Principles

Sorry Shin, missed the question in the crossfire

Yes I would, presicely because you wan't some extra capacity in order to cope with dirty mains and the DC component which will push a transformer closer to saturation.
Note how lots of equipment with barely adequate toroids buzz and hum like mad at peak times when all the televisons, PCs and other electrical items are in use. Poor frame TX's also suffer of course.

 

Thanks Rob.

The interesting thing is that I've found smaller transformers to subjectively sound better than larger ones. The mains quality is generally good around here.

If your interested I could detail what I'm talking about in another post. Its getting late so going off to get some shut eye.

 

Definitely interested, fire away

 

Not after your recent PM action.

You clearly don't understand the commonly accepted subjective result of such issues, that the resulting sound fails to convince and hold the attention despite a wonderful set of measurements. The implementation of such digital filters is held by many to destroy the essence of the music, and people have been trying to solve the problem for 30 years. To cascade those filters can only increase the damage done to the musical signal.

My repost was as a means of explaining just why WM and others have found such systems uninvolving and unnatural over long sessions. Musically, you would be far better designing a good 1st or second order crossover - or even ditching the whole design and building a big 2 way. Having worked with a number of these implementations, I can be confident that the result is impressive on an intellectual level - far less so on an emotional one.

 

Back to ad hominem, the resort of the ignorant!

So you prove you are a straw man just as I suspected. Parroting web chatter and perpetuating distortion.

My old company Tresham Audio was involved (as an end user) with the development of toroid designs by Avel Lindberg in the late 70's which helped get over the original design problems. Toroid development was very much a Brit thing, Yanks only used frames. The first to switch was Mark Levinson who used Avel transformers and very much benefitted from our input and development work. You cannot have AC without DC and visa versa, it is part of the design brief. Any transformer manufacturer who plays it cheap by cutting the core to minimum is playing the price game. Anyway transformer VA rating are very much part of the "how long is a piece of string" games that are always played with specifications. At what temperature and for how long??? There are lies and there are specifications.

Who was the first audio company to use torroids back in the 70's - the original incarnation of Cambridge Audio (good old Stan Curtis, where is he now?) - and they blew up spectacularly as the field within the case effectively shorted the windings. This would not have happened with a frame, as I said different field propogation characteristics.

The main skimpers are the Chinese these days, if you buy a Chinese amp you should expect this. Part of their design brief is to cut down as much as possible on material as that is a Chinese supply problem, where as the components they make from them are not. Transformers are the thing that suffers the most from this.

Richard

 

For Hi-Fi work, yes.

Richard

 

OK perhaps we have temporarily removed the problems from this thread. So let us again try to get back to the purpose of the thread.

Principles

Mine so far

1 - simplicity
2 - balance

I hope everyone agrees with these. If not *please* contribute in the same vein with reasons and observations. Please note I do not object to technical terms like feedback, star earth etc, but they do really defeat the point. They are symptoms or solutions not principles.

What I would love is all you lurkers, normally about 95% of a forum, to think about what it is you want from your hi-fi as that is the basis behind principles. If you just want to think about and compare specifications or intellectualise the subject them go play with the self appointed experts (most of the other 5%). If you wish to think about music and how your system portrays it then stay here and contribute. Also I would love those incognito industry guys who normally just read to contribute. Let us actually for once use a forum for positive purposes.

Richard

PS I am astonished no one has brought up the Ivor T favourite yet, tunes!

How important are these to your music?

 

For me:

-Accuracy/low colouration
-Good setup/room
-Knowing your system, its limitations, its strengths and exploiting them.
-'Full range' performance ie. 20-20Khz+.

 

I just want something very simple from my system: the sound quality I would have in a concert hall (classical music) sitting in the (what I feel) best seat.
More or less the same dynamic, loudness, colouration, power, hall ambience, transperance and I don't what else...

 

Aha more like it. Compare this with the previous post

Now when you go to a concert do you concern yourself with "dynamic, loudness, colouration, power, hall ambience, transperance" - no! - so why do you do this with your hi-fi? Why do you try to compare with something you do not even try to observe but take for granted at a concert. Why, because one is reality and the other is an illusion trying to recreate reality!

You go to a concert for the music, why does it become a different pursuit when you listen to your hi-fi?

Richard

 

I agree Richard. Titian gets very close to reproducing the concert hall experience from what I hear.

 

Morning Richard,

I'm not sure I agree with this. I use several amplifiers which don't use either local or overall feedback (as far as I'm aware) and I don't think they sound disastrous. It might dictate one's choice of active devices and might also result in 3-4% THD but I'm not convinced that the nature of this THD impairs my enjoyment of the music as much as the 'fog' imparted by the nfb almost always does.

Just my view.

rgs,

Murray

 

I find it very interesting that often the most enjoyable listening takes place when I am sitting in the next room from the audio equipment. Maybe there's something psychologically beneficial about not actually looking at the gear, and not being distracted by it.

And to throw a thought into the ring, some twenty-something years ago I bought a Linn LP12/Ittok/A&RP77 largely because of reviews and because it was expensive (although the LP12 clearly was much better than the Logic that I also tried). When I got it home, I reallly couldn't enjoy it, but a few weeks later everything fell into place - I started listening to the music, and it was the LP12 that 'taught' me how to listen to music. Ever since then I have been a 'subjectivist' at heart. A few years later I bought NVA amps, and more musical enjoyment resulted. Neither product is perfect by objective standards, but each (and the combination) gave great enjoyment. I believe that Ivor T was, and still is, fundamentally correct in his views on musical reproduction, even though I no longer own the LP12.

So, to sum up my thoughts on this, my priorities are for a presentation that is clear enough to hear small details and nuances, power enough to approximate the dynamic contrasts of real performances, and it should have an almost indescribable pleasure factor that gets sometimes grabs you by the stomach and makes you think "by God, that was good". I do not care much for imaging, ultimate bass etc, but the sound must be coherent. If I start thinking about the technicalities of HiFi then it is impossible to hear the music.

Regards etc

S

 

The most important factor for me is correct timbre, at least what I feel is correct, particularly piano, I grew up listening to my family playing piano...

Then liveliness, when I look to see if someone is in my room playing...

I also like to 20hz to 20khz, meaning extended response, not exactely this numbers...

 

The definition you're asking for is, I think, the definition of the musical experience itself. A holistic definition rather than analysis of attributes and aspects that might make up the holistic experience. Just call it music. That will do.

Unfortunately I suspect an outbreak of new-age-isms is around the corner and the word en**gies is going to be used shortly.

 

For many years I fell into the same trap of scoring my hi-fi purchases on how "technically excellent" it was until I recently saw the light. My way of thinking nowadays is that between me and the music lies an electronic/mechanical hindrance called a hi-fi system. The more it stays low profile and the less it hinders the more I am impressed and if the music reaches me without being corrupted along the way then the hi-fi has done it's job well and no other comment is needed. Rather than gushing about bottomless bass and soaring sweet trebles, I now rate the equipment by how little it offends my hearing, so in that respect all the wincing I used to do when the SYSTEM didn't float my boat reaching a faultless technical excellence, has now become an irrelevance if the music has hit me full on and I connected with it.

 

teenage mutant ninja turtles

 

principles

mine so far...

1) be excellent to each other.
2) party on dude....

 

What a brilliant post. This gives us the priorities and the need for realism in our assessment. Now if we look at what makes equipment achieve this we should start with principles (every conceptual exploration starts with principles) before we look for *energies*

Richard

 

If you are talking valve then you are probably right, I have very little experience in that direction. I am talking transistor and as I said before valves tend to distort benignly, even harmonic - transistors odd harmonic. I know a bit of a generalisation but basically true. If you can find me a transistor that perform like a valve with no feedback I would definitely look at it.

Richard