I have a nice stereo. I do not have one of those systems that cost more than a car or even a house. Still I think it is pretty damn good. If my house burned down I could probably replace the main parts of it for less than $8000.00. The LPs though, that would take a lot of time and a lot of money. I have some pretty good ones.
Let’s set the wayback machine to a time when everyone knew what a wayback machine was. I entered the engineering program at a big eastern US university in 1973. I had some cash and I wanted a stereo in my dorm, as that was a good thing to have. The year before my brother and I travelled to NYC to buy exotic bipolar power transistors that went into an amplifier design out of a magazine. They were about 60 Watts per channel. We each built one. Frankly I do not remember what kind of preamplifier I had. We probably built that too. I had built some big ass speakers with a lovely 12” die cast aluminum frame woofer in a two way system. It got loud. I thought it sounded fine.
The only “factory” components I had was a Dual Turntable and a Shure phono cartridge I think it was an M95. That system lasted two years before I caught the bug or curse as the case may be. In the second year my amplifier was sick. Whenever my roommate played Queen it went crazy and demonstrated what I now know as thermal runaway. Only Queen had this effect for some reason. I did not like Queen.
Over the next summer I bought and built a Dynaco 400 Amp and a Dynaco Pat 5 preamp kit. I also made a friend who turned out to be even weirder with more money who bought a Harmon Kardon Citation 11 and 12 with a really nice Sony Turntable with an SME arm. He had these speakers called Advents that some guy in Boston was selling to raise money to build a big TV.
The two of us got a subscription to a sort of underground magazine called the Absolute Sound. It eschewed advertising as that was corrupting and yet somehow convinced serious manufacturers to loan them equipment. When they managed to get an issue out we devoured it. We also managed to visit stores that actually had much of the equipment they listed as good stuff. We heard almost everything on their lists.
My friend got tired of his Sony Turntable and I bought it from him and I sold my Dual. He kept his SME arm and I do not remember what he did with it. I bought a Grace 707 tone arm and a Sure V15 cartridge as that was considered really good if you tweaked it a bit. It was so tweaked.
I remember he went from the Sony to a HK ST7 turntable. It had pretty lights. Then he went off the reservation and got a Transcriptor Skeleton Turntable. I think he managed to get the SME arm on it as the funky transcriptor arm was a recognized PITA. He had a part time job at a stereo shop and could order stuff wholesale.
He also sold me his old Advents which were wrapped in vinyl phony wood stuff and bought a pair of Advents that were covered in real wood.
He also traded his Citation 11 for an exotic tube thing called an AR SP3. He later sent it to the factory to have it upgraded to SP3 a1 status.
At that point I had his old Sony 2251la turntable, Grace 707 arm with a Sure V15, playing into a PAT 5 preamplifier and a Dynaco 400 amplifier feeding into a pair of Advents.
All that should tell you that for a couple of college students we had some pretty good stuff. It should also tell you I have no fear of cracking open a case and messing with things. When Dynaco upgraded the PAT5 to better OP Amps I got a set and soldered them in.
A very strange Grad-student with an all tube system would visit and offer restrained praise of our systems. About mine he said it was really good for a transistor system.
As all good things had to come to an end I graduated and had to move far away. I sold almost my whole system to another guy keeping only my LPs and my turntable. I still have that turntable that arm but not the Sure V15.
When I arrived at my new home and job in the Frozen North (Edmonton Alberta Canada) I had no tunes. Once paycheques started I got some stuff. I bought a preamp and I do not remember what kind of amplifier or maybe I did not have one, but I had a project. I was building electrostatic loudspeakers. Big ones too. For those I bought a pair of Dynaco Mk3 tube amps. I almost killed myself with high voltage building the speaker power supply. The palm of my hand got charred by being too friendly with some capacitors while they were “hot”.
Interestingly these big ass electrostatic speakers 4 ft square per channel worked! The bass was less than great so I built a 15” subwoofer and some other bits. I lived with my cousin and this crazy setup took a lot of space up and sounded impressive if not actually good. For the record I now think electrostatics have more problems than benefits.
I saw an ad for somebody who was selling a Transcriptors Skeleton Turntable and as one of the few people who knew what that was in the Northern Alberta I grabbed it. You cannot overstate how cool that thing looks. I still have that too, though I may sell it soon. The Stock arm got broken. I think alcohol was involved. I still have the parts. I modified the Transcriptors to fit another Grace 707 arm which was tricky as the bitch was heavier than the stock one and I had to rebalance the whole thing with ballast.
At this point things get fuzzy. I tired of the big electrostatic speakers and I think I built some small more wife friendly things as I had acquired a wife. Powered by the pair of MK3s it was pretty good. I had tweaked my preamp power supply with bigger caps and it got better. Then one day in a shop I found an orphan Audio Research SP12 for sale. All tubes 6DJ8s instead of 12ax7s. Somewhere along here I had built a copy of the SP3a1 from the circuit diagram on a breadboard and found 12ax7s to be PITAs as well. So that was my system for a while. All glowing warn lovely tubes.
The next step was newer bigger speakers. I had a design idea and paid a wood worker to make me some boxes. They were fairly big towers with a biamped woofer thing and went down to seismic bass and the treble was way past what I could hear as a young man. Those were still fed by the MK3s and a midsize transistor amp for the woofers.
Thing is the MK3s though really good are tube amps and those tubes were getting bloody expensive. So I went backwards. Dynaco was out of business. I found a company that had bought all their stock and I ordered a black box 400 kit and a few extra parts to build something special.
What I built was a black box Dynaco 416 with two power supplies and some really nice film bridging capacitors. I tweaked the mother while I was building it. No magic smoke when I turned it on. It was wonderful. I did another silly thing by adding an outboard power supply capacitor bank. Actually a pair as each channel was separate. Do you know how big 1 farad is at 74 volts? Unplug the bugger and it plays loud for a long time. Not being silly under normal operation it just made the beast remarkably quiet and potent.
I made a diversion to surround sound and 7.1 channel movies for a while. My black box and tube preamp went in the crawlspace. I sold the MK3s for a decent price. If you wanted to listen to records you needed the programmable remote. Life was getting complicated.
The old SP12 came out of the crawlspace with a nasty hum. I replaced a failed big PS capacitor with larger value but physically smaller caps and it worked fine. I dragged out the 416. I needed new speakers. The big guns were tied up in the surround system.
Actually what got me going was an ad on craigslist. I found some Advents and thought about going back in time. I also saw an ad for a speaker called Sonabs. I remembered hearing them 40 years ago and liking them. They were gone before I got in touch with the guy. I read up on them and decided to build some like it. I really liked the theory behind them. Simple and very restrained in a Nordic sort of way. The drivers you can buy today are really good and the crossover parts are really very very good now. They have computer programs to lock down optimum millihenries and microfarads based on the impedance curve of the drivers. So I used those.
The idea behind these things is to put the speaker drivers as close to the wall as possible to minimize reflections. It is a good idea, the sound I get out of them is very clear and uncluttered. Spooky actually.
So over the last few months that is what I have been playing with. I set up the Sony / Grace table and it has been a lot of fun. The Black Dynaco lurks in the corner and things are good. You push a few buttons and the thing turns on and music is available. No remotes required.
One of the really fun things is the cartridge on the Sony. I have a Signets TK7e and loved it 20 years ago. I found a replacement stylus and it still works. The thing responds to 45 khz. That is insane. I do not think any current cartridge is comparable. It was designed for 4 channel sound that used an ultrasonic carrier. Interesting the Grace 707 was also intended for 4 channel sound. They work very well together.
So take it as reasonable that I do have a serious and good home stereo system. I have more than a passing technical appreciation of electronics, but I am not a repair technician.
Then the fun really starts.
Set the reference frame to now. I am trying to reason out the basic issue of quality in audio.
Why do things sound different? Why does equipment have a unique voice?
One of the fundamental mathematical ideas behind low distortion is to have a given device respond to frequencies double or better than you want to recreate. So if a tweeter can go to 40 khz it has no trouble with 20khz. Same thing for that Signet it can do 45 khz so 22khz is easy. My latest preamp is rated to 100 khz so it really has no problem with audio frequencies. This should mean that normal frequencies are handled with respectably low distortion.
If signals are so accurate and distortion is very low should not all “good” equipment sound the same? The audiophile cohorts at this point lean back and say of course not. So let’s restate it as “If signals are so accurate and distortion is very low, why does all “good” equipment not sound the same?” It really should you know.
Both of my preamps are both earlier 1980’s vintage. One is the Venerable AR SP12 the other is an SAE Mk 30. Both list distortion as a tiny percentage of the signal. In db terms way down under -70 db. That should be effectively inaudible. Yet they sound very different. Taking it a bit weirder swapping different tubes out makes the SP12 sound different from itself though the distortion should still be low. That should not be.
People familiar with Audio Research products will know that they built a machine called an SP11 which is still regarded as a wonderful device and much sought after. The innovation of that design was using 6DJ8 tubes which are radio frequency capable and just much better than the venerable 12AX7 tubes. The SP12 was apparently a less expensive version of the SP11 using a much simpler power supply and I think one fewer tubes in one section. It still measured impressively so it is not trash. The design came out of the same very capable brains. It was a business decision.
The thing with Audio Research Fans is they think every subsequent model must surpass the previous or it is a failure. Even so that SP3a1 my friend had was once considered “a straight wire with gain” until it was later proved to be very coloured and muddy. The SP 12 is probably much better than the SP3 but is not worth near as much. I saw a recent sale of an SP3 for $3000.00 and for an SP12 for $500.00.
So why do they sound different? There is no point in picking which is better as it is like saying blue is better than green. A difference in frequency response would be measured and actually the SP 12 has a much more accurate RIAA phono curve than the SP3a1. In the high level section they both show a damn flat plot. Distortion is very low.
One of the most informative experiences I had with Audio was many years ago. I was reading a high end magazine extolling the virtue of a really expensive interconnect wire between a very expensive CD player and a similarly very expensive preamplifier. The reviewer said that only with this particular interconnect cable could he hear this particular very subtle sound on this particular CD. I had that CD, and I had heard that sound.
This was years ago. I am not sure what the full equipment set I had then was, but I had a “cheap” Philips CD deck. The cost of that deck, and my preamp would have been less than this wire. I could hear the sound he described. First Track Cowboy Junkies Trinity Session, down to the left a metallic rattle. There is also audile air rushing from a vent. So it was not the wire itself it was how this wire interacted with his equipment. (Good album) Most important I could hear it clearly without that stuff.
There I learned that good and better depend on a lot of things. Later I learned that many high end designers cannot afford extensive testing of certain things. The commercial demands are severe to get stuff out quickly. Some circuits will react badly to inductive and capacitive reactive loads. That can make them freak out. Fancy wires are both capacitive and inductive so get the wrong mix of parameters with a given machine and the reaction to those changes the sound or may even let out the magic smoke.
The best I can come up with is speculation. There is a famous Bet made by Mr Bob Carver that he could make one of his relatively inexpensive amplifiers sound EXACTLY like any amplifier a group of golden eared critics chose. He then proceeded to do just that. What he did was run a music signal through a channel of the target amp and inverted through his amp. If they were perfect the signal would completely cancel. At first they did not cancel indicating that there was a difference in how they sounded. Then he tweaked his machine until it did cancel. Once that was done, the two machines sounded indistinguishable. You could say he “voiced” his amplifier. I believe they still measured very low distortion. Very low distortion combined with a particular sound. Vellly interesting!
Subsequently he built a mad, cost no object all tube monster amplifier then produced a product line of smaller transistor amps voiced to sound just like it. This is very clever for business and not supportive of the idea of ultimate sonic goodness.
What must be happening is subtle interference, reactions and resonances inside the circuits. Sometimes there must be reactions between different devices entirely. Given a complex signal complex stuff happens and it comes out different if there are different components arranged differently. Neither is right or wrong, just different. We are noticing different voicings perhaps deliberate perhaps accidental. If you like something more than the other it is then better for you. So it ends up a personal choice.
Sometimes I hear something I had not heard before. I have many albums I have heard many times. A few nights ago I played a Philips recording of Stravinsky’s Firebird and a particular oboe part jumped out at me. I have heard that part many times before, but now there was something about it. I could tell it was made by a wooden instrument. It felt dimensional I could hear the wall behind it. Why? Some previously interfering sound was gone is the best I can come up with.
The real problem was the turntable was the same, the amplifier was the same the preamp and speakers not the same at all. Was the preamp clearer and more accurate? Maybe, it’s pretty good. Are the speakers clearer and more accurate? Was it an interaction between the two? Probably it was all of those things to some degree.
In this particular case I think the “new” things I am hearing are due to the speakers. My amplifier is really very clean. I assume the preamp is. My speakers are derived from the Sonab design from 40 years ago. The intent is to minimize wall reflections by keeping the drivers close to the wall and away from major reflective surfaces. I think that idea works very well.
I think a lot of very respected speakers are not really that good because they react badly with the room surfaces. Sounds get to your ears that are not on the recording based on the design and placement of speakers in the room and furniture for that matter. If sound waves that are not on the recording are audible then that is wrong. Maybe that’s why people like headphones so much. Dipoles are the worst for it. (My Electrostatics were dipoles.) Box speakers set far from a wall are bad too. If they sound “good” then these interactions must be compensating for a flaw in the voicing. Large panel speakers like electrostatics and Magnepans couple well to the air in a room and that gives the impression of presence and immediacy. That is actually good device-to-room impedance matching as large surfaces couple to the air better. Yet you will be hearing sounds that are not on the recording. Perhaps it is better to say they were not in the recording in the place and time that you hear them in.
To a certain degree you can get pretty close to honest and true sounds coming out of these machines. A powerful amplifier pumping many Watts into a little box is very persuasive. If it produces linear power, which almost any amplifier will, you can depend on it getting out into the room. The only limit is the frequency range of the speaker.
According to the charts of the components and the formulas for calculations I used, my speakers should respond from 30ish Hertz to over 40khz. The bass sounds good and is much dependent on the recording. My high frequency hearing is gone with the years but I still can appreciate the tiny metallic character of cymbals on a drum kit or bells or a lonely triangle in the back of an orchestra. I have an FFT analyser on my tablet and it shows some response over 18 khz on some records. I will not vouch for the frequency response of my tablet, but if something is there it is there.
So with respect to the room my little speakers work well. I know that they have a voice, but it is subtle. Another visit with the wayback machine is illustrative.
Does anyone remember the Fulton J Modular speaker? It was a behemoth and for a time at the top of the “good stuff” list. I heard it and was really impressed. My college friend bought a piece of one. The Modular moniker referred to it being built up from 3 pieces. There was a refrigerator sized base that had some number of woofer drivers a small box speaker midrange and an electrostatic tweeter array.
The piece in question is the Fulton FMI 80. In the day it was well thought of. It was responsible for all the middle frequencies of the unit, and those are where most of the important information is. You can see reviews of it in the archives of Stereophile magazine. They liked it. It was small and plain and you know it sounded great with chamber music and acoustic guitar and many instruments that had wood sound boxes. When he got his he kept the Advents, keeping them in my dorm room to keep my pair company so for a time I ran what were called double Advents. A certain magazine liked that arrangement. My room was the main listening place and we puzzled over the FMI 80s. They were good and not good depending on the material. Actually it was all about the material.
So being curious we brought the little guys into my room, and fiddled. String quartets were great, Fleetwood Mac not. We knew some musicians and invited their opinion. They liked them for acoustic instruments with strings and some woodwinds. Horns and such not really good at all.
I was sitting between them (it was a small room) and I noticed the sound coming off the side of the box. Revelation it was. I knocked the side of the box with my knuckle the box was made from thin wood. When you played certain instruments the box resonated and made the sound more “real” and alive, but that is not right. You should hit the box of almost any speaker and get a dull thud at most. These highly respected speakers had a definite voice. If the recording was woody it made it sound more woody.
We also opened one up and found the crossover circuit was a single rather cheap electrolytic capacitor. This was an educational experience. Well that is what college is for is it not? He sold them for what he paid for them and took his Advents back. Here is an example of a great respected behemoth speaker with a flawed heart. Respected reviewers were fooled, or perhaps charmed by the seductive flaws.
I wish there were definitive objective tests we could use. Then we could depend on getting things that are actually better. I will continue to play in this field. I mess with my equipment to keep it in the zone and listen to music. That is what it is really all about.
In the mean while it stays interesting.
