TrevC said:
The balance of the Universe is now restored, as i couldn't agree less.
Which Valve or Class D amps have you tried?
I like pianos to sound like pianos. The Behringer isn't very good at making pianos sound like pianos. It's OK with pop music.TrevC said:
BigH said:
I said 'decent', not 'local'............ :read:
My local dealer is a Richersounds, if i want to 'hang out', 'shoot the breeze' or whatever I go to my nearest DV247.
BigH
Well-known member
davedotco said:
Well it was not Richers, it is meant to be a decent one, to be honest I think 7oaks were much better. The problem is many people don't have much choice. Its a nightmare trying to hear some brands with other brands. Try finding a dealer that has Creek amps and Kef speakers for instance.
TrevC said:
I hate distortion and unreliability.
BTW, how do you know valve amplification is only for people that like distortion? It's not on the basis of demos. Is it on the basis of ownership of a wide variety of amps including push pull and single ended triodes and including a wide variety of power valves: KT88's, EL34, 211, 300b, 2a3, 45? Is it on the basis of something you've read? Or is it based on something else?
I totally agree that speaker differences can be relatively huge.
BigH said:
Dealers and their product ranges can be a big problem.
Small independent (relatively) manufactures like small dealers who sell modest amounts of product on a regular basis, big manufacturers want coverage of their range and a more substantial turn over.
This makes the chance of comparing, say, a Creek with a Marantz very difficult, the manufacturers are simply looking for very different things from their retailers.
This is one reason I do not like the 'shortlist' approach to buying a system, ok if you stick to the mainstream, otherwise impossible.
I still think the best apprach is to give a compedent dealer a price, the features you need and some idea of your musical tastes. Get him to play you systems he thinks you will like, tell him what you like or don't like and close in on a setp that works for you.
Oh, and don't mention brands, that will skew the dealers views towards what he thinks you think is good, what you really want to hear is what he thinks is good.
BTW. Having visited a few dealers a year or two back, I do understand that this is not easy.
davedotco said:
That would be a good aproach if you were a music lover. Us audiophiles think we know better.
Let's put on some electrical, mechanical and production engineering hats. And let's be ambitious.
Suppose we want to sit down and make some world class components. What would it cost?
Let's have a look at power amps first. How much would it cost to make a world class power amp? Well that would depend what type of amp we wanted. Let's say we want a world class high powered amp with high damping factor. We're probably looking at solid state. So we need a non magnetic case with big heatsinks. We'll need huge dual mono power transformers and a some big capacitors for the the power supply. We'll need a bunch of good quality transistors wired in parallel and we'll need some resistors, capacitors diodes, power switch, terminals, wire, plus a circuit board or point to point wiring. If we're making it for the pro market we can dispense with the big heatsinks and stick a cooling fan in the back. We're not looking at a huge amount of cost to build that. If we're a small company with low overheads, selling direct we can make and sell our world class amp for £1000 to £2000. For a big company selling internationally via dealers double or treble that.
Let's compare the cost of a world class power amp to a pair of world class speakers. This is where it gets tricky as it depends what we want to prioritise in our speakers. Let's say we want world class domestic acceptability first and foremost followed by the best possible sound within that constraint. There are probably several ways of doing this. One way is to make a pretty small ported two speaker, with doped paper mid-bass cones with no crossover on that driver and a single capacitor as the crossover on the tweeter. Cost to make and sell such a speaker would be under £1000 for a small company selling direct. Or it could be much higher if we decided to use something exotic like Accuton ceramic mid-bass units instead of the doped paper and Accuton diamond tweeters.
Let's say we wanted to make purist world class speakers where overall sound quality took priority over all other considerations. Various routes we could take again. Electrostatic. Panel. Vertical array. Huge ported 3, 4 or 5 way. Huge sealed box 3, 4 or 5 way. Single driver. Open baffle. Horns. Horn hybrid. Corner horns. Some of these routes require expensive engineering solutions to do them right. Very large and possibly complicated cabinets. Multiple drive units, some of them very big. Maybe compression drivers and horns. Complex crossovers with big inductors. Maybe an active crossover - which would be not too far off a power amp in terms of cost to engineer it to world class standards, etc etc.
When you put your engineering hat on, there's no reason why a world class amplifier should cost the same as a world class speaker. Nor should it cost a certain proportion of the speaker cost. They each cost what they cost, depending on the genre of the amp and speakers. A purist world class speaker is likely to cost more than a purist world class solid state amplifier to make.
Suppose we want to sit down and make some world class components. What would it cost?
Let's have a look at power amps first. How much would it cost to make a world class power amp? Well that would depend what type of amp we wanted. Let's say we want a world class high powered amp with high damping factor. We're probably looking at solid state. So we need a non magnetic case with big heatsinks. We'll need huge dual mono power transformers and a some big capacitors for the the power supply. We'll need a bunch of good quality transistors wired in parallel and we'll need some resistors, capacitors diodes, power switch, terminals, wire, plus a circuit board or point to point wiring. If we're making it for the pro market we can dispense with the big heatsinks and stick a cooling fan in the back. We're not looking at a huge amount of cost to build that. If we're a small company with low overheads, selling direct we can make and sell our world class amp for £1000 to £2000. For a big company selling internationally via dealers double or treble that.
Let's compare the cost of a world class power amp to a pair of world class speakers. This is where it gets tricky as it depends what we want to prioritise in our speakers. Let's say we want world class domestic acceptability first and foremost followed by the best possible sound within that constraint. There are probably several ways of doing this. One way is to make a pretty small ported two speaker, with doped paper mid-bass cones with no crossover on that driver and a single capacitor as the crossover on the tweeter. Cost to make and sell such a speaker would be under £1000 for a small company selling direct. Or it could be much higher if we decided to use something exotic like Accuton ceramic mid-bass units instead of the doped paper and Accuton diamond tweeters.
Let's say we wanted to make purist world class speakers where overall sound quality took priority over all other considerations. Various routes we could take again. Electrostatic. Panel. Vertical array. Huge ported 3, 4 or 5 way. Huge sealed box 3, 4 or 5 way. Single driver. Open baffle. Horns. Horn hybrid. Corner horns. Some of these routes require expensive engineering solutions to do them right. Very large and possibly complicated cabinets. Multiple drive units, some of them very big. Maybe compression drivers and horns. Complex crossovers with big inductors. Maybe an active crossover - which would be not too far off a power amp in terms of cost to engineer it to world class standards, etc etc.
When you put your engineering hat on, there's no reason why a world class amplifier should cost the same as a world class speaker. Nor should it cost a certain proportion of the speaker cost. They each cost what they cost, depending on the genre of the amp and speakers. A purist world class speaker is likely to cost more than a purist world class solid state amplifier to make.
Vladimir said:
Well, I would ask to listen to their very best / top of the range system first. If that didn't sound better than my bedroom system I wouldn't go any further with them. Why waste my time and why waste theirs?
This is my last post on the subject as clearly I am in the minority over the value of source components. The consensus seems to be that speakers and amps are everything so why bang my head against the wall pointlessly?
Various members have wrongly assumed I'm an old vinyl junkie and I'm only talking about analogue solutions. Fair criticism actually as my "vinyl engines" date back to 1897 through to the present day. However, my experience has been THE SAME WITH DIGITAL. Sorry for the emphasis and loud shouting but I can't really overstate this fact.
Someone said they couldn't hear which was better between an Asda DVD player and an Arcam CD. Well, to be honest I can't comment unless I too could hear both the same for comparison. If I couldn't tell which was better I probably wouldn't be on here talking about Hi-Fi. I'd be out somewhere enjoying the sun!
What I can say for definite though is that I have owned the following Arcam CD players: CD170 Transport/Black Box II, Delta 70.2, Alpha 8, Alpha 9, CD93T. I have also owned until this week a Leema Antila II and IIS ECO. These are all digital players. I also own an early Wharfedale DVD 750S (remember that one, review team?) and now a Krell S-350AV which is also a DVD player.
Now for the truly shocking revelations! None of the above sound remotely similar. The 70.2 was never as good as the transport/DAC combo but funds never permitted me to keep the latter back in 1990. The 70.2 was however a great CD......or at least until I heard the Alpha 8 in 1998. The 8 eclipsed the 70.2 in all aspects: it had a far richer more powerful sound with bass that the 70.2 barely even hinted at. The 8 was great until I heard the 9! I owned an Alpha 9 but never liked the weird styling of it. When Arcam dumped the odd design and brought out the DiVa range I was happier. The CD93T was in effect an upgraded '9' using Wolfson upsampling DAC chips. Compared to the 8 and less so for the 9, the CD93T explored the recordings in far more detail. Space opened up around instruments and fine previously unheard sounds appeared from nowhere. The soundstage deepened and you could hear the room/studio acoustics clearly like never before. This gave me a sense of "being there" and brought a greater realism to the whole experience. Now, given that everything else in the system stayed the same, can this improvement not conclusively be levelled at the CDP's?
Similarly I jumped up into the £3000 market with the introduction of the Leema Antila II. I was expecting something much better than a sub-£1000 Arcam could deliver but to be honest I couldn't imagine what the "better" could be. Needless to say the Leema did go much further than the Arcam. The sound was again far more powerful with greater depth and weight especially. Small details which were audible on the Arcam were now fully resolved and space appeared around those tiny instrumental details. By contrast to the already good Arcam, voices on the Leema seemed human. The Arcam was more mechanical and less convincing. The IIS ECO, much to my amazement went even further. How could it resurrect tiny details that even the II had managed to obscure? I don't know but it certainly did!
The point of my long and useless ramble is this. However much I could have spent on speakers at the time I could not have heard what the source hadn't delivered to the amps, irrespective of how good the speakers were. Where information was lost or muddled, neither amps or speakers could have miraculously rediscovered it. It just isn't possible.
My Krell DVD manages for the same money (originally £4400) to even beat the latest Leema. Transparency from the Krell is unprecedented. This is a "hairs on the back of neck" performance at this level, not just good Hi-Fi sound.The fact that I can also watch my DVD's in virtual Blu-ray quality is an added bonus too. I can clearly hear all this with the same amps and speakers. If the money had all been spent on speakers the sound would be better than what I have now, true, but the details, resolution and lifelikness of the presentation couldn't have been better than what they were fed via the amp from my digital sources as it is the latter part of the chain that determines the ultimate quality of the rest of it.
Speakers can definitely help shape the "tone" and "voice" to use old outdated terms and depending on source and amps can define the soundstage and overall quality of presentation. They cannot add what has been either lost by the source or muddled by the amps.
If all digital sources sounded the same and equally good, none of these companies making high end digital equipment could exist. Last week I resisted the temptation to audition a £75,000 CD player, not just because I couldn't afford it by a long shot but I did not want to be disappointed with my own system when I got home again!
Various members have wrongly assumed I'm an old vinyl junkie and I'm only talking about analogue solutions. Fair criticism actually as my "vinyl engines" date back to 1897 through to the present day. However, my experience has been THE SAME WITH DIGITAL. Sorry for the emphasis and loud shouting but I can't really overstate this fact.
Someone said they couldn't hear which was better between an Asda DVD player and an Arcam CD. Well, to be honest I can't comment unless I too could hear both the same for comparison. If I couldn't tell which was better I probably wouldn't be on here talking about Hi-Fi. I'd be out somewhere enjoying the sun!
What I can say for definite though is that I have owned the following Arcam CD players: CD170 Transport/Black Box II, Delta 70.2, Alpha 8, Alpha 9, CD93T. I have also owned until this week a Leema Antila II and IIS ECO. These are all digital players. I also own an early Wharfedale DVD 750S (remember that one, review team?) and now a Krell S-350AV which is also a DVD player.
Now for the truly shocking revelations! None of the above sound remotely similar. The 70.2 was never as good as the transport/DAC combo but funds never permitted me to keep the latter back in 1990. The 70.2 was however a great CD......or at least until I heard the Alpha 8 in 1998. The 8 eclipsed the 70.2 in all aspects: it had a far richer more powerful sound with bass that the 70.2 barely even hinted at. The 8 was great until I heard the 9! I owned an Alpha 9 but never liked the weird styling of it. When Arcam dumped the odd design and brought out the DiVa range I was happier. The CD93T was in effect an upgraded '9' using Wolfson upsampling DAC chips. Compared to the 8 and less so for the 9, the CD93T explored the recordings in far more detail. Space opened up around instruments and fine previously unheard sounds appeared from nowhere. The soundstage deepened and you could hear the room/studio acoustics clearly like never before. This gave me a sense of "being there" and brought a greater realism to the whole experience. Now, given that everything else in the system stayed the same, can this improvement not conclusively be levelled at the CDP's?
Similarly I jumped up into the £3000 market with the introduction of the Leema Antila II. I was expecting something much better than a sub-£1000 Arcam could deliver but to be honest I couldn't imagine what the "better" could be. Needless to say the Leema did go much further than the Arcam. The sound was again far more powerful with greater depth and weight especially. Small details which were audible on the Arcam were now fully resolved and space appeared around those tiny instrumental details. By contrast to the already good Arcam, voices on the Leema seemed human. The Arcam was more mechanical and less convincing. The IIS ECO, much to my amazement went even further. How could it resurrect tiny details that even the II had managed to obscure? I don't know but it certainly did!
The point of my long and useless ramble is this. However much I could have spent on speakers at the time I could not have heard what the source hadn't delivered to the amps, irrespective of how good the speakers were. Where information was lost or muddled, neither amps or speakers could have miraculously rediscovered it. It just isn't possible.
My Krell DVD manages for the same money (originally £4400) to even beat the latest Leema. Transparency from the Krell is unprecedented. This is a "hairs on the back of neck" performance at this level, not just good Hi-Fi sound.The fact that I can also watch my DVD's in virtual Blu-ray quality is an added bonus too. I can clearly hear all this with the same amps and speakers. If the money had all been spent on speakers the sound would be better than what I have now, true, but the details, resolution and lifelikness of the presentation couldn't have been better than what they were fed via the amp from my digital sources as it is the latter part of the chain that determines the ultimate quality of the rest of it.
Speakers can definitely help shape the "tone" and "voice" to use old outdated terms and depending on source and amps can define the soundstage and overall quality of presentation. They cannot add what has been either lost by the source or muddled by the amps.
If all digital sources sounded the same and equally good, none of these companies making high end digital equipment could exist. Last week I resisted the temptation to audition a £75,000 CD player, not just because I couldn't afford it by a long shot but I did not want to be disappointed with my own system when I got home again!
Overdose
Well-known member
steve4232 said:
With regard to digital sources in particular, high end equipment merely gives you exclusivity and a lighter wallet. The internals of such a player are likely as not using off the peg PCBs as used in much cheaper and just as capable equipment.
High end companies exist to offer this exclusivity not to offer the pinnacle of audio technology and performance. They also seem quite adept at marketing.
steve4232 said:
I had a very similar view until relatively recently; which is why I bought a Linn Karik / Numerik back when it came out in the early 90s. It was the first CDP that I'd heard, that I was prepared to give up my LP12 for.
I had my change of heart, when my dealer told me to come and listen to the "game changing" Linn DS. I found that the humble Sneaky out performed my relatively high-end CDP by some margin, as well as most of Linns expensive CDPs at that time (which is why they stopped making them).
So basically, I have only changed my outlook because you can now get a better source for less money.
chebby
Well-known member
The problem -at the time - with Linn's source first philosophy was that it almost became 'source only' with magazines recommending a NAD 3020 and a pair of Videoton Minimaxes hung off the end of an LP12! (As someone else said, figures of 50 percent, 60 percent and more on the source became the dogma.)
I have always felt that some 'balance' is required. Not slavishly, precisely equal amounts on source, amp and speakers, but not tipped too heavily in favour of one over the others.
A £50 Ion USB turntable feeding a Krell and Magnepans is as silly as the waste of a £10,000 turntable feeding a £50 Bluetooth speaker. These are silly extremes (almost as silly as those seen in some early 1980s system hierarchy charts.)
I have always felt that some 'balance' is required. Not slavishly, precisely equal amounts on source, amp and speakers, but not tipped too heavily in favour of one over the others.
A £50 Ion USB turntable feeding a Krell and Magnepans is as silly as the waste of a £10,000 turntable feeding a £50 Bluetooth speaker. These are silly extremes (almost as silly as those seen in some early 1980s system hierarchy charts.)
Covenanter
Well-known member
steve4232 said:
I don't think you are on your own! Your comment was so obviously correct that I for one didn't think we needed to agree with you. Get the best source you can afford.
Chris
The relevance of the source first four digital is less important than with analogue sources. Assuming a faithful data stream is provided, the focus is on better amps and speakers. For digital, connectivity, interface and DAC are relevant but standards today are so high, it's more preference than sound quality as the differences are fairly minor for the latter by comparison.
Overdose said:
How many high end sources have you heard, or is this pure speculation?
IME. The Source is vital, and if expensive, it needs an equally revealing system to show the difference.
To me, it's about where is the best place to put money to get the biggest gain.....in my case, the difference between ADS and MDS was less than that between 203/2s and 205/2s.
CnoEvil said:
Have you been to Jupiter's moon Io to know if its there? Ever seen a molecule with your own eyes?
Or are you just speculating based on measurements?
Yep, well a WAV file off my laptop, replayed on a flash drive (so less than £50 I'd guess for both the CD drive and the flash) wasn't disgraced up against a Linn streamer, so I'll put that one out there for fun!
chebby said:
Whilst I understand what you are saying, you are still missing what I consider a pivotal point.
In the early mid '80s, a lot of the people buying systems were not hi-fi entusiasts, music lovers maybe or simply caught up in the gestalt of the moment.
They had few if any preconceptions and often little knowledge of equipment or brands, they were sold product by demonstration. At that time we would have sold systems similar to the one you mention, though in our case we used the Creek and 'original' MS20. Amp and speakers cost around £200-250 in those days and an early LP12, Rega (silver) arm and cartridge about double that.
Sure, we could have sold a more balanced system, maybe a Planar 3 with a better am and speaker but, in reality, we couldn't the LP12 system just sounded better. We would play similar systems against all comers, and people heard the difference and bought the systems, time after time after time again.
We had plenty of experience of the competition, Thorens, Systemdeck, Walker and the rest and often took them as trade in, I am not knocking them, they were all decent players but lacked the final edge of performance and more importantly the dealer network to set up, demonstrate and sell them effectively to the non enthusiast.
Overdose
Well-known member
CnoEvil said:
It's statements like these that show more than a little naivity exists still. All digital sources measure ruler flat, or as near to it as makes no difference. If they don't, then something has gone terribly wrong somewhere.
Given the exact same frequency response and in most cases, an inaudible noise floor, they will not sound different from one another. Level match the equipment and you will remove any perceived differences.
You seem to be erroneously corelating price to performance. True, quality improves with greater expenditure, but in the digital realm this stops fairly early and a simple transparent (and transparent is frankly as good as it gets) DAC can be had for around £100.
Overdose said:
And that's, I think, a very naïve opinion, lacking commercial sense. I agree that digital sources should sound similar—after all, the DAC chipsets used by even the most estoric DACs can be found dirt cheap in eBay. But the truth is that some vendors keep on colouring their products to please specific shares of the market. For example, bumping lower frequencies to better match cheap, lean speakers.
I also think that steve4232's opinions are perfectly valid, if not very current. DACs used to be niche products that were scarcely sold and more difficult to get right. I remember the times when you had to connect the sound card of a computer directly to the CD drive in order to play a CD, as the sound card only had more or less advanced synthetizers but no DAC—let me emphasize, not even computer sound cards had DACs. So of course, sources were very important for the final sound quality. Nowadays the situation is quite different, DACs are commodity products and there is only so much sound quality that you can get by putting money into them. But some vendors will keep on colouring their DACs in order to gain a competitive advantage over the rest over some consumer groups. I myself keep away from those.
I also think that DAC/preamps should be set aside from simple DACs. Their preamp sections will imprint a certain personality to the sound as do those in integrated amplifiers—which is, I believe, one of the things we pay for in Hi-Fi.
Vladimir said:
Would you spend £20k on a system without listening to it?
The appreciation of music and how much you will like a particular system, is subjective. There are no measurements for realism, cohesiveness, believeability and the transmission of music in an emotive way.
Overdose said:
I'll take that as none then.
I make my judgements based on going out and listening to stuff from the likes of DCS, Audio Note, Linn and Electrocompaniet, to see what improvements can be had at different prices and the effect it has in different level systems.
Price isn't the deciding factor for me, because if it was, I would prefer the DCS Debussy to an Electro EMC 1UP, or a Chord QBD76 to a MDS...which I don't, so I certainly don't erroneously correlate price with performance.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram