Music in my boat

[Jackdaw]

Hey, Jackdaw and Philwsailz: Care to weigh in on those multi-thousand dollar power cords for amps that the "audiophiles" SWEAR makes their amps sound better?

I think I remember a blind A/B test between said super fancy power cords and coat hanger wire, where no one could tell the difference.

Well, I can't hear anything in those cords. And I doubt anyone can, subjected to a standard double-blind test.

The text you note was done with esoteric speaker wire vs coathangers. It was not a real (2x blind) test but done to wind people up at a trade show. A magazine installed coat hanger wire to a set of loadspearers, told people it was some new tweak product made out of unobtainium, and predictably got a bunch of golden-eared listeners to gush all over it.

 

[philwsailz]

Hey, Jackdaw and Philwsailz: Care to weigh in on those multi-thousand dollar power cords for amps that the "audiophiles" SWEAR makes their amps sound better?

I think I remember a blind A/B test between said super fancy power cords and coat hanger wire, where no one could tell the difference.

The stuff in the link below is nowhere near that cost, yet I still laugh at a $100.00 line cord plug....

http://www.parts-express.com/cat/ac-power-connectors/1560?N=22237+4294967118+4294964958&Ne=10166&Nrs=collection()/record[endeca:matches(.,"P_PortalID","1")+and+endeca:matches(.,"P_Searchable","1")]&PortalID=1

Short answer, those hyper-expensive accessories put THAT audiophile, (or his friends) into a no-win situation... So the guy goes and buys the cord. He claims he can hear a difference. Of course he does, he has to maintain that "golden-ear" reputation with his other audio-geek friends. And his wife who is looking askance at the purchase..... His friends come over and listen. They have to admit they hear it and if they don't the whole house of cards around their 6-figure audio hobby comes crashing down... If they can't hear the difference, they are admitting to the cord owner that they aren't audio-geek cool....

Tice Clock, green magic marker on CD edges, polarized speaker cables, magnetic-levitating vibration isolators, (yes, see here, you totally can't make this stuff up: http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/301861850865?ul_noapp=true&chn=ps&lpid=82) Some of these things are REALLY good...

at taking people's money who have infinite disposable income and a taste for exotic stuff, Oh, it is also a conversation topic in common with well, basically nobody...


Thousand-dollar AC line cord? I'm no dummy, I know what is in the wall.... The same solid-core copper 12/3 Romex the rest of my house is wired with. What is out there on the poles beyond my house's transformer? Aluminum.... If I got a windfall would I update my old Carver/Adcom theater electronics with something cooler? Like McIntosh? Hell yes. Would I but the fancy boutique cords to go with... Nah.... One exception: Bulk-spooled Kimber brand speaker cable.

I have my opinion, and some of you will just have to laugh at me, but I did my own audition on my own terms with their braided speaker wire... This was a long time ago when I KNOW my ears were still good. I was doing acoustic designs at the time... Full-range loudspeakers. I will not even begin to try to tell you why, and I really don't care. Same amp, same music source, same speaker, A/B switch comparing Kimber with equivalent gage zip cord speaker wire. It was obvious. Switch the wires so A is B and B is A. The difference followed the wire, so it was not induced by the switch.

 

[Justin_NSA]

Just play it LOUD!

 

[Boomer54]

Wow. All this technical stuff is way over my head. I simply listen louder. I accomplish that by turning my hearing aids up a notch.

 

[Nick]

Thanks Phil, Jack, Brian for the great info and learning some audio stuff...

My take on this is the tube amps provide a much cleaner output on the speakers at least to my ears compared to what I could discern from the solid state amps we checked out at the demo rooms and in my home... Either way to each their own... On the boat I was looking at 12V tube amps to run my music files from since I have some great JBL monitors installed in the boat... so running the small 2-10 watt tube amps to these speakers would be nice... the fact that the amps are point to point wiring compared to circuit boards that would get 'tin whiskers', salt creep and buildup, and general wetness from humidity was the main reason looking at them. They're not terribly expensive either which is another good point. I don't listen to FM radio or store CD's on the boat so no need for the auto/marine radio type unit (although I use the one I have now since it has the USB input slot).

 

[Daveinet]

...I have my opinion, and some of you will just have to laugh at me, but I did my own audition on my own terms with their braided speaker wire... This was a long time ago when I KNOW my ears were still good. I was doing acoustic designs at the time... Full-range loudspeakers. I will not even begin to try to tell you why, and I really don't care. Same amp, same music source, same speaker, A/B switch comparing Kimber with equivalent gage zip cord speaker wire. It was obvious. Switch the wires so A is B and B is A. The difference followed the wire, so it was not induced by the switch.

But was the zip cord fine stranded? It is pretty well accepted that fine stranded speaker wire does make a difference. As for AC cable, that's a funny one, as for it to have any meaning, means the power supply in the amp is of very poor design. One of the most interesting gimmicks was the damper rings for CDs. While the demonstration was very easy to hear, what was not so easy was to figure what they did to the CD player to make the error correction so bad that it was audible. I'm betting they figured out how to bend the motor shaft just enough to make the CD difficult to read. Then their damping ring just magically fixed it.

One other thing that comes to mind about speaker wire. If you have a poorly damped amplifier, you won't ever hear the difference that the speaker wire would make, especially if the recording has no transients to speak of.

But the biggest question no one has addressed is do your amps go to eleven?

 

[Johnb]

All I want is to never hear other peoples music.

 

[philwsailz]

But was the zip cord fine stranded? It is pretty well accepted that fine stranded speaker wire does make a difference. As for AC cable, that's a funny one, as for it to have any meaning, means the power supply in the amp is of very poor design. One of the most interesting gimmicks was the damper rings for CDs. While the demonstration was very easy to hear, what was not so easy was to figure what they did to the CD player to make the error correction so bad that it was audible. I'm betting they figured out how to bend the motor shaft just enough to make the CD difficult to read. Then their damping ring just magically fixed it.

One other thing that comes to mind about speaker wire. If you have a poorly damped amplifier, you won't ever hear the difference that the speaker wire would make, especially if the recording has no transients to speak of.

But the biggest question no one has addressed is do your amps go to eleven?

You walked right into that one, without even knowing it...

Yes, yes they do...

 

[Ken Cross]

You walked right into that one, without even knowing it...

Yes, yes they do... View attachment 120026

Okay I'm still laughing.
Ken

 

[philwsailz]

For sure it is a job, but we try to make it fun...

 

[Brian S]

Audiophile story:

When my friend and I were in High School, we were into stereos. His Dad was an electrical engineer, and he was going to follow in those footsteps. He wrote his senior English paper (which you had to do in order to graduate HS) on the history and development of the Compact Disc. So, he knew stuff. Me, I liked having cool stereo stuff, and listening to music.

So I dated a girl, and he was friends with her too. Her father fancied himself an audiophile. He was one of these guys who had all sorts of crazy expensive stuff. He maintained that he could hear an audible degradation in the sound quality of a Compact Disc once it had been played about a dozen times. Really? It's a laser that reads flashes from a shiny aluminum layer (or gold, if you bought one of those "audiophile" CDs...) There's no possibility of digital signal degradation of a CD, unless there are lots of scratches, or the polycarbonate delaminates from the aluminum layer and the shiny aluminum starts to oxidize. Now a vinyl album, that has friction from the stylus... That I could believe over time...

Anyhoo, the father had just bought new speakers, I think, and he had a new Telarc release of the 1812 Overture. This was in the days when CDs had DDD stamped on them, or AAD (or ADD.) The first letter was recording, second was mixing, and third was production. A or D referred to analog or digital. So, the super desirable was (it was assumed) to get a DDD disc, with the recording done digitally, mixdown done digitally, and everything on CD was always digital. The idea was there was no sound quality lost in a full digital process. (Of course, a properly executed Analog recording, mixed well in Analog, then encoded Digitally for a CD could easily beat the quality of a poorly executed DDD...But Telarc had a good reputation for well executed production.)

So, the dad puts this swanky gold stamped Telarc DDD 1812 Overture on for us, with the final movement which included recording of actual canons firing, and turns it up. Well, don't you know his fancy amp maxed out on the canon fire, clipped, and flapped the speaker elements against the stops! He was like "I don't understand, this system..." On our way home, my best friend tells me about amp clipping, and how he could ruin the speakers flapping 'em like that.

I can't remember if the dad had a California Audio Labs CD player that replaced the output sections with tubes (instead of solid state) or not.

I guess that's what happens when you have more money than knowledge...

 

[Brian S]

You walked right into that one, without even knowing it...

Yes, yes they do... View attachment 120026

"Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?"

"[pause] These go to eleven."

 

[Daveinet]

Brian, I must ask, Did you date my daughter???
Its probably a good question to ask is how many speakers have been destroyed by that specific recording. While neither of my amps will really clip, as they have peak limiters built in, I did eventually cause the cones to rupture on my Vegas. The cone over extended, which put a crease in the cone. Over time, that crease eventually failed, and the cone came apart. I bought a recone kit from CerwinVega before they failed, but due to kids and family, the speakers sat unused in my basement for 15 years. About 5 years ago, I finally broke out the kit and reconed them. It was so nice to have them back again. Correspondingly, that was also about the same time I got back into sailing. Truth be told, it was the line in the song, "If there is one thing in my life that is missing, its the time that I spend alone, sailing on the cool and bright clear water". Caused me to take a step back and look at a lot of things in my life that had just gone by, speakers, sailing, and motorcycling.

 

[jerry]

OOPS Thought I was on audiokarma forums.
Clipping - bad. Leads to blown tweeters. (BP-30's)

 

[walt]

By the way.. I was wrong about the clipping waveform Jackdraw posted earlier.

I was reading about tube amps and came across the source of that picture he posted
http://kenrockwell.com/audio/why-tubes-sound-better.htm

I thought this was a really good read from someone who isnt trying to sell you an amp plus understands things. Worth reading if you want to understand this a little more (and who doesnt want to understand more about tube audio amps).

You "can" get a distortion similar to what is shown in that picture by band limiting so that you remove higher order harmonics. However, that waveform shown is of a 1Khz tone so at least the first 19 harmonics are in the 20Khz amplifier audio bandwidth and would not have any filtering.

And, something we had not discussed..

From that article

Anyone picky enough to be reading this article probably also worries about how to enjoy music after a limited nuclear exchange

. If you plan on being near a nuclear blast but still want good quality audio (or at least have an amplifier that still sort of works), you might start thinking about getting a tube amp.

 

[philwsailz]

By the way.. I was wrong about the clipping waveform Jackdraw posted earlier.

I was reading about tube amps and came across the source of that picture he posted
http://kenrockwell.com/audio/why-tubes-sound-better.htm

I thought this was a really good read from someone who isnt trying to sell you an amp plus understands things. Worth reading if you want to understand this a little more (and who doesnt want to understand more about tube audio amps).

You "can" get a distortion similar to what is shown in that picture by band limiting so that you remove higher order harmonics. However, that waveform shown is of a 1Khz tone so at least the first 20 harmonics are in the 20Khz amplifier audio bandwidth and would not have any filtering.

And, something we had not discussed..

From that article . If you plan on being near a nuclear blast but still want good quality audio (or at least have an amplifier that still sort of works), you might start thinking about getting a tube amp.

Oh yeah. EMP. That is why KX-school Russian fighter jets used tubes... That's their claim anyway.

 

[Daveinet]

I was reading about tube amps and came across the source of that picture he posted
http://kenrockwell.com/audio/why-tubes-sound-better.htm...

The first sentence should throw up a million red flags, and should put the whole article up as suspicious and highly biased.

Tube amplifiers sound better because of the euphonic distortions they add to the music, as well as plenty of other reasons I'll cover below.

This sentence clearly points out that his definition of "better" is suspect, as he presumes it is desirable to "add" something to the audio path. Once the end product hits the consumer, it should be presented as accurately as possible, as intended by the producers who mixed it. All the intended desirable distortion that is intended is already mixed in. It should be noted that as popular as old tube preamps are, few bother to use them directly, as their desirable characteristics have been modeled in software, and produced digitally. As far as microphones, I've used the Neumann U47s, U67s, and U87s, but my go to large diaphragm is still an AKG 414C, which has a FET pre-amp. (It must be the "C" version, as they changed FETs in the "B" version) It is much preferred for it's purity and uncolored sound.
I had to laugh when the article referenced a Crown D75, which is probably one of the worst sounding "pro" amplifiers around. He also talks about amplifiers which use capacitors to decouple the DC from the output. Fact is, nobody uses capacitors on the output as most good amplifiers are DC coupled. Negative feedback?? For the last 30 years, your high end amplifiers have used a feed forward technique, which then uses summing in the final output stage. BTY, I have an old 50 watt tube amp that you can disable the negative feedback. It sounds horrible without it, so tube amps are dependent on negative feedback as well.
In my past life, I worked for a Pro-audio dealer. We also had a full fledged music studio as part of the dealership. As a result, we were dealers for Crown, QSC, Hafler, Carver, Stewart, and Bryston, plus a few others we had in for repair. Without any doubt, the Stewart beat everything we compared it to, with Carver running a close second. I did not have the opportunity to do a true A-B comparison, with the Bryston, but I would certainly put it in the same realm as the Stewart or the Carver. For true accuracy, for everything everyone claimed about the McIntosh, we found it to be disappointing in an A-B test. Interestingly, I have found is the output impedance of the amplifiers seamed to have affect on the accuracy of the amplifier more than anything else. I've also discovered that some speakers will show up a weak amplifier much worse than others. I had a long conversation with one of the engineers at Stewart. In their development, their development, they happened to be using some speaker with a extremely nasty impedance curve. Sure the speaker was 8 ohms at 1K, but as I recall, it went as low as a 1/2 ohm at 200 Hz or some crazy thing. Probably a nasty crossover design.

 

[SFS]

Audiophile story:
I can't remember if the dad had a California Audio Labs CD player that replaced the output sections with tubes (instead of solid state) or not.

I had a California Audio Labs Delta transport and Alpha D/A converter (the pre 24/96 version, this was 1995) that I really enjoyed enormously for 20 years. Just sold them last year. Thanks for the memory.

 

[Brian S]

Brian, I must ask, Did you date my daughter???

Daveinet, this was in Newark, Delaware circa '83-'84. I don't know that her family was ever into sailing. At the time, I wasn't a great boyfriend (was anyone everx a good boyfriend in High School?) but we remained friends after the breakup.

The speakers in question were vaguely pyramidal/triangular shaped. Actually, sorta more coffin shaped, if I recall. I don't think they were Cerwin Vegas. At that time, the commonly available Cerwin Vegas I knew about were kinda boomy speakers that played rock music loudly. Even Bose was making cheap consumer level speakers. I had a pair of ported speakers called Omnivectors. http://worldwide.bose.com/productsupport/en_us/web/omnivector/page.html They were horribly boomy speakers (I've always felt that almost all Bose speakers have a characteristic mid-bass hump that is particularly pronounced with male vocals) and they had this plastic diffuser over the tweeter. Imagine laying a book open, and arranging some pages sticking up through the arc of the book. Kinda like that. They were driven by a pretty cool JVC integrated amp with a 7 band equalizer built in. It all went off to college with me, and those speakers participated in some epic cross-floor noise battles using Sigue Sigue Sputnik as source material.

Then, one summer when I was home, our house was burglarized. I was very upset that not only did they steal my stereo, but they also stole my We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It album which was on the turntable. It took me years to piece that album together with downloaded versions of the songs. At least I still had the sleeve. Until some company reissued it on CD. Woot! But I digress...

My buddy and I went around checking out equipment of moderate upgrade level for the insurance company to buy for me. I wound up with some decent level Denon equipment, and Infinity 3 way acoustic suspension speakers. The claims rep said I did all the work for her, picking my stuff out.

I had those Infinity speakers until 3 years ago. I had replaced both woofers due to foam surround disintegration. I gave the speakers to an ex-girlfriend, so that I could tolerate listening to movies on her system. The Infinitys were replaced by a pair of ADS L-780 speakers. I had to find them on eBay, since they haven't been made since probably the mid to late 90's. My friend had bought a pair brand new. He has since bought another pair (or two) off eBay, and I have 2 pairs. Never gonna give them up! I had a voice coil blow on one woofer. Thankfully, I live very near to a guy who rebuilds drivers, and he was able to repair for me. $80 was worth it to keep my L-780's going!

I'm nowhere near audiophile level, but I like to think I have a nice sounding system!

 

[Daveinet]

Something worthy of note: If your foam surrounds have disintegrated, the surround can easily be replaced. I have replaced just the surround on several woofers. Surrounds can be bought on the internet fairly cheap.

...At that time, the commonly available Cerwin Vegas I knew about were kinda boomy speakers that played rock music loudly.

Yes, it depends on what you buy. The Vegas that I have use a cloth spider surround, so they do not have that characteristic boominess that foam surrounds do. That is rare amongst consumer speakers. I measured then to be within 1db from 50hz to 15khz (that is all the wider my spectrum analyzer did at the time.) The LF cross over was at 250hz, with 2- 7 inch polypropylene midranges. You never heard a nicer sound on strings except for the very expensive planer drivers. I suppose I was an odd duck listening to Telarc's recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons at greater than concert levels.

I do have a sharp contrast story in my sailboat. I have yet to install any sound in my boat. On my last vacation, the whole family was out for a night sail. The moon brightly lit the whole lake as it reflected on the water. My daughter being resourceful called up her best friend and had her play Moonlight Sonata on the piano, while we listened to it through her cell phone. I had a small bucket that we placed the phone in, to give is a barrier to focus the sound so we could her it from her speaker phone. While the quality was limited, it was the highlight of our vacation.