T.H.E. Droid

Unless your old panel was delivering very low voltage, but not enough to trip anything, it's unlikely anything changed. I think it's just human nature to try to see some kind of improvement for an expensive update that was unneeded.

reading this thread, it's amazing how rediculous some of these gearhead conversations can get. Kind of like those guys with 2000 HP engines in street cars or the ultimate male fantasy, the 36-incher. Or 10,000 watt car stereos. All silly, all expensive to the point of the absurd, and all useless. Probably cheaper just to hire some homeless person to hit you in the side of the head in time to the music.[6]

Sure, why not? CF is inert and everything is bonded together with epoxy resin, so a light cleaning with a damp cloth (or even a good dusting with one of those big, gentle makeup brushes should cause no harm. Remember CF tends to be stiff and brittle so don't apply any more pressure than you have to if you're not sure how thick the composite is made.

I guess it boils down to whether you're an "audiophile" or a music lover. IMO, audiophiles are never happy, no matter how much $$$ they throw at it, because they're more into the equipment than the music. Music lovers are just the opposite, and generally fixate more on getting something that does a good basic job of reproduction without getting rediculous. I guess if you can sit down an enjoy a cylinder record, 78 or Edison disc, you'll also enjoy an LP, CD, or just about any other media that delivers the goods.

While cactus needles are recommended, certainly using real steel needles and replacing correctly is a good "point." The discs were made for that and will last fine. However, I wonder why you don't use a modern table? I use an Empire 598 II with a Stanton cart and the results are awesome. OTOH, I'd love to hear a 78 played on an "audiophile" system of the day it was released. I recall wishing I had the 200.00 the lady wanted for a showroom pristine Brunswick 78 console back in the 70's when I lived in Big Spring, TX. The lady was in her 70's and she and her husband had pruchased it new and kept it perfect. I'm sure it would have sounded great. Dave Most people who play around with phonographs miss the the advice to change the needle with each playing, or think it's marketing hype. I buy them by the bucket load and cost is not very high. Giving a newly procured disc a good cleaning seems to help more than anything. I have a nice variety of players including a tall Brunswick high end machine, an L-door Victrola, several Edisons, and some portables including the Victrola VV50. Probably my favorite, though, is a really nice teak Danish modern console with a Drexel cabinet and guts by Magnavox. I plays extremely well and has a nice three-channel tube system. I would like to add a modern turntable setup and almost snagged one last year, but I got too busy and it got away. Key is to find the right turntable like the belt-drive Empire you mention. None of my modern turntables have 78 RPM so I wouldn't be able to pop in the Stanton and play. Aside from listening, it would be great to transcribe some of my favorites and reduce the wear and tear. I've done that with a lot of the LP's that are out of print and irreplacable.

I will agree with you that the latter part of my argument is somewhat general, but no tube amplifier designer can violate the laws of physics and get away with it. That happens in the marketing department.

I agree. My vinyl collection goes back to the 1950's, and I've always owned the best turntable I could afford at the time, so even my early records still play very well. My 78 collection goes a lot farther back than that, and I've found that as long as the record wasn't trashed before I got it, a good cleaning works wonders. And I do play my 78's on steel-needle phonographs.

Actually, it's important to clean a new record because the pressing process uses release agents that remain on the record and they tend to attract and stick dust. Removing them as well as treating the record with an antistatic compound helps the record stay cleaner.

Glad to hear someone has tried it with Khorns, that gives me a bit more confidence that it will work. Now I just need two more amps.....

Yes, I think that's a very valid point. I know with my Summits, I've moved them around a bit and now they sit about a foot from the wall and five feet in from the corners. No such option on the Khorns unless I build side sheets for them, also not an option. I know the Khorns can sound much better, and I'm not giving up on them yet.

The connections between the voice coil and terminals are very delicate and can even be damaged by applying too much heat on the driver terminals. They can also suffer from cold solder joints. If you are not good at soldering or have the correct wattage soldering pencil you should leave the job to an experienced technician.

Since Watts = volts X amps, then they must produce 1/5th the current in the case you mention. Unfortunately, most loudspeaker drivers are current machines (coils) so drive current is much more important than drive voltage. Couple that with low damping factors, tube equipment is a recipe for inaccurate, underdamped bass.

Actually I think the main reason the current generation has embraced MP3 is because they can copy (us old farts call it stealing) music with little effort.

That's actually a separate point, and I'm not sure you are making the point you intended. After all, isn't it these old prop jockeys that engineered all those analog recordings that ended up on vinyl? Flying a jet is exactly the same as flying a prop plane, after all, the laws of aerodynamics remain the same, only things can happen a lot faster in a jet. And I hate to break this to you, but pilots don't learn to fly in a jet, they learn in a prop plane. That aside, I do agree that the weak point of music reproduction has always been the capture and engineering process. It's darn hard to capture music! However, there are a lot of things that have improved with digital, like lossless multi-track recording and mixing. I think some of the microphone technology has also been much improved but on the other hand, basement studios, synthesizers and things like autovoicing have seriously hit audio quality. I guess you'd have to show me that someone producing music for vinyl today has a better signal chain than everyone else, especially when producing for media with a very limited audience. But the original question was "why vinyl?" If you can handle some of vinyl's shortcomings (which, by the way, made the vast majority of record buyers abandon the format) there's no reason why someone can't enjoy vinyl.

The CD has less information on it than vinyl due to the processing capability of chips when the CD was first created. An extremely simplistic comparison is a stair case. Draw a diagonal line up the incline of the stairs and assume that represents the actual sound wave. The vinyl will store the wave as the diagonal line. The CD will store is as a sequence of stepped measurements and when replayed it looks like a set of stairs. When the CD player is reading the disk in real time and cannot re-read the bit covered by a finger print, as it can't stop the music by saying "hang on a minute can you repeat that again please I missed that bit", so it replays a previously read bit from it's buffer and the hope is that you won't notice this. When you rip it to your computer, there is NO SUCH PRESSURE TO PERFORM so it will re-read it a few times before it spits the dummy and gives up. Your CD player will make up it's own version of the jumping record when it gets a bit much "under pressure". haha The previous request was for something in the order of $500.00 The ARCAMrDAC will be in that price range and is very effective in getting the best out of the USB port on any computer. Nothing else to buy if you have sufficient space on your computer hard drive. Wolfson chips are also used by Cambridge and Rega. My ARCAMrDAC is magnificent and extremely portable so I take it to gigs and link it to my MSi X340 netbook. Since CD's are inferior storage mediums to vinyl then this combination gives me the best from a CD as the computer has "no pressure" to get the information of the CD in real time. It's a shame to have to read these long pseudo-technical explanations from someone: 1. who has an obvious agenda 2. who doesn't know how CD systems actually work 3. who can repeat the technical jargon but doesn't know how things like interpolation and how oversampling works.

Your record for inaccuracy and hyperbole grows with leaps and bounds at every posting. That grammaphone you show doesn't play vinyl, that's still about 40 years in the future. I understand what you're trying to say, but your point raises more questions than it answers. First of all, if CD's are an infant technology, why haven't they evolved? With analog stylus reproduction, the technology evolved from vertical groove recording on tin foil to wax cylinders to lateral groove recording on discs, then to long play, then finally to vectored groove technology (stereo) and finally to quadraphonic, which failed primarily because vinyl simply couldn't accurately reproduce the high frequencies where you claim it is superior. Don't quote those double-blind tests unless you can cite the actual reference. These so-called "tests" seem to exist only in the land of audiophile mumbo jumbo. The simple fact that the music listening public voted for CD with their wallets in a truly massive way says that everyone could hear the difference. Before I bought my first CD player, I actually purchased CD's of several of my favorite vinyl albums, and I could certainly hear how much better the CD's sounded. And that begs the question why CD hasn't evolved? It would be simple to have a CD system with a much higher sample rate than we do now. In Video, we went from reel-to-reel video tape, to pro cartride, to home cartridge, to cassette, to DVD and now to blu ray in about the same time period and CD has remained unchanged. Why? The answer is simple. It sounds great. Remember, we're living in a digital world where downloaded music comes in lower sample rate versions than CD, and people seem happy with that, too. Bottom line is that CD has more than enough frequency response for the general listener, whose hearing starts dropping off around 16khz and whose equipment can't produce frequencies higher than that anyway. Now I would consider myself a critical listener, and I have no complaints either. While I have certainly hear a lot of bad CD recordings, I've hear at least as many bad vinyl recordings. My reason for playing vinyl (and older technologies) is to be able to listen to music that isn't available on modern media. Given both CD and vinyl recordings, I've compared the two and always prefer the CD. There's certainly a place for vinyl, just as there's a place for my old 78's and my Edison cylinder players, but vinyl does not have any mystical qualities that only a few special people can appreciate. To me, that's kind of like "art experts" who stand around crowing about a room full of dirt, and looking down on people who see a room full of dirt. That borders on delusion, and there's plenty of that going around in audiophile circles.

As I've studied my Khorns, I've come to the conclusion that there are a few "dirty secrets" that need addressing, so I'm considering some form of (at least) bi-amping. My Khorns had a blown tweeter and old crossovers so I ordered new CT125's and the matching A/4500 crossovers from Bob Crites. That resolved the blown tweeter issue, and in agreement with Bob's design goals, keeps the midrange horn operating in it's optimum range. Bass has been a bigger problem. Bob's design uses a first order low pass filter for bass, where Klipsch used a second order. As far as I can hear, the more gentle slope the Crites' crossover results in too much higher frequency content in the bass and a "muddy" or "woody" resonance. I switched back to the Klipsch second order filters for an improvement but in my opinion, the bass can still be improved, so at this point I'm considering using a crossover that allows higher slopes and going to bi amping. The dirty secret I mentioned is driver phasing. When you "stretch out" the folded horn of the Khorn and compare the equivalent driver position with the positions of the mid and HF drivers, there is quite a bit of difference in driver positions. That means that sounds being produced in the overlap regions of the drivers are arriving a different times, which creates both phase distortion and room modes. It's pretty much impossible to create a phase-coherent version of the Khorn, so you're stuck with this problem. In my case, I've noticed the Khorn does have some serious issues with room modes, most likely caused by this problem coupled with the characteristics of horn projection. One possible solution I've looked at is using a speaker management system like the Behringer DCX2496 Ultradrive Pro. This crossover allows triamping, but more importantly has full control over slopes and crossover points, and allows time delays to correct speaker phasing. I've hesitated because it will take a tremendous amount of effort to get the system set up and balanced as well as buying two more amps, and I'm not sure if the Khorns merit this much effort. Frankly, I like my JBL Summits just as much as the Khorns at this point and they don't have the problems that I'm experiencing with the Khorns.

The problem is the question. Do you really want to ask if a tube amplifier with a certain power rating has the same bass as a solid state amp of the same power rating? The answer should be yes, of course. The misconception about tubes probably comes from the fact the tube amplifiers generally have lower output ratings than solid state. It's not unusual to find SS amps with output ratings in the 200w/chan range, but that would be an unusual tube amplifier. And often, many of the best tube amps are class A designs, which generally put out under 10 watts. Even then, a 10 watt class A tube design should have about the same bass capabilities as a 10 watt solid state amp. As for damping factor, that has more effect on the quality of the bass than the volume of the bass. SS amps typically have much higher damping factor than tube designs and can thus have more bass accuracy. And since bass content often includes some very high energy transients, having a higher power amplifier can make the difference in accuracy. My vintage Scott LK48 integrated amp has been relegated to a secondary system with small bookshelf speakers because it doesn't have the power for my main system, and yes, the symptom of not having enough power is degraded bass response at higher volumes. It simply "wimps out" in a way that I can easily hear. Bottom line is that you need enough power to handle your normal listening levels and the speakers you are driving. Someone with Khorns can get by with a lot less power than someone with much less efficient loudspeakers. If you're considering spending some money on tube equipment, I urge you to get something that you can return if you don't like the way it sounds with your equipment. Given that so many tube designs are hand built, they can get quite expensive on a per-watt basis, so you want to make sure you will get what you expect.

Oh yeah, the high frequency content on CD's is so accurate, Golly, an illustration of sample aliasing from a high school computer text book. But I'll bite--- If the sample rate you show is 44.1Khz of a CD, then the HF waveform you show is a 10/11ths the frequency-- we can count in analog, can't we? That makes it approximately 40Khz. So I have a few questions: 1. Do your speakers reproduce 40Khz tones? 2. Can you hear 40Khz tones? 3. Anybody playing music with a lot of 40Khz tones in it? 4. Can your vinyl record 40Khz tones and can your cartridge transduce them? If you want to discuss technology, please stick to technology and skip the wishful thinking and audiophile mumbo jumbo. [8-)]

CD's achieve much higher channel separation and soundstage than any LP. (Not uncommon to hear the soundstage shifting on an LP as the cartridge wobbles on not perfectly centered pressings) The grit and sand you describe is called high frequency content, much of which is missing on LP's. My elderly uncle has the same problem. HF content that I can clearly hear as part of the music, he descibes as "noise" or "distortion" simply because he has age-induced hearing loss. You might want to consider a hearing aid, but in your case, avoid a digital one. [] I love the comment on not wanting to "hear every friggin note on a recording." Reminds me of Mad King Ludwig telling Mozart that his opera had "too many notes." [:'(]

Well, vinyl recordings don't suffer the brutal compression that many digital recordings often exhibit (but that's more a critique of production than the end format). Huh? Vinyl has a fraction of the dynamic range capability of CD's so recordings were compressed in dynamic range, and tonal compression was also used because of the limited tonal range in the highs and physical inability to record large bass excursions. Those of you with some vintage equipment can turn off the RIAA equalization and see what vinyl really sounds like. I like to think of Vinyl as the "Bose 901" of the music world. Sounds bad without being equalized. Not that I hate vinyl-- I don't, and have a record collection that includes lots of vinyl as well as 78's and even cylinders, but disc records are a very limited media.

That's retailer-ese for "The price is high but our margin is low." They'd much rather resell something to you that has a 300% or 400% margin. Given the rather pedestrian tastes of the public these days, I think they're more interested in lower priced big margin equipment.

Anyone who spends top dollar for Mcintosh equipment should expect a dead low noise floor, that's one of the things the money is being spent for. (And yes, there actually are products out there with top-dollar engineering rather than audiophile hype.) Generally any decent interconnect cable brand with clean connections will give excellent performance. Hiss comes from the electronics, hum and buzz from cables. The hiss you hear in your system is coming from your electronics. Given the same model amps, you need to look at your preamp and/or music source.

Just to clear up a misconception, all the Speakerlab K models were designated SK's. There were different sub designations such as SKs, SKi, SKf, SKu, etc. for differnt setups. Speakerlab sold built speakers, driver kits with plans, knocked-down kits, and unfinished but built systems. The only option in terms of drivers was getting the HT350 tweeter instead of the HT3500, and over the years the Speakerlab K crossover evolved between open frame and cased designs. One thing I don't like about the cabinet design is the tweeter placement off to on side of the midrange horn. That makes the speakers asymmetrical, which implies that it's possible to end up creating room modes that are uneven from left to right, which can screw up your soundstage. I prefer the symmetrical vertical arrangment of the Klipschorn. Of course if you are building your own K's, simply make the mid/high cab front taller and place the tweeter over the midrange horn. I have had both Khorns and K's, so I can compare the contruction. My K's did have side sheets, which I liked, but they do add a lot of weight to an already heavy speaker. Depending on how you will place them in your home, you can use side sheets or omit them, a luxury when you build your own. One thing I really dislike about the Speakerlab design is the monolithic slab front, which incorporates the midrange/tweeter driver mounting panel in the front panel of the bass cabinet. When compared with the removable "top hat" section of a Klipschorn, the Khorn seems very elegant and the Speakerlab rather crude. I recommend you try to copy the Khorn design of a separate mf/hf upper cabinet if you can. Construction wise, use the best quality solid-core 3/4" plywood (not sure what the metric designation is for that in UK) that you can buy, especially for the inner woofer cabinet, which will develop the highest pressures. Pay close attention to the quality of the joints and that they are well sealed. About the only place I can see using 1/2" plywood is the side sheets, and I don't even recommend it there. You can probably get by with good MDF for the top and bottom sheets and parts of the top hat. As for special tools, about the only place you'll use that expensive plunge saw is cutting the driver slots. A good table saw with sleds and angle jigs is your best bet and generally those accessories you build yourself. Crites components are fine, but I recommend you have Bob build you a second order bass low pass filter instead of the first order design he includes on the A/4500 crossover. I found the stock second order low pass filter worked better and made the bass response much cleaner. You might even want to consider some of ALK's high slope designs to better separate the frequency bands. Low order crossovers can result in a lot of modal distortion where both drivers are producing the same frequency, and at best the Khorn design has some real challenges when it comes to room modes and phase distortion. His tweeters are excellent and resolve the problem created by the delicate EV tweeter, which is namely having to be crossed over at too high a frequency. As Bob explains, that pushes the frequency response of the midrange horn to it's limit. Bob's CT125 tweeters are very happy producing down to the 4500 hz range, which keeps the midrange horn running in it's optimum range. Good luck on your project. Take your time and do a good job and you'll create nice furniture that everyone (except probably your wife) will enjoy. My wife called my SK's "the packing crates" and she has named my Khorns "the black monoliths." In fairness, I have given her the living room, which now it looks like Laura Ashley and Martha Stewart were wrestling for a hand grenade when it exploded.

Well, one area where decent stereo has advanced a lot since the 1950's is in background noise. I notice my Heresy's are very good at reproducing and projecting hiss from my vintage Sansui 5000, so you want to be sure that any component you get is in top shape and doesn't produce hiss or hum. Nothing against tube equipment per se, but hiss and hum are common problems and I think you'll be quickly turned off by your Heresy's if they sit there hissing at you all the time. I do notice that my more modern Adcom amp/preamp is dead quiet compared ot the Sansui, but I will admit that the Sansui is in original condition and could probably benefit from being recapped. In any case, make sure you can check out the vintage equipment before you buy.