  If you haven't read this article before I urge you to have a look.

In summary, the research evaluated a large group of people's visceral and emotional reactions to three different stereo systems: an analog system composed of a turntable and tube amplification, a digital system composed of a CD player and solid state amplification, and a mixed system with the CD player and the tube amplification.  Each person filled out a series of questionnaires designed to evaluate their emotional balance and relaxation level before, and then after, listening to a selection of music on each system.  The tests were performed blind so that the listeners had no idea what they were listening to.  The results were consistent: the analog system made people more relaxed, less nervous and more involved in the music they were listening to.  The digital system less so.  On the analog system, more people said they liked the music that was played for them; on the digital system the same selections were liked by fewer people.  The unexpected thing is that the experienced listeners among the group thought the digital system sounded better.  But the surveys they filled out indicated that they were more relaxed and more involved with the music when they listened to the analog system. Here are the money quotes:

Quote :

At the end of the test, the participants were asked which of the systems they would buy. Those listeners who had some experience of things hi-fi preferred the digital system, which they thought sounded better. Those participants without such experience preferred the analog system's sound.

Quote :

The far-reaching conclusion: You cannot tell what your emotional response to a component's sound will be from a description by a critical listener, because that response is independent of the conscious perception of its sound.

Quote :

Still, by a mysterious paradox, fidelity to sound does not always coincide with fidelity to the emotion, which is the soul itself of music.

The idea that perceived good sound is not connected to musical enjoyment is a radical one which bears serious thought and discussion.  Setting that aside, my take on the article was that I may have overlooked something crucial to musical enjoyment in my audio journey.  Are turntables and tubes the key to enjoyable sound?

Well, I thought. It wouldn't be hard to find out.  I already own several tube amplifiers.  If I set up a turntable I should be able to hear what they're talking about.  Would this be more musically involving than the CD and computer based systems I've been listening to?  To make a long story short, I ended up buying a used Well Tempered Simplex turntable, an Ortofon 2M Red cartridge, and a Parks Audio Budgie phono stage.  I had the cartridge and arm set up by an expert with the Feickert Adjust+ software and a USB microscope.  I then hooked this all up to my tubed headphone amp and BeyerDynamic DT990s.  The results?  Underwhelming.

The sound was completely uninvolving emotionally, and in technical terms nowhere near the level of fidelity I had achieved with the Magnavox DVD player.  After trying to listen for half an hour I gave up on the whole project, disassembled the turntable and packed it back in its shipping box for resale.  It was that bad.  The other part of the decision rested on my realization that I could not play a record without being around to lift the needle at the end of the recording.  I know there are devices that will do this, but not being able to set it to repeat and let the system warm up for an hour seemed like a real handicap.  To say nothing of breaking components in for 100 hours or more.

The questions I want to ask other tunees who are experienced with vinyl are these:

• Am I giving up too soon?
  
• How do you feel about your long term listening enjoyment of vinyl as opposed to CD?
  
• If I were to continue with vinyl, what steps would you recommend taking for better sound?
  
• Is it worth getting started with vinyl if I don't have an existing music collection on it?
  

I feel like I should give some background at this point.  In the mid 80's when I first became interested in audio, I made a conscious decision to go with CDs instead of records.  It seemed like the future and at the time my entire music collection consisted of a half dozen cassette tapes.  Today, I have a large CD collection but only one vinyl LP (Abbey Road, of course ).   So having an existing vinyl collection is not a reason to go analog.  It would have to provide a better experience than digital.  At this point I haven't sold anything yet so I could still change my mind.  I'd really like to get some second opinions.

Greetings Bill333

Good to hear from you again after this near half-year!

In giving you Sonic's views on your questions, may I start with an observation -- while the Stereophile article indeed raises some fascinating ideas, the observation that "perceived good sound is not connected to musical enjoyment is a radical one" appears to be not so radical as it is borne out in experience fairly often.

There are some speakers that are well loved and give emotional enjoyment of music but may not be conduits of "good sound", if this good sound is meant to mean accurate. Examples are the Quad ESL57s and the Rogers LS3/5As. Both are band and dynamically limited devices but what wonderful musical experiences they deliver!
And the single ended triode amps and high-efficiency horn speakers are exciting with their effortless dynamics yet many are not the last word in midrange linearity. Or some SETs and matching speakers reproduce singing voices that but never mind the bass and treble.

So "perceived good sound is not connected to musical enjoyment" has a number of precedents we are both familiar with.

What puzzles Sonic is how your disappointment with the turntable and Ortofon 2M Red is a consequence of the observation and conclusion derived from the Stereophile article. This needs some elaboration.

But to answer your questions:

Q: Am I giving up too soon?

Sonic: I think so. There are many variables in the chain from the condition of the TT, (I assume the 2M red is new), the matching with the Budgie all the way to how the Headphones really sound. Why was it underwhelming in technical and emotional terms? Did you compare it with the Magnavox on a substitution basis. More investigation is recommended.

Q: How do you feel about your long term listening enjoyment of vinyl as opposed to CD?

Sonic: Even with my modest analog front end, my musical satisfaction from listening enjoyment of vinyl far exceeds digital (CD and SACD). On Sonic's system digital is already very good but the vinyl is better. Vinyl just sounds closer to and captures the essence of the real thing. Then there is analog tape....

Q: If I were to continue with vinyl, what steps would you recommend taking for better sound?

Sonic: Hard to say not knowing what the problems are. What does the TT sound like when you hook your analog system into your tuned system in your Michael Green room? But don't give up so easily. We tunees know what it means to persevere.....

Q: Is it worth getting started with vinyl if I don't have an existing music collection on it?

Sonic: This is really up to you yet the way Sonic looks at it is "what medium is the music I seek available on?" I have hundreds of LPs, SPs and 78s that will never be reissued in any digital form due to lack of demand. These are works by obscure renaissance, baroque and classical composers, some jazz and ethnic. If the musick performance I really want in my collection is only available on cassette, 8-track or MP3 then that is the playback capability I will develop.

Sonic

Hi Sonic, I was hoping you'd respond to my post as I know you have a huge amount of experience with this.  If you think there's a possibility of getting great sound out of the turntable, that's enough for me to hang on to it for a while.  Unfortunately, the tunable room is far from finished so a real evaluation will have to wait several months.  

Q: What puzzles Sonic is how your disappointment with the turntable and Ortofon 2M Red is a consequence of the observation and conclusion derived from the Stereophile article. This needs some elaboration.

It isn't really.  I was bringing up two different ideas: 1) Chasing perceived sound quality may not be getting us where we want to go musically, and 2) Vinyl and tubes may hold a unique piece of the puzzle in terms of musical enjoyment.  Point number 2 leads into my story about vinyl.  Point number 1 is just being floated for general discussion.

I did compare the turntable setup to the Magnavox on the same headphone amp and headphones.  The Elekit TU-882R headphone amp had been broken for several months and I finally had gotten around to fixing it.  When I first turned it on, it sounded dreadful so I put the Magnavox on repeat play and left it there for four or five days.  (There's that digital convenience again!)  After five days I was shocked at how good it sounded.  I don't like the tonal balance of the DT990s, but it was doing a lot of things right and I felt like I was hearing music for the first time in a long time.  A day later I hooked the amp and headphones up to the turntable and it was just so flat.  Admittedly, I didn't let it warm up very long and the cartridge really only has about an hour or so on it.  But I just didn't see any realistic way I was going to be able to stand near that turntable for a hundred hours putting the needle back to the beginning of the record again, and again, and again.

Your mention of analog tape is intriguing, but I've seen the prices (!) and availability of those reel to reel tapes and I don't see being able to go down that road.  As far as what medium the music I want to listen to is available on, most of my favorite music is available on both CD and LP.  If anything the advantage leans towards CD; I have a large collection of pop music on CD compilations which would be difficult and/or very expensive to fully replace on vinyl.

I apologize if you've given this information elsewhere, but can you tell me your turntable/cartridge/arm and phono stage setup?  And how did you tune them in?

Thanks,

Bill

Greetings Bill333

For Sonic, if a musical work I am looking for is available on both CD and LP, I would tip to CD in most cases. Apart from about less than 10 recordings which I have on both LP and CD, Sonic's collection of LPs, SP/78s do not overlap with the CDs and SACDs.

My analog front end is:

Rega P5 with RB700 arm -- sits on three Low Tone Redwood blocks, felt mat double sided taped to glass platter. See my post of last Friday for a pix of my rig.

Cartridge Ortofon 2M Blue -- set to Baerwald alignment with a Dr Feickert protractor.

Phono Stage -- Tube Box S, set to 150 pF, special super tubes, device is tuned with Michael Green genuine products the Michael Green way in a mini clamprack. A close up pix of this is on my thread uploaded over the last couple of weeks.

Cable in from the TT to the Phono Stage are standard Klotz from Rega (unseparated), output cables to the preamp are Michael Green Picassos loosened up.

Question: is your Well Tempered TT one of those that has the arm with the golf ball in a bath of silicone? If it is, damped tonearms to Sonic's ears have a certain sound. Clean but dead-ish sounding. Damped arms may work great to tame ringy MC cartridges but the Ortofon 2M series are themselves very controlled, full, flat in frequency response and "elegant" sounding. Sonic can imagine what my Ortofon 2M Blue would sound like damped and I would not find the idea pleasant.

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

Yes, the Simplex is one of those with the golf ball in the pool of silicone.  And now that you bring it up, I would say that clean but dead-ish sounding is about what I was hearing.  

I probably shouldn't be, but I am a little surprised at how reasonably priced and non-exotic your analog rig is.  Would you recommend that setup for someone like me or are there other things that might be even better?  How do you feel about the Denon DL-103?  Your guidance about what sounds good with the tune would be extremely helpful.  I know that most turntables are much heavier than ideal.  What has been your experience with tuning different turntables?

Sorry to throw so many questions at you at one time, but I really find this whole subject very interesting.

Thanks

Greetings Bill333

Sonic is very happy with this combination of the Rega P5, RB700, Ortofon 2M Blue and Tube Box S (with much better tubes than those that Pro-jekt supplies). Of course there are set ups better than this -- think Rega P10 and RB1000 all the way up to refurbished Garrard 301s with 12 inch Schick arms and Ortofon SPU cartridges.

I have heard this classic Garrard 401, SME 3012 with Koetsu playing a Muddy Waters LP. The speakers were big Tannoy Westminsters. That sound defined the possibility of analog for Sonic and its superiority over digital.

The Rega turntables are built light in construction with as much weight as required and no more. These tables can be improved with parts from Groovetracer which have been highly praised. But beware, I have heard stories of people who fitted aftermarket parts to their Regas and destroyed the sound of their tables (though none of these mods were from Groovetracer as far as Sonic knows).

The joy of Sonic's Rega-based system is its bomb -proof mechanical stability. Put the table down on a decent surface and it will play at perhaps >90% of its total potential day in, day out unlike those turntables with springs that I hear have to be periodically tuned and woe to the owner who moves them about.

Having seen the problems with so many spring turntables, Sonic is going with solid mount tables. No problems with direct drives either with me.

I have a Denon 103 somewhere....while it sounds musical, its tracking is not that good at the inner grooves possibly due to its conical stylus. The Denon 103s with elliptical and line contact styli were fine in this regard Sonic is told. But it is a cartridge that Sonic likes a lot.

Sonic

I have been watching as Sonic has returned to LPs for his musical enjoyment, and you can add one more, me. This past week, I placed a small sub 15 pound tube integrated into my system and added an older tubed phono preamp and the fun began. I started comparing two albums, Santana Abraxas and Blood, Sweat, & Tears vinyl and cd. Not only did the vinyl sound better - it relaxed me. There was more information available and the soundstage was bigger and surrounded me on my vinyl compared to the CD. There was also a harmonic rightness that I felt missing in the CD.

I am using two tables, one solid mount table with a Rega modded arm and Ortofon 2M black and one spring mount table with an Ortofon arm with a 2M black cartridge. Both tables provide excellent analogue sound that work well with the Tune

Hi Garp,

Funny you should mention the relaxation.  I've been hearing about that off and on for years, and my reaction had always been 'What the heck are these people talking about?'.  I've never had the experience of being more relaxed after listening to music than before.  At best I feel about the same as I did when I started, but more often I listen until my mood turns dark and I have to turn it off.  It's unfortunate, because I really love music.

So it really got my attention when I read about the participants in that study feeling more relaxed after listening to the analog system than when they started.  Maybe the reason I've never found music relaxing is because I've always been listening to digital and usually to solid state?  I don't know, but I think it's worth spending some time listening to a well sorted out analog/tube system to find out.  

Can you tell me more about the tube integrated and the turntables you're using?

Sonic,

Funny you should mention the Garrard 301.  I didn't want to bring it up earlier, but I actually have one.  (I can just see Michael rolling his eyes from 2000 miles away )  I bought it on an ebay auction and then felt like it was too much of a project to take on, so I concentrated on finishing out the Simplex.  I would need to get a tonearm and cartridge for it, and possibly a replacement plinth.  If you were setting up a 301 for your own use, how would you go about it?  

Or do you think I'd be better off sticking to your Rega solution?

Hi Bill & Gang

I'm enjoying reading this thread come to life. no I'm not

I'm always interested when a listener follows that voice inside. It's part of what makes this hobby so much fun. While I disagree that Bill has never been turned on after he has listened (I've been there), I know that there is a part of Bill that is turned on by the exploring side of the hobby. Being Bill's friend as I have got to know him and his family, and consider them part of my own, my advice would be "explore".

The thing about TT's is they allow us to learn and be involved in the out-come of the results. They are tuning animals, and more time has been spent on tuning vinyl, reel2reel, equalizers and tubes than any other part of the electronic hobby, outside of what we do as Tunees.

tape-vinyl-CD-files

Because of how I listen to the hobby (on repeat), CD's are by far the most useful, until I start to build my computer based system. But if you asked me to choose which source I like the best as a cold start medium (not on repeat mode), it's fairly obvious I would choose R2R. I do like vinyl, I would just rather spend my time making adjustments not limited to a 20 minute session. The choice for me is one of personality, discipline and practice. I could and have fallin in love with any source to be perfectly honest. Any source or recording I listen to, within the first few seconds I know if I want to listen to it or take it somewhere else. Maybe this is partly the recording engineer in me, but I would say this is mostly my confidence in the tools and method of the tune and love for harmonic structures. I tend to listen more harmonically than fundamentally, as well as where can I take the recording and what can I make it do, within the context of what is there. By far the best listening for me happens after a long repeat, as we have seen listeners like Hiend001 do. I don't mind coming back later and doing little tweaks as the music rolls and then finally doing my serious listening session on that piece of music. I'm most certainly not a DJ listener most of the time, or should I say, I like having choice.

Another important factor for my own listening is, I'm not all that crazy about multi-source systems. I personally again don't see any comparisons between two sources on the same system as being legit. Sources are all completely different animals, and when we try to make one champion we by default always lean toward the most successful one with that unique setting. As hobbyist, we tend to favor one source for a particular setting, or group of components, and in doing so we make the secondary source run through that setup. When I think about this it makes little sense for me to think that one set of tuning will match two different languages. There's a major difference between vinyl listening and tape for example, and if I were to use my preamp selector as judge, most certainly this would be as unfair to one source, and more than likely both. This is why early on the industry created Eq standards and built them into the recording and the playback. In other words all things being equal has never been the case. The whole idea of multi-source systems is flawed. Out of convience at the time you had one component (pre-amp or receiver) try to accommodate several source choices that all had their own take on the same recording. Tape, vinyl, FM and then CD. Think about it a second and picture the EQing. No way is the same recording on vinyl going to react the same way as on CD. These need 2 separate systems and setups to be truely legit.

As I have said "I like them all", but I don't view them as competitors but more separate listening hobbies.

TUNABLE ROOM 2.0

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I have reached the first milestone in my tunable room rebuild. The floor support beams are done.  

A reasonable person might ask, 'It's been almost a year and a quarter, why did it take so long?'.  In my own defense I have to say that this was a really tricky custom woodworking project and I took as much time as I needed to make sure it got done right.  The job of the floor support beams is to suspend the entire room above the cement floor where it's situated.  Two beams are connected together with metal plates which form a cradle that supports a third beam.  There are three supported beams which will be built into a frame which forms the floor of the room and each one is supported by its own cradle.  What made this tricky is that none of the beams are flat and straight.  If I had simply drilled holes and bolted the metal support plates to the beams, there would have been a constant torqueing force on the beams when the structure was loaded.  Having heard what even a single misaligned screw can do to a tunable room, I knew I had to find a way to eliminate the torque.  

The solution I came up with was to cut flat and parallel surfaces into the beams in every spot where they touch the supporting hardware.  This way the beams can retain their natural shape and the hardware will be supported in a configuration which allows the loading forces to travel straight down through the structure.  To accomplish this, I built or had machined for me specialized routing jigs, work surfaces and drill guides which would allow me to cut flat and square surfaces into very curvy pieces of wood.  



The above picture shows one of the three cradles with its supported structural beam in the center.  If you look closely you can see that the holes that the large bolts are poking out of are not centered in their beams.  This is true for the large 3/4" bolts at the ends and for the smaller half inch bolts in the center.  But look again - what's actually happening is that the bolts are perfectly vertical while the beams take their natural shape around the steel.  This is also the case with the position of the bolts down the length of the beam.  You can see that the bolts are in a line with each other even though the beams are bowed.

Here are some close up pictures of the hardware:

The metal and wood structure in the center of the picture goes on the floor, and the threaded plate fits into a notch on the underside of the beam.  The bolt goes through the beam and can be fine adjusted with a wrench even after the structure is built.  The dome and dimple design allows a stress free joint between the bolt and floor plate even if the floor isn't flat.  


The long bar is one of the metal support plates which will carry the weight of the room.  The two shorter bars are essentially washers which transfer the supported weight to the top of the wooden beam.  The bars, the bolt heads and the nuts were machined with chamfers and radiuses which insure a perfect 360 degree area of contact even if the hardware is not in perfect alignment.  Each piece is labeled with a letter and number because each one was custom cut and drilled to fit a particular surface on a beam.


In this last picture you can see all three of the cradles laid out in the positions they will occupy when the room is finished.


The next step is the floor, which will incorporate the 12 foot structural beams and 2x6 joists made of low tone redwood.  I'm still putting together the tooling for that one...

Great Pics Bill

Hi Bill333

You are making your own tooling

Now that is dedication not to mention extreme patience on your part to plough though this for a good 15 months!

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

What I'm calling tooling is really just worktables and a few specialized tools that I am having made at a local machine shop.  For the floor construction I need two 13 foot long worktables, a 14 foot long right angle square, and a routing jig for making 2x6 shaped mortises.  The other major specialized tool is a 14 foot long cutting surface for the miter saw, but I already built that.  I'll post a picture of it when I find it.

Probably the toughest thing about this entire project is finding truely flat work surfaces.  I used to think I was surrounded by flat surfaces - the floors in my house, the kitchen counters, the butcher block woodworking benches at my neighborhood's woodworking shop.  I bought an accurate 7 foot level and laid it across all these things and there wasn't a single one of them that was even close to flat.  I ended up constructing a worksurface for the beams out of melamine closet shelving.  If it was shimmed carefully, it would be close to flat over most of its area but it was just too flexible to be depended on.  

I've come to the conclusion that stone countertop is the only material that is milled flat and will stay that way when laid over a pair of sawhorses, so that's what I'm going to use for the new worktables.  It isn't cheap, but there's no other way to get wood to behave without a flat reference surface.  I'm looking forward to having delightfully flat walls.

Hello Bill333

Given the rate of progress, when do you estimate the wooden super-room will be assembled and the first note of musick played?

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

I think the end of this year (2016) is a realistic goal.

The big news going on here is that my wife has finally let me set up the system in the upstairs loft again.    I tried to reproduce as closely as I can the way Michael had it set up when he was here:



It's such a relief to have a real system again.  The headphones just weren't working out.  Finally, I can hear what my equipment is really doing again!

The other news is that I have delayed work on the tunable room for a month so that I can build a 300B amplifier.  I'm a big fan of the Elekit TU-879S kit that I built, and I always wondered what that circuit would sound like with a 300B tube.  As it happens, Elekit makes a 300B amplifier called the TU-8300R with a similar topology.  For a long time, there were no reviews on it so I hesitated about giving it a try until I came across this recent review.  The holy grail with these tube amplifier projects is to have the entire circuit on one PCB with the transformers sitting off to the sides so that there's no weight on the board.  The TU-8300R wasn't designed with that setup in mind, but it can be modified to do it without much difficulty.  So I was pretty excited.

When I checked out the availability of the 8300R, I was surprised to find that Elekit no longer makes them and that there were only a few left anywhere.  I know from past experience that when Elekit stops making something, they aren't kidding about it.  I grabbed one of the last two left in North American retail channels.  Here's my workbench with the 8300R in progress:



I'll post a review once I've got it up and running.  

I was on my way to comment on Sonic's page when I saw Bill's post . First off I have to say hi to "E" (Bill's wife), love you.

Once in a while I run into a room that I absolutely love right from the get go (once a good system is put in). Bill333's upstairs room is one of those. For any late comers, the upstairs loft area overlooks the large living area below, a soundstagers dream come true. I didn't know about this space until I started on Bill's portable room two floors down. If I would have and if I would have heard it, I would have asked the big question "why put a room in the basement with this space waiting to be perfected". Now, to be honest some of the systems up there didn't sound so good, but my ears were focused on the spaces potential itself and was super excited when they let me do even a little tuning up there.

"Take out the bookcases, go with a berber carpet (no padding) or hardwood flooring, PZC's and experience heaven", was my thinking every time I played around up there. This is no down on the Tunable Room, but this space screams "play me and relax". It's the kind of room (properly cared for system wise) that I could kick my feet up, put on the FM, or equal now days, and fade away. I can picture exactly the setup I would do up there knowing I had the worlds reference setup downstairs to get totally crazy with. It's not often you find a space that allows you to do what that space does and so it's with great joy to these ears to see music there once again.

As you can see from the system picture I posted, I have continued to work on my vinyl setup.  The turntable in the pic is the Trans Fi Salvation, normally a rim drive but which I temporarily built as a belt drive.  I think the Salvation is a pretty good turntable, but I have not had much luck getting good sound.  I still find the theories about analog vs digital sound that I posted a while ago intriguing, but I can say definitively that bad analog will drive me out of the room just as fast as bad digital.  I think the real value of analog for me is not so much in some kind of innate musicality, but in the ability to use cartridges to editorialize the sound.  'More beautiful than reality' is exactly where I'd like to be, but I've never known how to get that from digital. On the other hand, I hear good things about Koetsu cartridges...

Getting back to present reality, I swapped the turntable out for the Magnavox yesterday and it was so far ahead of the analog setup it wasn't funny.  There was literally no parameter in which the CD player didn't eclipse the turntable, including musical involvement - an area in which I have always held the Magnavox in mixed regard.  I've hit one of those points again where I'm ready to throw in the towel.  So I'm debating with myself whether I want to continue developing the analog system or not.  If I do continue with it, I will probably pick up a Denon DL-103 cartridge and a step up transformer and see if that takes the sound in a direction that I like.  If I don't, I'd like to build a music server and try out some different DACs, or maybe do some work tracking down the treble harshness that has affected nearly every system I've built to one degree or another.

Weighing against the analog route is the difficulty of getting good software.  I bought my first vinyl album, Abbey Road, about a year ago and I have just now figured out that the quality of the pressing is absolute crap.  Compared to the CD, the entire album sounds pale, indistinct and undynamic.  On some tracks, the bass is so bloated and distorted it just sounds sick.  Worse than the wasted money is that I used it as an evaluation album at AXPONA last year.  I thought all the rooms where they were kind enough to put my record on sounded terrible, but the real problem was my record.    There is a web site that makes a business selling very good copies of popular LPs, but a nice copy of Abbey Road will set you back $400.  I'm actually willing to pay that for Abbey Road, but where does it stop?

So that's what's on my mind lately.  I need to decide whether to continue with analog or give it up and maximize my digital front ends.  I'm making progress on the analog learning curve, but I'm still a long way behind where I am with digital.  I'm just not sure if I will ever reach a point where analog becomes my preference.  If it doesn't, I'm going to end up wishing I had never spent the time and money on it.

Thoughts?

That darn Maggie

My love affair with that CDP makes me smile every time I play it.

This is just my personal take for what it is worth. I've always seen you as a computer audio person and believe you will achieve the control over your recordings by pursuing the digital route. I do have an idea though. I wonder how well you would do at using an equalizer? As simple as you have made your setup I bet a good simple EQ might be a whole lot of fun for you. Actually I might be interested in exploring this move with you.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see you master an EQ. I bet you would be good at shaping the sound.

That would also make three of us if I got one as well, you me and Sonic. What do you think Sonic?

Hi Michael,

There are definitely a lot of fascinating developments going on in computer audio and I wouldn't mind being a part of it.  Places like the forums on www.computeraudiophile.com are a hotbed of activity.  But the siren call for me is still greater involvement in the music.  Is analog the way forward to that?  My experience so far says no, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something there at the end of the tunnel.

Regarding EQ, what kind of equalizer are we talking about?  Analog domain, or digital?  On the digital side, I know HQPlayer is able to run some sophisticated correction on a digital signal before it's passed to the DAC.  On the analog side, it's hard to imagine an equalizing circuit that doesn't degrade the signal to some extent.  And I suspect that there could be some harm done on the digital side too.  In either case, I'm not sure what that kind of control over my recordings is going to bring to the table.  I have rarely ever felt frustrated by an inability to control frequency response, but I've been trying for years to create richer tone and denser stereo images without much success.  Will an equalizer help with that?  I'm asking, because I'm really not familiar with what they do.

What kind of EQ is Sonic using?

Hi Bill

Here is Sonic's EQ






I'll let him fill in the blanks.

The EQ's I used ranged from parametric to basic 1 3rd octave mostly. I used separates as well as dual models. Most of them were pro, but some of the audiophile vintage ones were pretty good sounding too.

Which ones to use? Boy that's a tough one, but if you look up third octave EQ's you are going to be surprised to find that the EQ hobby is as big as high end audio. In the recording sense it's bigger than High End Audio.

www.computeraudiophile.com is also a very good tip

I'm not sure I have the time to pour into the computer side, past being setup with something and start tuning it at this point (not enough hours in the day), but the EQ project is something I can see fitting in to one of my systems. I like the idea of letting the equalizer being my crossover of sorts instead of having crossovers in speakers. I would think having tunable acoustics, no crossover and equalizers could be something very cool. In your case it could actually save you the effort of spending so much time adjusting the room and other tunes so often.

Once you get use to an EQ, every time you play a recording that sounds slightly off it's pretty easy to make it at least listenable. They don't replace what you are doing, but listening together with you, I wouldn't be surprised at all that an EQ could be a very good thing for you. Definitely worth the journey.

On the vinyl or R2R side of things, these are two very large commitments. Building a collection of either one is a life time of exploring and finding your own personal settings. Not saying it wouldn't be cool, but it seems to me based on listening to the BYOB and file comparisons we did at your place, an EQ done right shouldn't be more of a music degradation than that. Done right it's more of a changing of what is there already. Yes parts are involved but I think it's worth a go, especially if others here are on the adventure together. Look at it like changing tubes to ad to or an out board dac.

Nice to have you back posting

Greetings Bill333

Sonic wonders a few thoughts in relation to your post, given that turntables and analog have a sort of infinite adjustability:

a. if your turntable was designed as a rim-drive, would your modification to run it as a belt drive account for some of the difference between it and the Magnavox CD/DVD player?

b. what cartridge are you running, how has it been set up geometrically – not to mention maintaining proper loading into the phono stage?

Sonic has Abbey Road in both CD, file (44.1khz/16 bit) and LP. In my system, with the FLAC file, the sound is precise while with the LP, the sound is excellent and preferable to digital in an “emotional” sense – where analog somehow captures what I think the Fab Four were trying to achieve artistically with this album even as their relationship as a band were, by the time the Abbey Road album was made, largely past-tense.

The 5-band equalizer is a very useful tool – the degradation from the signal passing through it is surprisingly small. With just 5-bands it is easy to use, I keep 1khz as it is and toggle the bass and treble following the way Peter Walker designed the Quad preamps’ tilt control. If a recording is lacks bass, Sonic will edge up the 40 or 60 hz, maybe a touch of 250hz while backing off the 5 khz and the 10/15 khz. For bassy recordings I do the opposite, bass sloped off, treble up a little. If you get a record with an OTT midrange (now I haven't got any of such in my collection) you can leave the extremes and edge the 1khz down.

It’s really easy. Of course, you might wonder what happens if the frequencies to be corrected fall outside the 5 bands of the JVC SEA-10. In such cases, I shrug my shoulders and say “oh well, that’s the price of simplicity, compared to wrestling with a pair of 32-band Klark Techniks”.

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

Vic Patacchiola, who builds and sells the Salvation turntable has been very helpful in tracking down the cause of the poor sound I'm getting.  He's convinced that the big problem is not the motor, but the platform and floor that the turntable is sitting on.  He had serious problems in his own home system until he mounted the turntable platform on the wall and used a thick piece of slate with sorbothane pads underneath it to damp the vibrations.  This table just does not like being on a flexible floor.  

The cartridge is an Ortofon 2M Red.  Unfortunately, I don't have the equipment to do a really dialed in setup of the azimuth and VTA.  As a starting point the azimuth is 0 and the tonearm is set horizontal.  I think what I'm going to do is set the analog rig aside until I get the tunable room rebuilt in the basement.  The concrete floor should be a better starting point for a turntable platform than anything I'm going to be able to do upstairs.

Of course, putting the analog stuff away gives me a chance to concentrate on computer audio!