Vic Trola's Audiophile Blog

2011-07-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

Its 192K Degrees in here!

Recently I had a discussion with many of you regarding 192K software downloads from HD Tracks and Reference Recordings. I also have had discussions about with some of you with respect to ripping vinyl at 192K and playing it back – expecting it to sound more like vinyl, you see, because its 192K. As I stated many times before, 192K is just not ready for audiophile prime time. And unless you do some intensive lobbying at Texas Instruments, Anologue devices, Wolfson et.al., the wait will just get longer.

Digital audio, once you venture past your CD player, can make you down right dizzy. In our digital audio road show we do try to make you dizzy (more about our road show in an upcoming BLOG). We play music through USB and the Musiland Monitor 02. Then we ask, which one sounds better? Low and behold, it’s the Musiland, by like 100%. Then we try and play 192K through the PC. We use the MD 10 modified because it is: 1) a good DAC with great sound 2) probably one of the best 192K DACs that we have heard and 3) it displays the sampling rate right on the display. Low and behold, out of the few windows players that will actually play the 192K track, most of them down sample the music to a more USB friendly 48K. That’s because my friends, and I have said this over and over, native USB does not support anything greater than 48K.

Ok, you tell me you need to replace these drivers with async ones that support 192K. Two issues: 1) you need an async DAC to do this and 2) how many USB DACs do you know of that reliably support 192K USB (and I mean reliably) and sound good? If you do your research, you will find the pickens for USB based 192K rather slim.

Such is the problem with folks that spent their hard earned cash on the Amarra product, which looks like you could download it for free any day now. It’s great that Apple in the latest Snow Leapord releases will be supporting natively USB Async drivers that plug into Amarra. What’s not so great is that there is very few audiophile quality DACs that you can plug 192K USB into and get it to sound like you’re not listening in the latrine on a long Southwest flight.

The Musiland DACs are the only DACs that I have heard that can process 192K reliably from a Coax / BNC connection and sound good. ( As of 7/1/11, we do not offer any DACs via USB that can support 192K) After many conversations with Audio gd, we got them to drop their efforts at a 192K native USB DAC (and drop the USB port from the REF 7. The audio gd exception is the digital interface, which King Wa uses in conjunction with M2Tech HiFace). As a matter of fact, King Wa agrees, as I do, to drop the whole 192K thing all together until someone makes a decent 192K receiver chip.

Yet another problem with USB 192K, is the amount of EMI interference and latency that the PC introduces. Even with the Async drivers, keeping step is critical to keep jitter low. A missed or heavily damaged packet causes a “guess” by the DAC as to what the packet originally looked like. Because of the SPDIF conversion protocol does not allow for error re-transmit, the chance of getting anything close to 44.1K jitter levels at 192K is next to nil. And don’t try to convince me with the canard that your Benchmark DAC re-clocks jitter. While any cheap DAC can re-clock jitter, it cannot fixed the damage that jitter does to the music. Once the music packet is damaged, its damaged.

As of 7/1/11 the DIR 9001 remains the king of input receiver chips in terms of sound quality and jitter rejection. It has sounded the best for some 6 years now and I don’t see / hear anything new on the horizon. One caveat, the DIR 9001 only goes up to 96K.

See what I mean?

All the best,
Vic

2011-05-21T16:30:00.000-05:00

The Top 10

Stop Looking At the Amp

This is usually the first thing I ask when you call me for Amplifier Help. I will then ask the size of your room. I am obviously trying to match an amplifier, price point to your speaker room. Overpowering and/or over damping a speaker will make it sound cold. Under powering a speaker will make it sound thin and closed. Yes, there is an amp for every speaker / room combination.

Stop Paying Attention To The DAC Chip

I know that you have heard me say this time and time again. Any designer can make a good chip sound bad and a bad chip sound good. The most important part of a DAC that effect sound quality are in order 1) the filtering that designer chooses to use, 2) the Analogue output stage and finally the DAC Chip.

Don’t go Crazy with Sampling

I get this all the time. The other day I was talking to some poor sole that ripped all his vinyl (some 300 albums) into 192K files and placed them on his PC. He called me up and said that the 192K DAC did not good with these samples. As a matter of fact, it sounds the same as a 44.1K sample. That’s because, and I keep saying this, USB cannot handle 192K without USB driver replacements. The only way to get 192K USB out of computer is the use the M2Tech, Musiland Monitor 02 or the Musiland MD 11. Better yet, place it on a CyberServer and you will eliminate most of the noise that a PC produces. Again, a PC is not a good playback device; it’s a computing device.

Stop using your CD Player as a Transport

Your CD player was not really meant to properly output digital S/PDIF. Quality transports have correct buffering, error correcting and buffer management that make sound good. When your CD player plays a CD, most of this circuitry is next to the converter chip, so it does not have to worry about error correction. When you use it as a transport, your CD player runs the digital output naked to the DAC without any significant error correction. In other words, it comes out with errors galore. Ouch!

Stop Paying Too Much Money for Digital Cables

The best USB cable is the shortest USB cable. The best coax cable is the one that “Larry the Cable Guy” uses. It’s always shielded, 75 ohms and has BNC connectors. Coax cable has 10 times more jitter than BNC, and Optical cable has 30- 50 times more jitter than Coax. No serious audiophile uses optical.

Stop Paying Too Much For Mods

The best mod you can do to tube equipment is to change the tubes. Period. Do this, before investing in any modifications.

Stop Paying Too Much For Audio

I had someone call me up the other day and say that the problem with our stuff (and I was not aware that there was a problem) is that it is too low cost, so nobody believes it’s that good. Look, spending $4000 for preamp, really? Ok, let’s do the math, how much, do you think, the individual components in the preamp cost? Let’s say they are using some really excellent caps, transistors / tubes, resistors and switches. But all that can’t be more than $800 right? After, all they are commodity components available from a supply store like Digi-Key. Then there is the case, another say $300 bucks or so? Now, I would add another say 2-3K for intellectual property, but I cannot. The reason is that the secrets are all out, and audio is not rocket science, it’s not even introductory college science, its prep school science. Sampling, Push-Pull, Inductance – all make audio work, this was discovered years ago. There are not any “New” or “Revolutionary” discoveries are there? So, I cannot pay the 2-3K for IP. What I will pay, however are the marketing, sales and profit costs. Say, another $400. There, that’s a fair price for a solid state high end preamp, $1500. For a tube preamp, I am apt to pay a little more for tubes, say $1500 - $2000.

2011-03-24T18:59:00.002-05:00

Now, that’s dumb.

In Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, the author speaks of many strategies for defeating and combating the enemy. One of them is “taking the high ground”, where instead of confronting your advisory directly, you kind of “go around”, thereby devising a completely different strategy in hopes of obtaining a victory later.

Our brick and mortar retailer friends, if they can get past there upturned snobby noses, should take the “high ground” by buckling down with what they do best: rubbing shoulders with industry stalwarts such as Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, McIntosh, Levinson etc… After all, this is their niche: catering to the upper crust, who think this high end boutique paradigm is still “happening”. Instead, our brick and mortar friends are doing something that in my opinion, is, well, dumb.

What’s really dumb is offering Chinese-made equipment at Levinson prices, a strategy that I just cannot figure out. The minute that the internet-o-sphere figures out that the high end boutique brand is really offered on the streets of Shanghai at 1/3 of the price, the brand gets flushed down to loo.

Instead of figuring out hot to sell over priced equipment better, they are getting adroit at disguising the brand rip. A little sleuthing and homework will help you figure out which brand is which. Let me share with you my work.

The Raysonic brand, looks good, but to me, it looks like a Shanling, doesn’t it? There is another company that claims it is an “Austrian Brand”. They take out big ads in Stereophile and Absolute sound. But I was offered to sell a Chinese amp that look mysteriously like the “Austrian Brand” with round chrome faced transformers for much less than these are going for. Then there is another importer who sells CD players and integrated amps made by Shanling but marked up much, much more than the comparable Shanling products. That same importer, by the way, has succeeded in running what was left of the Shanling franchise right into the ground. Likewise, with re-branded Chinese vacuum tubes sold at exclusive distributors with what it seems to be exclusive prices. Note to self, “If you cannot find a Chinese tube on the web from China, then it’s a "markup” brand re-labeled. I thought that the whole reason for buying an import these days is the high value proposition, and not high price proposition. Right? I cannot believe that folks are getting conned into these tubes - they are jsut re-branded stock Shuguangs (P.S. - I am not talking about the treasures).

Jolida had it right, sell high value at discounted prices and offer USA based service and support. The Jolida model is the one we choose to imitate. But, buying a Chinese import at Conrad Johnson prices? Well, that’s plain dumb. Buy the Conrad Johnson.

2011-02-08T15:46:00.000-06:00

Still Evangelizing

Now as ubiquitous as John Boehner's smoking habits, high def TV is still alive and kicking - and growing like July crabgrass. To us audio geeks, we know what high def means; it means high sampling rates and more bits per second. If the high rez sampling rate works for TV, just think of what it can do for music.

The problem confronting audiophiles with 96K-192K, lets just call it high rez, is not finding high definition music, but playing it back properly. If the comparison to high def TV is in tact, then 192K should sound significantly better than 44,1. Alas, in most cases it does not and for some 'philes out there, they can hardly tell the difference. So, back to my original theory: there must be a problem with playback.

As you can clearly see from my CyberServer videos, the PC is the problem. Being a computer jock, I know a little about PCs and USB. The block input / output that USB uses requires a pre-fetch of data blocks to be placed in computer memory, where, it is clobbered to death by other high speed clocks on the mother board and graphics card. Computer memory is not a good place for Oscar Petersen. Its really bad, if Oscar is at 192K. Using your computer for high rez playback is like watching high def TV on the SONY Trinitron: it just was not made for it.

They still can't convince me that the standard USB 2.0 drivers are adequate for high end audio and attaching a well made music "streamer" is the end all. The standard USB drivers are not fast enough for 192K (they were never meant to stream music, you see? ) and can barely do 96K. If audiophiles used DACs like the Matrix mini that display the sampling rate, they would find that most DACs, find so much jitter in the 96K signal that they down sample it to 48K. If the Audio gd DACs find ka ka in the signal, they just shut off, refusing the play the mess. The only way to get 192K and 96K reliably out of a PC is to replace the drivers a la Musiland or M2Tech. While they make a world a difference, you still have the block input / output - pre-fetch problem described earlier.

One easy solution to the USB problem is to get a computer with what is called "streaming" I/O (I/O stands for input / output). Streaming I/O reads a byte - writes a byte. No memory to muck up the sound, no blocks with their choppy latency that translates into jitter. While fairly primitive, streaming I/O is ideal for digital playback. The best operating systems to make use of the streaming I/O are the Unix / Linux brands. Here, a computer programmer can open a music file and specify this somewhat primitive I/O mechanism for the pushing the music file down the stream.

The next fly in the high rez ointment, is latency. Since the computer is not really meant for high speed streaming of anything, latency abounds. The DAC sees latency as jitter, and although the asynchronous USB drivers help, they are not as fast as they need to be so latency prevails. You have to cut latency anywhere you can: on the I/O bus, which carries the digital music, to the hard drive. The hard drive is slowest of the bunch and any increase in I/O speed from the disk yields an appreciable improvement. A solid state drive is about 40% to 50% faster that a conventional hard drive with a motor. Its one drawback is that it is expensive. Like a sports car, you pay for speed.

When you put this all together, a Linux operating system with streaming I/O and a solid state drive, you get CyberServer. I cannot tell you how happy we were to see Byrston trying this same idea out with their new media server. One thing though, the Bryston costs over $2K price tag - although it uses a terabyte. The USB thumb drive that they use, in our opinion, may still be a little too slow. Stick with the faster solid state ones. Ours start at $720.

All the best,
Vic

2011-01-04T12:58:00.002-06:00

They Call Me Mr. Chips

Well, they might as well. I probably have here, at my disposal, a slew of DACS and codecs of all shapes and sizes. I have old Philips TSA1543s, PCM 1702, PCM 1798s PCM 1704, ADM 1852, ADM 1853, all sorts of Delta Sigmas and Wolfsons.

What I find interesting is that you say that each of these chips have a sound of their own. See if this conversation sounds familiar to you:

"Hello, Pacific Valve"
"Yes, I am interested in the Bluto DAC, What chip set does it have?"
"It has an AD1853"
"Oh, forget it, I don't like the sound of that chip."

Really?

For the life of me, as I dig through all the DACs and chips that I have, I cannot correlate a sound signature of the chip with the DAC. I can say that it is easy to make the Analogue Devices chips sound soft, but the Lite CD 22 player has the AD 1853 chip and it sounds anything but soft - as a matter of fact, it has given me joy through its dead neutral sound.

Or how about the ubiquitous PCM 1704UK. I have heard this chip sound soft as in the Lite DAC 60 Modified, sound dynamic as in the Audio gd DAC 19SE, sound romantic as in the Brigatta 2 - well, you get the picture.

The disparity between chips and sound is prevalent in Audio gd's latest round of now discontinued. SABRE DACS. The NFB-1 seems to have the classic SABRE sound - slightly analytical, forward, dynamic. But, the NFB-7 has some of that, but not all of that and sounds more like the REF 7, which means the SABRE sounds like a PCM1704UK - get it?

As I have said before, its not the chip, its the filtering and the output stage that gives the DAC its signature. Take for example the NOS DACs. Some use the TDA1543, some do not - but they all tend to sound the same (dynamic, high energy, "just ok" resolution) probably because of the sampling they use which in turn, effects the filtering. So its really the implementation of the chip and not the sound of the chip itself that contributes to the sound of the DAC. It may be easier, for a DAC designer, to get the sound they want by choosing one chip set over another. But again, they are tailoring the sound, and not using a chip's sonic signature.

All the best,
Vic

2010-11-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

Audio gd of Days Gone By

In case you have not noticed, Audio gd turns products over quite a bit. This is in sharp contrast to rest of Chi-fi, that keeps production around for quite some time. Viz., the Ming Da 7R has been around since the mid 90s, the Bada DC-222 is a hot seller for us and it is in its 4th year (although minor cosmetic and circuit changes occurred along the way). I could go on and on. Audio gd, on the other hand, shuffles the deck quite a bit. If you are an Audio gd owner, you might be tempted to trade yours in (although most of you have not done that yet ‘cause I can rarely find them on the used market), but before you do, please read my Audio gd of Days Gone By.

The ST-3 Headphone Amp
What a wonderful amp this was. For under $300, you got a quite a headphone amp. It was dead quite and ultra dynamic. It gave your headphones a sense of immediacy and presence that only the best headphone amps have. It was cobbled inside a Lite DAC AH box, and what a fine little gem this was.

The DAC 19SE / DAC 19DF
The original DAC 19, and still the best DAC 19 I have ever heard. It was the first DAC to combine the gut thumping realism of drum spank that only the best NOS DACs do, but with the detail and sense of inner space that a only the finest over sampling DACs bring to the table. The DAC 19SE came in a box the size of a Lite DAC 60. I still have my original DAC 19SE, and I still love it. I know, I know, you may disagree with me. The DAC 19DSP is a little to top heavy for me in the upper midrange. The DAC 19DF was the closest thing to it and wanted to be the 19SE when it “grew up”. In mind opinion, the new NFB-2 beats them all (sans my beloved 19SE).

The REF 1 DAC
There was never so neutral Audio gd DAC (in terms of tonal quality from top to bottom) and probably Audio gd’s best resolving DAC. Although it is still slightly warm, the REF 1 was the first DAC (albeit, listening through CyberServer) that let me hear the bowels of a wood piano after the key was struck. Truly a high end reference DAC. REF 1, you will be surely missed.

The Audio gd Compass
Probably was the one of the great buys in audio today. The Compass stole some of the ST-3’s “magic” and combined it with a DAC and line output pre that still today, mops the floor with anything close to its price point of $369.00. Probably one of the longest break in times of any of the headphone amps, the Compass really showed you what it was made of when you fed it great ripped music after about 400 hours of play. The fact that you could achieve this level in headphone amp-diom plus a great DAC and line pre, will make this short-lived treasure a keeper for a long time.

The P2 Preamp
You had to play with it. It was fussy about cables, it was fussy about power cords and conditioners. It took forever to break in. I am not a fan of solid state preamps. But, once you got it right, for the money, it was untouchable (as most Audio gd products are) for a solid state preamp. It gave John Curl overtones in Levinson – like construction. It threw instruments in the sound stage correctly and never smeared. It was no tube pre, but gosh, it knew how play music.

All the best,
Vic

2010-09-15T19:11:00.000-05:00

Welcome Aboard

In case you have not heard, "Sound, by Singer" lost its lease and is selling (or, by the time you read this) has sold, all of its inventory. I am not sure how you "lose your lease". I have never lost one. I can understand not being able to pay your lease, trying to negotiate a new rate and then bowing out of it. But I am not sure how your current lease, if paid, can be lost. I am not, by any means, implying that this is what happened to "Sound by Singer", I am just saying.

How can you be surprised? The market where high end retailers play is really a "House of Cards". I want to bet that Singer was a pretty good business man, but he should have known that it is the same people buying the same goods over and over again, and net new customers must have been very small. In the Obmama stimulus-sized high end audio market (some $1 billion now), we know that high end audio occupies the smallest of bread crumbs.

I have said it over and over again, but it bears repeating: I have never seen an industry go out of its way to shrink its market as well as high end audio has. High end audio insults consumers and then prices them our of the market with politician-speak unscientific preponderances.

I hear that Mr. Singer may go web based and offer high end over the internet. I find this very interesting as web based retail, marketing and distribution is a completely different paradigm than what high end audio retailers are used to.

Welcome aboard, Mr. High End Retailer.

All the best,
Vic

2010-07-14T18:38:00.000-05:00

Playing, with records.

The antique phonograph show is held every year in Union, Illinois next to the Wild West Town. You can buy original Edison cylindrical phonographs, Gramophones( those things with the large horns sticking out of them), and of course Victrolas.

We have our Victrola at the entrance to our living room. Operating the Victrola is a step back in time. Place a record on, crank up the turntable, and place the Sammy Sosa forearm on the record and off you go. You adjusts the volume by operating the two hinged draws in front; open the doors for full volume, close the door for decreased volume. Maintenance is a must, as the needle ( or nail, literally a nail, that is) must be changed ever 2 or 3 78 record sides. This is because the shellac on the record is harder than the needle and wears it down. There are receptacles for old needles and new needles, carved into the top panel of the Victrola.

When I have non-audiophile company over, I try to Linn them. Yes, I have. I have tried to Linn them, Unitrac them, Denon them even Sonus Blue them. I VPI them, Triplanar them, Decca them, Dynavector them. I leave them unimpressed.

But show them the Victrola, and they begin sipping wine and toasting Champagne to a 78 record that sounds like someone blowing their nose in the background while large gall stones of hail is hitting the window. They listen to Nat's original Mona Lisa, Solo Mio and Al Jolson. They listen to "I'll be home for Christmas" as snow gathers on my pine outside my living room window. As they whisper conciliatory comments at my Linn turntable, in a louder voice, they swoon over the Victrola. When you listen to the Victrola, so they say, you are hearing music as they did in 1913. When you take that same 78 and play it back on my system, you are hearing it through 2010 refinement. My system is so offended by the tonal quality of the 78, that it tries to correct and subsequently "ruins" it, or so they say.

In 1913 a Victrola cost as much as a car. When someone had one, they were revered. You went over the Uncule Bill's or grandmas house and actually played records. It was a social event in the parlor where you listened to records and entertained company and discussed the artist - even recollecting when you saw them live. In 2010, I watch people listen to music. They download it from a web site, sometimes legally, sometimes questionably, and listen, solo, blank starred with a cheap pair of headphones, discussing nothing.

Vic

2010-06-18T21:41:00.003-05:00

Buying the best cable.

The manager of the largest mutual fund of the 1980's, Peter Lynch, once remarked that you can tell a company's return to its shareholders by the lobby of the company's headquarters. If the lobby was opulent, he found the return to the shareholders to be less than, say, a lobby with more modest means. So if your stocks have lobbies like Oprah's carriage house, you might want to sell at market.

I think the same holds true for audio cables. Instead of HQ lobby decorating, look at advertising budgets. For the last couple of months now, the back covers of both Stereophile and Absolute Sound featured advertisements from audio cable manufacturers. Not that there is anything wrong with this except for the fact that to advertise in one of these pubs, especially on the back cover, takes mucho bucks. I can see taking the back cover for two or three months, but the last six? Where are they getting all this dough?

While we all know we are over paying for these things, rest assured that no one is playing the high end audio con game better than these cable manufacturers who apparently have a lot of folks fooled into thinking they are actually worth the money. These Bernie Madoff students hit their margin number out of the oark on two counts: the previously mentioned price gouging and the low COGS (Cost of Goods Sold).

COGS cannot be contributing much to their overhead. What would raise their COGS and crush their already exuberant profit margin? Lets see, is it the end plugs? If they claim to make the technical advances on bananas and RCA plugs then how come they do not look any different? They maybe made of some special material in some special way, but how much does that cost? It can't be technology, Volta, Ben Franklin and Ampere all proved many years ago, before 2A3 tubes were invented, that conductance makes it work. I can make the case that conductors sound different (for example, silver sounding better than copper etc) but I cannot make the case for different kinds of copper or pure copper sounding different. Sorry, they are commodities.

Gold, Silver, Copper all trade on the COMEX exchange as commodities. Commodities have fixed prices, and metals are measured by the ounce. I really wanted to know the real price of a cable so I did some price checking. The spot prices on gold, silver, copper per ounce are:

Gold - $1249 / Oz, a solid gold cable, about 16 oz, $19,984
Silver - $19 / oz, a solid silver cable, 16 oz, $304.00
Copper - $ 2.85 / oz, a solid copper cable, 16 oz, $45.60

I figure that 16 oz will get me .5M.

Ah, I think I will go with a solid silver cable. Add about $10.00 for some nice connectors, some rubber tubing etc. - another $5.00 There is a cost of labor + shipping,another $20.00. So my COGS is $339.00.

What about my profit? Well that's easy, if I want to advertise back cover on my favorite magazine, my cost to you is $3700.00. But, you should hear them! They sound better than any cable you ever heard! They are made a special way, with pure lead-free silver ! (get it?)

Please email me if you want to buy my cables, I am working on my back cover ad copy now.

All the best,
Vic

2010-05-13T11:37:00.001-05:00

That 48K Sound!

In the latest issue of the Absolute Sound, I stumbled upon a press release of the new Audio Research DAC, and gee wiz, it has a USB DAC that takes samples up to 48K. Well, gosh oh golly.

If the price of imported equipment is not getting to USA manufacturers, the sheer lack of technology will. It seems that most of them (sans but a few) really understand computer audio or are at least making an attempt. So, my advice is, if you are going to come out with a new USB DAC and use 10 year old technology, then do yourself a favor and omit the USB capability all together and stick to making ridiculously priced preamps, amps and an occasional decent cross over. And don't do that wireless server thing... please, our ears!

There are so many issues with using audiophile grade USB technology that it eludes most high end manufacturers. This will ultimately not be so good for the CES crowd as young upstart companies, who advertise on head fi through tenacious postings, show that the poor USB capability can be solved with software and an inexpensive cable. So, if you are looking for USB capability from the mainstream affluent, my words of advice:

Caveat Emptor.

First, let me say this: as good as you think it sounds, playing music through a USB port is not going to be as good as a decent CD player or transport. And, I don't care if its 96K or 192K on that there computer hard drive - the problems with USB double and triple as the native clock speed increases. There are so many problems with using a computational device (PC) as a music streamer that I cannot list them here. We do a reasonable job explaining this in our videos: the block read/write nature of PCs as opposed to streaming, EMI interference from monitor screens, fans, graphics cards, the USB drivers, slow disk drives... the list goes on.

But, hey I am here to help high end manufactures get their skin from unknowing suckers wishing to over pay for decent sounding technology, so listen up:

First, don't believe those USB converters that claim they can extract 192K from USB without replacing the PC drivers. Now, you can certainly correct the clock and send it up to 192K, but what good is it if you destroyed the resolution of the music to begin with? The only right way to do this is to replace the USB drivers with software that hand shakes with your DAC hardware. In this way, you will be using less of the "re-clocking" trick (and that is what it is, its a trick) and more of the pure music. The next thing to do is use a short USB cable, the shortest that you can possibly run between the USB port and the DAC. (You can still charge your astronomical tuft-hunting prices for this cable, lets say $899? even though you can buy it from Radio Shack, for $1.49. Shhhh! I won't tell anyone)

So there you go, its that easy. Your only problem is your competition. Its out on the web. The Musiland Monitor 02 allows audiophile sound quality through a USB with native 192K clock speeds. And now the bad news: it does all this for $189.00.

Good luck with your 48K sound.

All the best,

Vic

2010-04-13T19:59:00.000-05:00

The Greatest Dangerous Import

The current trade imbalance is giving heartburn to manufacturers and unions alike, who are having just an industrial age Dickens’ of a time digesting the new reality. The current rate of the imbalance is expected to increase proportionally in the next few years. Last November, for example, the gap increased to almost 9.4%. Most high end companies, B&W, Krell, Vincent (Sheng Ya), Musical Fidelity et.al, have their equipment (or in the case of Krell, some of the equipment) made in the same place that puts duck sauce on pancakes.

The biggest import threat to those who want to manufacture and sell audio in the USA, is not the trade imbalance with China, but the import of Chicago politics to Washington D.C. And that my friends, more than anything, is a real threat to any small business trying to make a buck in a lethal economy.

The bullying, conniving and shoving executed with the breath-taking precision of a Hawks game was on display during the passage of what I think seems to be some sort of health care bill. Make no Jimmy Hoffa bones about it my friends, this is just the start of the Chicago dance. As the Jimmy Carter redux era unwinds the boom of the 1980s, our “Check Please” President is more apt at commenting on the foie gras then he is at nuclear disarmament (“Check Please” is a PBS show in Chicago that has people go out and eat at a restaurant and report back. There, the fresh Senator Obama appeared and gave a review of his favorite eating establishment). Since he has managed so little (except some community organizing- Psssst, very few communities in Chicago actually did get organized), he is going to have a hard time navigating us out of this mess. What we all hope does not happen is that he may use some of his Lake Michigan toxins to do more damage to what is a very fragile climate for any small business. We now know that this ‘Change” he was talking about was really the change of thin crust to thick crust pizza.

US bound audio manufacturers are going to have it tough in hiring expenses, taxes - perhaps even a VAT to avoid a “Greece” like trauma. Someone has to pay for these things and it’s the same people that buy high end audio. Consumers are going to face higher taxes and will have less discretionary income to part with their current rigs and step up to high end audio. Just wait and see after the election.

High end audio need not worry though, “change” is on its way: Pepperoni or just plain cheese?

All the best,
Vic

2010-03-31T22:25:00.001-05:00

Blue Tooth Audio

If you listen closely, well, if you ever listen at all, you will notice the nasal congestion from the Bluetooth headset on the other end of the line. In my personal calls, this congestion is so bad, that I ask the other party to switch back to the regular phone. I shrug my shoulders and chalk up my experience to a cheap blue tooth headset.

Or is it something else?

When I ask about the price paid for one of these fine units, I usually get a $150 - $200 range. These headsets seem not so cheap. I think I know who the culprit is and it’s a good one. No one talks about the culprit because no one understands it. The culprit is wireless jitter.

In the telephony world outside of audio, wireless jitter is common place and all phone companies struggle to improve signal quality by lowering wireless jitter. Last year, collectively, phone utilities spent millions of dollars on their network edges to help with wireless jitter. In the early VOIP installations, you could really hear wireless jitter at its best. For example, it was hard to tell who was at the other end and it was difficult to finish a phone call without line drops.

No I am sure, as this blog reader, that you are not spending millions of dollars on your wireless network edge. But, you may be using a wireless music server, and your wireless server is just full of jitter. A simple blind comparison between a decent CD player and your server will reveal this difference.

A wireless server is great for parties, background music or any other non serious application. But to build a serious music system around a music server, I would think again. You can help the sound with some decent DACs, but I would not spend too much money. The Fathom is an all around champ on this as is the Musilands. Spending more beyond that, is a waste of money.

All the best,
Vic

2010-02-21T19:52:00.004-06:00

Updated Picks.

Hello all!

I have some new picks here for my favorites and deleted those items that I no longer carry. I will update the PV site shortly. Anyway, In addition to the alreaedy famous picks here are four new favorites:

The Teradak Chameleon

As Teradak gets closer and closer to a reference NOS DAC, we have with the Chameleon, a very reasonable stop along the way. In our pursuit of great DACs, we are looking for the dynamics, bling bling and articulation of vinyl, without a smushy soundstage. The Chameleon comes close to this as it has some of the resolution capabilities of the Musiland Modified, although it falls short on complex passages and what we use for the digital audio test tone, the piano. But, what a fun listenable DAC we have here – and most of your average catalog Class “B” or whatever DACs cannot touch it.

The Audio gd Reference One

While it is not as musical as the Brigatta, where you can hear throat smoke on the singer, the Reference One is my DAC champ. Why? Because it does everything right, so much so, that on the piano test, not only can you hear the correct initial tone and after tone, you can also precisely hear the after tones of the chords echoing around the wood in the piano. I have only heard this, BTW, with EAC ripped FLAC files through a CyberServer.

The YS Audio Symphonies R

There are resolving preamps, musical preamps, musical preamps that resolve and resolving preamps that are musical – phew!. The YS Audio Symphonies R is a musical preamp that resolves. With the tube upgrade, it is just so much fun because it gets musical timbres right. For the price point, purchasers of this preamp are going to get a price / performance that is out of this world. I just love listening to this thing and right now it leads the pack in preamps less than 1K.

The QLS CyberMini

Ok, putting WAV files on an SD card is a pain in the butt, but, for a couple hundred bucks, you will have a transport that can create such a jitter free sound, that it easily compares to transports costing 3K. When you purchase the CyberMini, you see what we are talking about that digital music should be played through a quiet, spin-less, motionless device that is hard wired and NOT wireless into a DAC. WAV files on the CyberMini excel at our piano test and the lower bass registers are properly produced. You will see what we mean.

2010-01-31T20:57:00.002-06:00

I Guess I Missed It

Looking as silly as ever, our high end audio’s leading publication rags are rushing to review the exact same products like Time Magazine and Newsweek rushed to get Bruce Springsteen on the cover.

I just cannot figure out why they tip their hand so readily? It has become increasingly obvious that if you advertise and spend the cash, you can get Washington style lobbying sweets such as your product on the cover, favorable reviews, and kudos from multiple reviewers. Since I still manage to remain a capitalist in this Jimmy Carter redo era, I am all for these publications making money. But they have to know, as we know, that sooner or later, placing your ethics in jeopardy, places your business in jeopardy.

High end audio magazines, since I know you read this, I am here to help. All you have to do is listening. Well, not to me, to this thing called the internet. Outside of your realm of in-the-pocket distributors, high end rip offs and product companies that you have been supporting and eating candy with since the ‘70s , lies a cadre of great audio products just waiting for a great reviewer to discover them. You see guys, this is where the rest of us are hanging out and this is what we read. As you become increasingly irrelevant, I suggest that you could circumvent your certain fate by opening up your web browser.

The Internet board, Audio Asylum maybe a good place to start. They have product names that you are familiar with so you won’t get too alienated. Walk over to the ‘Tubes Asylum’ and check out what they are saying about the latest Shuguang tubes. While they will probably never advertise in your magazine, you may at least want to mention them while you are listening to your new tube amp that you are about to write favorable review for.

After Audio Asylum, venture a little deeper to Audio Circle where you may find equipment that you never ever heard of, but dollar for dollar are probably the best values in audio. There is even a section for manufacturers where you may want to give them a mention or two. Now I know you don’t want to hurt your advertising dollars, so be sure not to mention how good they really are, as you will certainly scare your high mark up constituents.

If you are feeling really daring, go over to head fi, where I prefer to hang out. Head fi is so much more than headphone listening and has really grown. There are people there that are truly brilliant audiophiles that I can’t even hold an EL84 candle to. Hey, they even sometimes don’t agree with the products we carry or our viewpoints, but heck, they are as honest as tubes are hot. At head fi you will take a dare as they sometimes don’t even care how the product looks, and are truly helping to grow some great audio companies. Take a look at some of the great stuff that Audio gd is doing, audition the Beresford DAC, find out why they like NOS DACs so much, watch them get carried away on a product and take it to the Nth degree of audio nirvana. Come back a few days later and witness their O’Hare like flights as they just took off on another product where the board looks completely different that it did a few days ago.

You see, Mr. Audio Reviewer, this is where audio is really taking place, and you need to get a hold of this really quickly lest you become the Boston Globe of paper once been. So please, let me vent:

You never mention the joys of ripping a CD using EAC and playing it back using Media Monkey. You give no ink time to discussing over sampling, non-oversampling or upsampling. You never bat an eyebrow at the difference between a 2A3, 300B or 845 - these are not Pontiacs Mr. Audio Reviewer, they are tubes, FYI. You never toast the fading of SACD, and the birth of high rez formats like 96K or 192, or for that matter, how they will really catch on to replace SACD because we already have DACs that have this capability. Heck, you never tell anybody what these sampling rates really do.

Our audio rags claim they are advancing the hobby and helping to support the audio business in general. They claim that they have products that sound the best. I guessed I missed it.

2010-01-12T19:31:00.006-06:00

Time Magazines "Man of the Year"

Become increasing irrelevant with accelerated colossal arrogance, Time magazine launched Ben Bernake as the “Man of the Year”. While nobody really cares, expect for their few readers, I think that they really missed the boat on this one. The one that I would like to see win did not even make their “short list”. My nominee will not rub shoulders with likes of Nancy Pelosi, the Chinese Worker or the mesianic Obama. But, my nominee is just as bold, brash and tenacious as the prices he has on deck. My nominee, just like Time, has colossal arrogance out the wa-zoo-bee. Akin to only a carnie swindler, my nominee convinces suckers in a down economy to plunk down their hard earned cash for items that cost 10 times of what they should. My nominee has also shown tremendous resilience to change as he is aided and abetted by an industry that is slowly eroding beneath him. My nominee has single handedly disinfranchised an entire generation of music lovers who, thanks to my nominee, think that IPOD is high end.

Congratulations high end audio salon owner, I nominate you for Time Magazines “Man of the Year”.

You deserve the nomination because you actually still believe that this distribution model is still “happening” and you deny the fact that most of high end audio commerce is being done over the net. Your manufacturers and their crony publications still believe in this high cost , low volume distribution model. Yet you hang on, albeit with your finger nails into the wall, but you still hang on.

Kudos to you, you “Man of the Year”, and hang in there, as long as you can.

2009-11-30T09:01:00.002-06:00

Pulling a fast one

Walk down the streets of Shanghai and you will quickly get an education on the state of high end audio in the USA. On a street you will find many a hi fi shop. These shops carry amps, preamps and CD players with unique designs and brands you never heard of. Your stroll will make the latest hi fi rag’s “recommended components” a kin to hospital food – generic, lack –luster and downright boring.

What is even more interesting is that you will find brands like Cayin, Xindak, the “Spark” amplifiers that look mysteriously like the Prima Donnas and a host of other products that look mysteriously like a brand that you just saw advertised. These brands are often offered at a fraction of the price that they are sold for in the USA, and except for a voltage winding on the transformer, are identical to those offered in the USA. However, they don’t have the mark up that USA distribution.
Now, being from Chicago, I can completely understand the “one hand washes another” paradigm. And I too, long to play in this game of “advertise in your magazine, review in your magazine” . And while my Heinz ketchup anticipation awaits me, I am going to do it without marking up my items or such other nonsense as part of the game. Only because I know that all of you will blow me off quicker than a Lou Dobb’s exit.

While I have complained about the high cost of audio in the past, I just cannot complain about equipment that is hand-crafted. Equipment from Audio Research, Mark Levinson, Macintosh, Conrad Johnson etc.. may very well be worth the money – they are collector’s items. If you are looking for a hand crafted piece and want to pay the mark up – then please go right ahead.

We are not trying to compete with those items or manufacturers. We are trying to give people a taste of those components, at a fraction of the costs. Recently, there have been some items that are in the less than 1K range on our website that are just outstanding audio values and are above and beyond what you can get in the USA.

What frosts me is when something that you can buy in Shanghai is marked up by a distributor trying to pull a fast one. That is not buying audio, that is just plain dumb.

2009-10-09T14:20:00.000-05:00

The other day I sat down to listen to some music. K.D. Lang, Chris Boti, Sara Vaughan was my selection. It was nice. It was listening.

Every once in a while, I get a new lease on my listening life; Instead of listening to music, I discover an artist. I have been discovering my whole life. In my salad days (when I was crisp with knowledge and green with my convictions – that’s Willie Shakespeare), I remember discovering the Moody Blues. I just could not believe the writing, the music and the vocals. I also remember discovering a band called Fleetwood Mac and not the annoying Clintonian Rumors, I mean real albums like Penguin, Future Games, Then Play On… My discovery continued with Peter Frampton, Joni Mitchell, Grateful Dead and so on.

And it was not until a dreadlock squirt drone of American Idol, one Jason Castro, who sang a song that absolutely moved me. The name of the song was “Halleluiah” and it was written by someone I never paid any attention to: Leonard Cohen.
I was destined to discover Leonard Cohen. On his Grammy CD, “The Joni Letters”, Herbie Hancock has Leonard Cohen reading the poetic Joni’s Jungle Line from “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” . Juxtapose and just as mysterious, Stereophile wrote a great article on some new re-releases of Leonard’s past work. Needless to say, I am in the process of discovering Leonard and I am quickly buying his albums, going through them, bit by bit. Understanding Leonard’s music, listening as he matures and then changes, trying to understand his musical direction and writing. Truly, discovery is fun. This is how one becomes a “fan”.

Classical music fans discover all the time, whether Antal Dorati or Tchaikovsky. See, that is why two channel is still around…. Its all about discovery.

Hallelujah

2009-08-24T19:17:00.000-05:00

Emerging from a quiet and dark background, the dynamics of CyberServer slowly fill my room. And then suddenly blooms into a full orchestra allowing me to hear every detail, yet not over bearing or etchy. The fact that I can get this sound so relatively inexpensively, is nothing to sneeze at. While it is true, that most of the cost of CyberServer is in its solid state disks and clever configurations of the buffer cache, the tweak-er-ing (that’s a cancatenation of a tweak and tinkering), is well worth it.

But, this blog is not about CyberServer, it is about computer audio.

The fact that I can have all of my music, regardless of sampling rate and resolution, at my finger tips without leaving the chair, is something to behold. Before this, the so called “wireless” servers, never sounded as good as our CD players. Thus, nice for background, but bad for serious listening. Well, that paradigm is changing. We expect more and more so called “quiet” servers – non-wireless servers with no moving parts, will be hitting the market soon. They will have astronomical prices. They will advertise in high end pubs and they will get their review. See Harry and Wes swoon.

But, there prices cannot fool me. Its just an AMD/Intel chip, linux, a solid state drive and a clock. That’s all it is. No big whip, and ergo no big price.

2009-06-11T15:30:00.004-05:00

Here they go again.....

In an attempt to woo readers to their never ending boredom of over price audio components, we see our two beloved magazines blaze the dusty desert trail of high end audio in search of the next giant killer. In an effort to keep the very subscribers they are disenfranchising, they will suddenly perseverate on mediocre components and try to make them great. Their history of doing this makes a much better read than their latest pro-bono $20000 amp that they have sitting in their listening rooms waiting for a glowing review.

The giant killer trend started back in the late ‘70s when Mr. Peter Pritchard was making the wonderful moving iron ultra high compliant ADC cartridges. Having sold the company and the patent, Mr. Pritchard started a cartridge company called “Sonus”. The cartridge they all went ga-ga over was the troubled Sonus “Blue” that was put together with peanut butter as the cartridge would literally fall apart while playing, leaving magnets and other space shuttle debris whirling around the player. While they praised these high compliant wonders, the Shure V15 Type III, beat the pants off of the Sonus, as it went much deeper and wider. That’s why my friends, the V15 type III was always in pictures with the excellent SME tonearm. The folks at SME were no dopes.

They went on to hale the $13.00 Grado FTE+1 cartridge all the way to a inexpensive CD player out of Tawain that they claim sounds so good, when in fact, an $80 Onkyo player sounds just as good. Now, in the latest issue of a magazine, they are at it again, claiming that an $89 USB DAC is the same as the $495 Bel Canto 3. ( I can’t wait for the review)

Now I know that folks who read this blog are not falling for the hype of the $89 USB DAC. If they really understood that the weak link in the whole USB computer audio chain is the computer itself, they would not be so quick to jump to this conclusion. And to be honest, I did not order or hear this $89 USB DAC. I don’t have to.

The correct way to compare and listen to computer audio via USB (except for software based USB products like the LILO, Brigatta, Ayre and the Wavelength) is to 1) reboot, 2) close applications in your start tray, 3) close all applications and 4) turn off your monitor. If they did that, then they could help remove most of the grunge that computers generate. Hence maybe they would see the differences in these two DACs are wider than they think.

But why? Saying you have an $89 USB DAC that is a giant killer sells advertising and magazines. It fools the reader into thinking you actually have some value to offer. I got it.

2009-05-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

All That Jitters……..

Computer high end audio. Before you embark , let me inform you that it is not as easy as it seems. If you do not do it right, even on the most budgeted of systems, computer audio is not going to sound as good as a redbook CD does.

Take my foray into computer audio at your favorite high end audio say-lon. Desperate for sales, they were pushing the PS Audio digital link. They were all excited about its new price point because they finally got a product for the rest of us. Now, I am not here to bash PS audio, who unlike some “other” high manufacturers, will actually survive this down turn. I am here to give you a caveat on high end computer audio.

I listened to some Magico speakers and a VTL amp. The dealer was trying to impress me with the price point. “How does it sound?” he said. “Well, it sounds like someone is blowing their nose in the background”, I said. “Get out!”, he said.

The sound was 2 dimensional, lifeless and bland. At about 1000Hz – 20Hz, there was a dull suck out as if the system had a cold. Mysteriously, I could here some good detail, but as if I had a cold. What I heard was a thick veil, a thud, a murk, a mud. Hence, I could not help but curb my salesperson’s enthusiasm.

As I said before, this is not a bash on PS Audio, I want to make that clear. What I heard, loud and clear, was the sound of jitter. Even the PS Audio’s Herculean efforts at re-clocking, could not help the sound quality.

It no wonder. There are many kinds of jitter. In computer audio, the physical aspects of jitter, (E&M waves, power line disruptions etc.) play a big role. This guy put two Theil speakers together and had the laptop sitting on the speaker coffee table he just made. The magnets loved it. Even more troubling was a florescent light display in back of the Theils, spraying the entire assembly with magnetic waves that make grasshoppers 10 feet tall on the Sc fi Channel.

Where you place you PC in your digital audio set up is a big deal. The computer monitor, external and internal hard drives, all affect the sound. Until we sort this out, USB audio is good in a pinch, but we still have a lot to learn.

DACs that have drivers that allow asynchronous I/O, like the Musiland LILO DACs,the Ayre and the Wavac go a long way in helping. In theses DACs, the DAC controls the streaming and not the PC. Hence, that is why they replace the drivers on the PC. But, alas, the LILO only has windows drivers.

So go ahead, download, rip and tear. But I would be careful, don’t throw away those redbooks, not just yet.

2009-03-28T15:56:00.002-05:00

Headphone Amplifiers

Ok, I admit it. I am trying to sell you a headphone amplifier so beware. But if you are going to do headphones,- do them right. The right way to do it, is, to have a separate headphone amplifier. In this way, you get the maximum fidelity from the cash you spent on the headphones. There are exceptions, where stand alone headphone amps are embedded into products. For example, the Shengya S10CSII, The Shenda Music Van and the Classic 16.0

Headphone amplifiers come in all shapes and sizes. If you want to drink from a washing machine hose of information, then go to head fi where, I am sure, they are marshalling through the rinse cycle of the headphone amplifier du jour with threads the length of Chicago Irish parades. I am here to talk about our headphone amplifiers, so the drink will be a little less pressurized.

We have tube headphone amps, solid state headphone amps, hybrid headphone amps, headphone amps that moonlight as DACs and integrated amplifiers that moonlight as headphone amplifiers. Whew!!

If you want a tube headphone amp, then you need to be prepared for a little noise. Not that these amps are noisy per se, but tubes are. I for one, do not mind the noise because I cannot hear it once the music starts. Plus, with the right tubes, it is just so darn tantalizing I just cannot put the phones down. Grados and low impedance phones work best with all tube amps: the Doge 6210, the Ming Da MC84C07, the Trancendere and the Timester. The Ming Da, for some reason, also sings with AKGs and Senns – go figure, I guess there is not a general rule.

Hybrid amps, like the Bada PH-12 and the Bada PH-31, work best with high impedance phones. Probably because there transistorized amps can handle the impedance loads, The Bada PH-12 is the de facto standard for AKGs – so this is what I use with these phones. The 6SN7 tubes paint a warm inviting sound stage while the Mosfets pass the resolution to the phones against a dead quite background.

Solid state amps are the enigma wrapped in the mystery. The Audio gd amps are class A amps, so they sound very un-transistorized and the BL Audio moving coil amp is a beast all its own. These silicon salamanders sound like the Bizarro of transistors. Warm midranges, deep bass yet articulate, but not to point of being annoying. These work well with a variety of phones – from the low to high, and unlike some other amps, you do not need a high / low switch like you do with the tube amps.

We have not heard a DAC/Headphone amp that we like – including the Benchmark or any of ours for that matter. The neutral Yulong is your best bet if you want to go this route.

If you want to start low cost, my pick is the Audio gd ST-3. You cannot go wrong with this amp if you are just getting into headphone amplifiers. You will be amazed at its resolution quality. The Ming Da MC 84C07 is a bets buy – it is great with headphones + you are getting a little amp all your own. The crème de la crème is the mainstay Bada PH-12, now in its 5th year with us, is a must for those who want the best out of their Senns or AKGs. For you tube lovers, the Doge 6210 – roll the tubes and you will be in for a treat.

2009-02-19T15:05:00.000-06:00

Audio for the Rest-Of-Us

As they march-on with their self-destructive parade down Bankruptcy Street, you can still here the usual suicidal bromides coming out of the high end audio salon. This discourse is designed to disenfranchise all but the few, who put up with the retailers colossal snobbery just because there is no other place to buy this stuff. My personal favorite is, “Its not about the money, its about the sound”.

But, as everyone but the high end press and the retailer knows, it’s the complete opposite; It is about the money. As a matter of fact, it is all about the money. Mr. High End Retailer, show me the money. Well you did and its just too darn much. The only time that it is not about the money, in my book, is charities: where savings lives and souls can really make a difference. They also tell me to “support” my local high end retailer – implying that internet retailers should be avoided. That’s like telling Amazon to support their local bookstore. I support charities. Mr. High End Retailer, you are no charity.

It’s the “Show me the Money” pitch that will really get to them and get you the cold shoulder or a kick to the curb. Just what are we getting for all this money, I am not sure. New product introduction at the high end audio salon is at such a rapid pace, that driving it out of the lot easily reduces its net worth. Not to say, by any means that some of them are not well crafted; they are. However, if you think you are buying a work of art, then by all means, pay the gallery prices.

But I am purchasing equipment that will stir my scotch and get my brain moving with the jazz singers thoughts. I need to get the best for the money, because you see, I want to get as close to this is possible without feeling like I blew the college fund. The very idea that I may risk $20K for an amp that will only get me incrementally closer than spending $2K, just does not sit right with my common sense, so it is about the money.

An therefore its no secret, that the IPOD crowd has no interest in high end audio because at these Mt. Everest prices, they cannot get near it. So, this is what every marketing 101 student knows: IPOD is successful for one reason and that its barrier to entry is small. If you are in high end audio and want it to survive, make the entry point small.

As I stated in my previous blog, the Darth Sideous Triorca of high end manufacturers, retailers and journalist got us into this mess, and as of date, their governor Rod denial shows no real interest in getting us out. As far as supporting my local dealer goes -its hard to support something that has no interest in supporting my real needs. Enter the internet, which is really the only market place supplying product for the mid tier. Because of the thin margins, it is almost impossible for the high end retailer to get into the game. So in effect, they are squeezed out.

Audio for the rest of us is being led by Pacific Valve, GR Research, The Horne Shoppe, Van Alstine, Morrow Audio, McCallister et.al who are trying to run business for the middle tier who have common sense for price / performance. he middle: where men are men, woman are woman and cash is king. Support you internet high end retailer, they are the only ones in the game.

2009-02-06T21:28:00.003-06:00

Piano Tuning

The other day we had our Yamaha piano tuned. As I walked around the house, I could not help but noticed the different sounds emanating from my piano as the piano teacher turned piano chiropractor, styled the tightly wound rope to get the sound he wanted. As he prodded and twisted, sounds echoed my halls. Some sounds were well placed. Others were cacophonies of out of tune notes and harmonics which pierced ears and freely gave headaches.

You can have some the same experience with high end audio. For example, you can assemble a series of components that really don’t mesh at all. The result: blurred over tones, sharp piercing midranges, raspy highs. Assemble the right components: silky smooth midrange , texture, deep bass, no beaming – smooth sailing.

So, how to avoid? What causes this is listening in a dealer show room, impulsive ebay shopping and late night audiogon-ning. While it may have sounded all so well in the store, the interaction of rooms and equipment have created quite the mess.

Luckily, audiophiles have some weapons that can aim at the right tone with Apollo 13 "bring it on home" precision. You need a 30 day audition. Not just to see if the item you bought was of high quality, but to hear first hand, if your new piece “tunes” with your current system. If it does not, return it for another item that the retailer agrees will gel more with what you have. This, if anything, is the argument for not jumping into “used” equipment so fast. Return, you see, if it does not gel.

Yet another not so subtle one is tube rolling. Tubes can make such a difference that incorrect tubes can cause the piano tuning torture described above. For this reason, I keep several tube types on hand, swapping them to and fro, looking for the correct harmonic structure that I want.

The lesson is simple. You can hear this right off the bat. The best audition, is the home audition.

2009-01-21T15:23:00.000-06:00

The Horne Shoppe System

Some time ago, a magazine or a an audio retailer (can’t remember which one) gave me some advice, “You need a balanced system, spend 10% on a preamp, 30% on an amp, 20% on a turntable and the rest, 40%, save that for a speakers – or something like that. Like a bad guilt trip, it has stuck with me. But, now me thinks, these people might have been a highly misinformed.

Take the dilemma that I am smack dab in the middle right now. A speaker that I have wrote about before, the Horn Shoppe Horns has baffled (no pun intended) me. So much do I love this speaker for my den that I can’t help but write about and listen to it.
As I read about this speaker, I could not help but notice that it kept weak company. Even from Mr, Schilling himself suggested to us that a common amp to use with horns is the “GLO” amp, a modified Timester amp. While this is a good amp for the money, me thinks that most folks probably have wrong components with the horns. This type of pairing cannot do them justice.
Ok, here is what I have: I used the Classic 16.2 300B amp (Shuguang Mesh plagte 300Bs, RCA Clear top and Raytheon 6SN7s), with a Doge 6 CD player (Telefunken 12AX7s, RCA 12AT7s), Xindak FS-1 speaker cables and the Bada HL-3 interconnects. Total system, without horns, about $4K. I know you might think that I am nuts, but nuts is as nuts does and I am clearly not following the 60/40 rule described above.

This nut has imaging and tonal quality in the highs and mids like you cannot believe. The horns have the incredible ability to take music apart bit by bit and re-assemble it on a grand stage never heard before by yours truly. Its not all pizza and ice cream as the Horns have cone break up at very loud levels and there is considerable coloration in the mid bass. The way I have them placed in my small den, washes out bass response as I do not have the lower registers. You can tell though, that the Horns are doing something so incredibly right. Example: a piano note does not drag from one note to the next and thereby smear the piano concerto. The timbre is ever so right.

On the flip side, the Ming Da MC 34A06 , for $699, is a tube amp that shows incredible Marantz like liquid midrange and a non-bass bloom that amps costing 3X its price. I run this amp into Quad ESL57s, and paired with the right tubes, they are capable of some extreme sound quality. I listen to the Doge 6 , the Shenda Music Van or a Vanguard / Brigatta combination. This little amp is capable of so much, it is so easy to set up and use and images like a son of a gun, you would swear the amp costs 3 times as much.

So how do you size up what to spend on what and how much? One use to be able to follow the 60/40 rule, but not anymore. What rules now, what will rule in the future an what will always rule is price performance

2008-12-30T20:48:00.002-06:00

The Trouble with Preamps.

What’s wrong with the following conversation:

“Hello, Pacific Valve?”
“Yes”
“Which one of your CD players has a volume control?”
“Currently its our modified Sheng Ya”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, Can I ask why?”
“Well, I want to go straight into my amp and I do not want any lousy preamp mucking up my sound”
“But sir, not that I am trying to sell you a preamp, but going straight into your amp without a buffer can seriously affect the sound”
“You heard me, no preamp”
--Click—

What’s wrong with people? They got this idea in their heads of a straight wire with gain, going directly into an amp. Sarah Vaughn’s voice, on some mythical path to the speakers, is going to bypass the evil preamp and make its way to mother amplifier who is waiting for the electronic reception. I can see it now, its Mrs. Field herself - chocolate chip cookies and milk on hand waiting for the signal like a kindergartners first day of school. So happy to see it, mother amp is going to amplify, ever so delicately and yet forcefully that the san preamp guy will have the best sound on the blog. He has out smarted every one else – what a genius. This, for some reason, is their idea of audio nirvana. I can hear him now, “…a straight wire with gain, you see and since there is a volume control on my CD player, why, no other volume control is necessary, you see… “

Like all things in audio, sometimes true, mostly not true.

If it were true, then why have preamps at all, right? Are preamps just over done, glorified switchers? So, it cannot be always true.

You can do the math and look for the impedance mismatches and see how the CD player is going to effect the sound or you can do as I do, perform the ear test. First you will need a preamp of some sort – either your own or borrow a friends.

Here is what an impedance mismatch generally sounds like, and I mean generally:

The midrange congests. It sounds like someone is placing their hand over the midrange. Then all of a sudden, without any warning, the congestion goes away and comes back. I cannot explain this electronically, but it seems to happen every time.

The bass thins out. Listen for the lower registers not being there. This could be deceptive, since it will have juice and punch, but nothing to punch through.
Try to find an Instrument in space. How easily can you isolate it? What does it sound like? On a mismatch, it will be hard to locate the instrument and then once you do, it will smear back and forth and eventually, get on your nerves.

Now, plug your preamp in. Does this go away? Is the image stable? Has the bass returned? Be sure that the volume is set for the same level, and you should easily tell if a preamp purchase is in the offing.

2008-12-16T19:26:00.001-06:00

The Maytag Repairman

You know this guy? He is the loneliest guy out there, so they say. The deal is that Maytags are supposed to be lonely due to the reliability of the Maytag products. Which is a good thing if you are a consumer and a bad thing, well, if you repair Maytags for a living. But this guy has a some new company: the high end audio shop retailer. He is lonely not because he repairs audio components, but because it looks like no one give a rat’s ass anymore.

But its not the consumer I am talking about, it’s the high-end retailer. I tell you, I go into their shops and it looks like the raid on Entebbe; cables strewn about, equipment scatter (cannot tell whether its used or new, and if its used, put the prices on there, for gosh sakes), speakers that are so helter-skelter that it looks like they have minds of their own and have started a hejira out the door. The store merchandising looks like a rogue designer had a grotesque Feng Shui session with the owner. It is not only some Chicago stores (where I live), I have been to Arizona, New York, Florida et.al. and have seen the same.

Now they have to economy to blame. And just like cabin pressure suck-out, folks that do not want to spend (or have them $$ to spend) and arm and a leg on equipment are even more disenfranchised – keeping them away from the high end retailer and spurring the retailer’s depression. This mess, of course, was started by none other that the Darth Sideous triorca of audiophile magazines, high end manufacturers and the retailers themselves who, on a grand mall brain fart, thought that it was a good idea to charge 50K for speakers, 18K for a preamp (well, you get the drill). Such a dumb move was this, that if they think that the audiophile market is shrinking, then the ultra high end of the market is shrinking even faster. Consumers that were willing to pay 50K for speakers and 18K for a preamp have now been 201K’d from their 401K and are holding back.

Since Pacific Valve does not compete at this high, high end, these frees me up to help the high end retailer, whose new market is the cornucopia of income disposable mucho.

High end audio salon, do not despair. I have put together some simple guidelines:

Stop Whining. That’s right, you heard me. Look, you and the rest of the folks who run this industry got yourselves into this mess. Embrace it. And face it, that due to these things called China and the internet, you are forced to sell your ridiculously priced components to the few who are willing to pay for it. And they soon will come back, cash in hand and permission from their spouses who, on an act of exemplary mercy, freely gave up a room in the house for speakers the size of UPS trucks.
Instead of having your shop look like it a designer come in for a grotesque Feng Shui experiment, clean up your act. Put those cables away, move speakers that do not belong in the listening room out of there. Get a rack for cables and let me choose which ones I would like when I listen. Turn the components on for warm up. And, for the love of mite, you all have good music in your shop – why not turn it on and have it playing softly when I get in there to spur my interest? Dust off the equipment – what is this, the Adam’s Family attic make over?
Re-negotiate your real estate. Practical folks like me who come into your shop to browse will never spend the money for this stuff. Find a cheaper location off the beaten path. Most of your serious customers will be by appointment anyway, with no place to dump their cash, they will easily find you.

Ironically, a recent article in the Absolute Sound was of interest. Called, Audiophile 101 this article spoke of the importance of the high end retailer. If the high end retailer wishes to have a value proposition to folks not willing to spend 6K for a CD player, then the retailer must encourage the industry to start producing great equipment at great prices. So in all, I do not think that the high end retailer is going away, just re-directed. But criminy, don’t make look like, or don’t sound like, your going away ‘cause with that attitude, you will.

2008-12-02T20:23:00.001-06:00

Those Shuguang Tubes

There are some great things to be had in Chinese tubes these days since we are, ah, all cutting corners. Some of them, knock the ball out of the park. Some of them, violate the infield fly rule. Here is my guide to help you.

Shuguang 12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, 7025, 6922(derivatives)

Fa-gyet-a-bout-it. Really. I have tried. They are either very bad or average. Use the 7025 for 12AX7 replacements for listening to background music. Theses tubes are in the realm of extremes: either very dull or very bright. No matter what I try them in, the Classic Preamp, the Ming DA 7R preamp or the excellent Doge 6130, they are remarkable by their sheer lack of remark-ability.

Shuguang 6SN7GT

The Shoo 6SN7GT are worth looking into, and for the price, cannot be beat. Now pay close attention, brothers and sisters of the halo getter, as I am referring to the 6SN7GT models with the white lettering and the brown base. I am not referring to the Shoo 6SN7s the have the silver base and I am not referring to the tubes that have 6N8P labeled on them. So hey, be careful out there.

The Shoo 6SN7GTs are a delight and are far from the listless bland sound coming out of EH these days. After listening to some EHs in the ever critical Bada PH-12 head amp, I was actually getting fatigued by the Bada trying to pull detail out of these tubes and the tubes fighting it every step out of the way. When I placed the Shoos back in, the window opened up and I was hearing things with detail and a sense of firm instrument placement that I have never heard before. This is a consensus view of the Shoos, as most folks that I respect (Response Audio, for example) is fond of them as well.

Shuguang 2A3C

Please have a spare of these, you RCA lovers, ‘cause you are in for a treat. These are the white label and (current) white base that have “Shuguang 2A3C” in white letters (hence white label) stamped on them. I am not referring to the 2A3Bs that you should remove the insides of, fill with wax and use them as Yuletide candles for the holidays.

The 2A3s are just going to be tough to beat for the price as nothing comes close, sans for the EH 2A3s. The JJ Teslas are just two, well JJ Tesla-ish. Viz., the bass goes mush and the dynamics are missing. The sound is a kin to the JJ KT88s – they just need some guts behind them to get them to sound right. Alas, the confusion is, the Teslas sound correct tonally, at first install, after a while, you will know what I am talking about.

The Shoo 2A3s bring a SET listening to a whole new level and those 300B folks, so endeared to a lucid detailed, vocalist lip-smacking midrange may want to give these a try. The EHs are correct tonally, but are missing the last bit of detailed that the Shoo 2A3s reproduce.
I use the Shoo 2A3 tubes in the famous MC2A3 preamp and they are just dynamite.

Shuguang 300B

Again, these are the 300BC white label and white base (sometimes they have a brown base) 300B tubes.

The Shuguang 300BC is probably one of the most reliable, industrial 300BC these paws have ever handled. I use them in a variety of ways: to bias the 3008 Mono blocks and for general purpose listening. I do not like them as much as the Shuguang mesh plate varities (or any other mesh plate variety for that matter). I also do not like them as much as the bargain-of –the century Sovtek 300BC (which you can no longer obtain, and I have not heard the EH 300Bs). I am currently comparing them to the JJ Teslas. Compared to other 300B tubes, the Shoo white label sounds a little too dark for me and in doing so, tends to suck out the midrange ever so slightly. This tube also needs a war-and-peace level break in time as it could take as much as 100 hours before the tube open up. And then, if that were not enough, it needs another 2 hours of turn on time before it even begins to show you what it is capable of. It is as quiet as a mounse and sans its “dark” attributes, is one heck of a tube. Use it if your amp has a hot high end and upper mid as you may find this tube endearing.

The Shuguang KT88-98

These are the KT88-98s and not the KT88 and not the KT100. The KT88-98 comes in two varieties: the white label and the hand picked red label that you can only get when you purchase the Shuguang Blue S8 amplifier.

The Shoo KT88-98 is one of the punchier KT88 tubes. I like it a lot and prefer it over all new tubes, sans the Cadillac Genlex, which surpasses a KT88 tube in just about every category. The Genelex has it over the KT88-98 in the mids to highs, where it parts a 300B sound to the highs and a 2A3 sound to the mids. Punch for punch, bass for bass, dynamic for dynamic, it is on par the with the Shoo KT88-98, which is why it is worth having a pair on hand.

The Shuguang 6550

These are supposed to be replicas of the GE 6550. Well, they are not. And for that matter, none of the replica tubes are “replicas”, IMO. Take the Mullard New Sensor re-issues. Nice tube, no replica. Same thing for the Shoo 6550, nice tube, no replica. My favorite 6550 tube remains the EH and SED, where I place the EH, SED and Shoo 6550 in that order. The Shoo 6550 needs a tremendous break in time and sounds like the 300BC tube, a little dark and withdrawn – but it has the punch bass of its kinkless trioide. cousin. I like in amps that sound a little bright and forceful, where it paints a scene of delicate subtleness with these amps. The 6550 shoos are standard in the Ming Da MC 368B90 amp.

Shuguang tubes have come a long way since there inception in the early 1990s. They seem to get better year by year. Even as the dollar rises against the Chinese Yuan, the Shuguang tubes represent a great bargain. Enjoy these tubes and enjoy their price point.

2008-10-21T16:11:00.001-05:00

When Reviewers Buy

Like Chicago politics, the audio reviewer industry has a well known protocol of d'une part, un autre lave (one hand washes another). And like the best Rezko-ish deals of Chicago, some of the reviewers are better than others at executing this art form.

Not all are in this club. Some are very well salted, well read and have good ears. They opine in the strictest and fairest sense.

But, when they buy, then that is your buying signal. So far, these are reviewers who have bought.

Affordable Audio – The Bada HD-22

The HD-22, now in its HD-22SE version, has the unique ability to be dynamic and yet provide a warm, tube sound. The inside is built like a tank and for this price point, you get an advanced Phillips servo found in 5K CD players, dual trannies and an advanced AC filter network. We suspect that the reviewer feels like we do, for the price point it cannot be beat. To consider your other audio outlet rice-a-roni CD players is well, a joke.

Stereo Mojo – The DAC AM Modified

Incredibly tube like, the DAC AM Modified maybe the steal of the century in the < $500 DAC brigade. The harsh midrange of low end DACs is toned down and replace with a see through window that only the best tube DACs aspire to. The reviewer states that the DAC AM Modified embarrassed the LINN Classik. The reviewer was fooled by its low price point and therefore placed the DAC AM in his “den” system; only later to find that the DAC AM has enough body and clarity, to be placed in his main system. The DAC AM Modified is the solid state counter part to the tube DAC 68. Try it in your “den” system; it will soon be moved up to your “high end” system.

Positive Feedback –The Ming Da MC 34AB

Another great audio deal is the MC 34AB 07. The Ming Da MC 34AB 07 with its 8 EL34 tubes and power humpty and 75 watts of power, opens up speakers like no other amp. It is no wonder, that the Dr. Sardonicus of Positive Feedback bought one of these. Like so many reviewers, the price point sways them toward a “second” or “den” system, only to find that the amp makes its way up to the main system and rules to roost. This versatile amp can also be used as an integrated and basic amp. It also has a switch for triode and ultra linear modes. The MC 34AB 07 makes quite the impression right out of the box, then it slowly warms as well as providing a deep tight bass. We have also had, may folks sell their Primas and Cays on Audiogon, take to proceeds and buy the amp a new. What a deal.

Stereo Mojo – The Shenda Music Van (Review Pending)

Lets call it the poor man’s Doge 6. Why? Consider the Doge 6, which is able to substantially define a musical object (vocalist, symbol, bass drum et.al) in space, put weight around it and then calculate the distance between the musical object and other musical objects. The difference between the Doge 6 and the Shenda Music Van is the fact that the Doge 6 is better at calculating this distances and the Shenda sometimes misses. Depending upon your systems resolution, this may or may not affect you. When the Shenda places an instrument musically. Therefore, it tends to make poor recordings a little more musical and the transitions between wide dynamics a little more bold. Over all, if its dynamics you want, then choose the Shenda. If it is imaging you want, then choose the Doge.

Affordable Audio – Shuguang Blue S8

Hope they like blue as the LED shoot across and up and down the amp. It really is a tale of three amps: the Shuguang, the Ming Da MC 368B90, and the Doge 6130. Lets take the two sonic extremes: the Ming Da MC 368B90 and the Doge 6130. The Ming Da is Audio Research Dual 76A / Conrad Johnson MV75 sweet, as it plays to the best qualities of those amps. It is surprisingly musical and defines what tubes are all about: a slightly rolled off high end, lush midrange and a deep fat bass. Some like this, other do not. For those that do not, enter in the Doge 6130, where it has the detail and articulation of a solid state amp with the warmth of tubes. It has a deep low end that is not fat or rolled off. The midrange is pronounced, yet still has some musicality. Lovers of the MC 368B90 will be looking for the tubes in this amp. The Shuguang then falls in somewhere between. It extracts details from the source, yet provides tube warmth and a bump in the lower registers. All that being said, it is the most musical of the bunch. You can change the sound dramatically by substituting quality 6SN7 or 6SLT tubes.

Read the reviews, read between the lines. But when they buy, you can read into their actions.

2008-10-02T07:37:00.010-05:00

A New Economy

Unable to adjust to the onslaught of value added high end components coming from the e-tailers, mainstream audio pubs will be vomiting all over themselves trying to come up with value added reviews from their cadre of mediocre products. After all, they have to cope with our new miserly outlooks given what has happened to our economy. And alas, while a bail out of the audio industry in not in the offing, we will have to digest the rice-a-roni of audio seeping into the mainstream publications and audiophile bulletin boards: "What do you think of the Azur"?, "What about this Rotel amp?" , "Which NAD to buy'? These ever- present philosophical questions, while making my eyes roll so far back into my head that my contacts are now stuck in my brain, run deep into the hearts of many as they look contemplate their purchases of the run-of-the-mill.

Like I said in my previous blog, this new economy will make over priced audio die even faster than it has been. But, look no further than Google, to find out about great products and services coming from Pacific Valve, GR Research, McAlister Audio, the Horn Shoppe,Morrow Audio, Brent Jessie and Jim McShane to name a few. Lets take a look at these (since no one else is)

The Horn Shoppe
Much has been written about the horns, but we shall not stop. As they have been and continue to remain one of the greatest values in high end audio today. I drive mine with the Classic 16.2 integrated amp using the new Shuguang mesh plate 300B-S. I use a Raytheon 6SN7 as the regulator and Sylvania Chrome Domes as the drivers. I hope to try the new Ming Da “Globe Trotter” 6SN7s as they seem to have real promise. I will let you know. The Horns do what few speakers do: When they receive the instruments / vocals from the amp in the form of current, they ere-assemble it bit by bit on the sound stage and present it to you. This, ladies and gents, is no small feet. Given their $850.00 per pair price tag, they remain a great buy.

GR Research
Danny Ritchie runs GR Research who supplies these baffle-less spekeakers in kits to be re-assembled. For those of you, pitching pennies, this may be the way to go. If you are handy, this will be relaxing. If not, it’s a minor hassle to get a friend to help you and a great way to kill an afternoon with a couple of beers. I plan on purchasing these soon. I did hear the OB-7s and OB-5s driven by the Ming Da MC34AB amps – and let me tell you – these speakers have a way of cementing an image in the sound stage and providing the body and weight of a speaker costing 3 times as much. I plan a purchase soon.

McAlister Audio
Take off, eh – to the Great White North of Google and you will find McAlister audio. Some very reasonably priced products that compete with, yours truly. I have not heard these, but some of these are worth looking into. The NOS VT DAC for example, has caught my eye.

Morrow Audio
Scroll past the Bada-look-a-like Tonewin and move to some great looking single cone speakers and most of all the cables. We purchased a pair of interconnects and were duly impressed. As you probably already know, the mark up on cables is well, USA Congress bail out extreme. So do not be dismayed by the price of these as you are really getting a lot for the money.

Vacuum Tube Services
Need tubes? Your mainstream pubs do not have the brain cells and bandwidth to discuss them, probably because dead tube companies do not pay for advertising fees. Turn no further than the web, where Brent Jessie and Jim McShane will answer your emails with care and explain to you the ins, outs and sounds of each tube. Their sites are chocked full of information and are used by yours truly before contemplating a tube purchase.

Explore, explore. There is a great wide world of audio out there, beyond the mediocrity of the current “Recommended Components”

2008-09-16T17:14:00.004-05:00

Systems From the Uninvited

I am still going blog ga-ga with the September issue of Stereo Rev…, I mean Absolute Sound. Every year they poll their gold pocket advertisers and come up with the best systems under $2000, or for $3000 or whatever. This of course, makes great fodder for your truly because 1) it is not the best you can buy for the money and 2) it is at best, mid fi sound.

How I wish these systems were truly the best you can buy for a price point. But alas, the writers are never allowed to venture past their advertisers, so a good portion of audio nirvana is missing.

Do not despair, brothers and sisters in sound, I am here to help. And although my bias is well known, the fun will be if their systems will ever beat my systems sonically.

System $1180

Bada HD-19 CD Player with Jan 5670 Tube $1180
Yulong Amp4780 amplifier
Gini LS3/5A speakers

There – I dare you, I just dare you to throw me you NADs, Oppo, PSB etc. for a bake off. This system is capable of some stunning achievements and forays into detail, tonal balance and frequency response when compared to grain grit and rough ride you will get from the usual suspects. The Bada HD-19 yields the sound stage that one would expect from a CD player costing 3 times as much. The Yulong has the headroom of a tube amp with the bass response of a great solid state amp. It is surprisingly musical for its price point. All of this goes into the GR Research A/V 3 that kicks the canard out of any speaker less than $1500. I took the sonic caps upgrade because I know that these electronics can really deliver. A truly wonderful speaker.

System $2447

Ming Da MC 84C with JJ EL84s and Sovtek LPS 12AX7s
The Shenda SD100s with Tung Sol 12AX7s, GE 6189 tubes
Horne Shoppe Horns
Xindak AC01 interconnects
Bada SP100 power Cables
Choseal YF-218U 2.5 M Speaker Cable

The EL84 is truly one of the most remarkable tubes as it is capable of some incredible power and bass response for such a low wattage tube. I picked the JJs for their transparency and clean sound and the Sovteks for their bass. The dual chassis Ming Da has plenty of power in them their caps to power my speakers.

With no op amps and beefy power supply, the Shenda SD100s is the one to beat. For a less then 1K CD player, it is capable or removing every last detail from the disk. With its Jolida roots, the Shenda has the build quality and sound characteristics of player costing 3 times as much.

For its price, very few audiophiles will ever experience the detail, coherency and sound stage presence of the Horn Shoppe Horns. A truly remarkable speaker, when properly broken in (which could take up to 40 days) and placed, is capable of great bass response and lower midrange neutrality. And maybe, just maybe, the Magneplanars that the Sound suggested , is capable of more detail. A truly remarkable speaker.

System Sky’s the limit. $7460

Doge 6 CD Player with 12AX7 Tung Sols, Sylvania 12AT7s
Ming Da MC 2A3 Preamp, with upgraded tubes
Ming Da 3008-A 805 Mono Blocks with upgraded tubes
Bada Sp-300 Power cables
Bada HL-3 Interconnects
Xindak FS-1 Foil Speaker Cables
GR Research OB-7 Plus

Much has been written about the Doge 6 CD player. This 6-tube design primary strength in a nutshell, is the tube filtering which allows tremendous transparency during the conversion process. Because of this, it does not sound like your average CD player. To think that an Azur is, well, roughly the same price, is one of the great jokes of Audio today.

Truly a straight wire with gain, the MC 2A3 is one of the more remarkable preamps ever built. Its transparency and its ability to amplify low level signals into amplifiers is truly remarkable. It is honest and true to the sound stage and remarkable at rendering music. Check our customer testimonials for enthusiasm, where real audiophiles make their claims. I modified mine with RCA clear top 6SN7s, Amperex 6DJ8s and Sylvania “Fat Boy” 6CA7.

Fitted with Cetron 805 and Shuguang mesh plate 300B tubes, the MC 3008-A will give our selected speakers the power it needs, yet provide a SET midrange with a warm 6550 low end. The amp can be driven hard and does not mind complex speaker loads at all.

For our speakers, the GR research OB-7 with its open baffle design and powered sub really works. The first time I heard this speaker, I was awe struck on how lively and dynamic it sounds. With the 3008-A 805, it really shows what it is capable of detail in the midrange and the lower registers. The OB-7 gives you the sense of immediacy of a planar speaker, with the imaging and spatial relationships of a fine cone speaker. I do not personally own this speaker, but my pal down the street does. And when I go over there, I cannot wait for the show.

Well, there you have it. Systems from the uninvited. Search hard before you buy.

2008-08-26T17:48:00.002-05:00

First the pride, then the fall

I really like the newest version of the Absolute Sound. Not necessarily because of its insightful reviews or salient comments, but because, this latest copy makes great blog topics for yours truly. If you read between the lines like I do, you can get a really good glimpse on why high end audio is in the state that it is in today - a state of high inventory and declining sales.

The interview with Lyric is especially revealing. Of the elucidating and braggadocio, the article tell us how the Levinson ML-2 achieved the price of $1600 and later $6000. Apparently, Mark came up with a pricing of $700 and, while not throwing folks out of the store (from which I got from the article, is legendary for Lyric) , Lyric convinced Mark that $1600 is the price to go for. Mark took the bait, and high end snobbery was borne.

This is how high end pricing gets done; sell a little to the elite few at astronomical prices, and completely disenfranchise the middle.

Somewhere in the article, HP asked if "High End" was dead. While some say that the patient is on life support, I say that we are in a correction a la the personal computer style.

You better be careful who you throw out of the store though, and be especially careful about it when your market is in a price correction.

2008-08-22T07:09:00.007-05:00

They are not coming back.....

As you all know, we have a 30 day money back guarantee. And, as you can imagine, there are some products that have higher return rates than others. Its inevitable. We may get returns on certain products(for a variety of reasons) , while others, never come back.

One that does not seem to want to make its way back here is the $99 Musiland LILO DSP Soundcard.

$99.00, which includes the LILO and software down load from our site, gives your lap top the closes thing it is going to see to a sound card. For your desk top, install the card via the USB port on the front panel - you do not have to rip into the guts of your PC.

On certain audiophile boards, they throw the LILO into the same boat as a USB DAC, of which it is and of which it is not. The hand shaking between windows (XP and Vista are supported, sorry , no Mac, *Highly Discriminatory *) is accomplished through the installation of DSP software. This DSP software gives one recording engineer control over the music. In addition to all this, there is an optical out on the LILO for conversion from USB to SPDIF. Don't have a USB DAC? Take the LILO, adjust the sound, and pipe it into your favorite DAC via the optical out. As a special bonus, the LILO will do 24/96 conversion, sweet. The Brigatta uses the LILO capabilities, but short changes the process, for higher rez, by using I2S, very sweet.

The master control on the LILO software is plum. Basic control includes "foobar" functionality and the DSP control is (star) treky. Control includes:

Bass, treble, loudness
Dynamic Bass
Sharp, medium and soft filters
Corner/ center frequencies
Amplitude adjust
an equalizer

So, go ahead, enjoy yourself.

How does it sound? I listened through mu AKG headphones. The amount of detail was actually stunning and comes close to my favorite Bada PH12. This is not just average listening from you lap top on the train ride home, this is, high end on the trade ride home (although, I recommend using some high end buds, as you will look quite dorky with AKG 701s on public transportation)

CDs ripped with EAC are enlightening, internet music or streaming audio, for some reason, breath taking.

All this for $99.00

2008-08-12T17:12:00.004-05:00

The Dirty Little Secret

Somewhere out there, in the blogo-sphere, folks are muttering something about the CD is dead or about to die, because the computer is taking over. The disrupter (computer) claims ease of storage, ease of use, quick retrieval, etc Sounds inviting....Selling CD players, DACs and USB DACs, yours truly feels qualified to opine.

The dirty little secret is that sonically, the computer paradigm is not flushed out yet. While there is no doubt to their convenience, loading a CD or downloading music while it seems simple, can sonically be a nightmare.

There are so many aspects of this that can make a difference. USB or sound card? FLAC, loss less or none? EAC or copy? Replace ASIO driver or not? Or the uninformed, "Let me upsample these puppies to 3 Mega hertz".... "This uses a newer chip" ......I could go on....

What we have here, in cool hand Luke terms, is a failure to communicate. If you thought that cartridge alignment, tone arm, turn table, cartridge cable, phono preamp et. al. was a lot to swallow and understand, sister/brother, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Ripping music to a computer; simple. Watching someone spend all that time just to get frustrated during play back; priceless.

Stay tuned to my blog as start a foray into computer playback..... right now, its the dirty little secret of high end audio.

2008-07-16T08:22:00.003-05:00

The High End Press

I just received my latest and greatest copies of Absolute Sound and Stereophile. *SIGH*

They are not really high end magazines anymore. They are more like the "Audio" and "Stereo Review" magazines of yester year. The only thing missing is Julian Hirsch.

When Harry Pearson ran The Absolute Sound, you really got to peer in to what intelligent and outstanding designers in high end audio were up to. And, except for an article in Electronics Magazine (the debut the Ampzilla amps) you probably would have never heard of Audio Research, GAS, Magnepan, Dayton Wright etc...

If you want to know the next reviews in our popular high end magazines, just look at their advertisements, you can bet there is a favorable review in the offing. If you really want to know what is going on in high end audio, try another high end medium, a google search.

All the best,

VIc

2008-06-19T21:43:00.006-05:00

The MHZS CD 88

I would love to talk to you about the MHZS CD 88. How transparent it is. How it is one of the few tube CD players out there with tube rectification that smooths the transients, and once properly broken in, (could take several weeks folks) ,it is capable, for the money, of some great CD sound. We have been selling the MHZS line since 2005. We have sold many, many units. They are hard to pick up on the used market. Everything was going so well, then suddenly......

Lamp - blasted.

You know who he is, just Google MHZS CD 88 and you will find him. When we were first Lampblasted (and I invented the word and coined phenomenon - right here, just now, see I did it) several of you sent us emails encouraging us to respond to rants going on via Head Fi or Audio Asylum. We opted not to, because there are several Fi'ers and inmates who have purchased the MHZS CD 88 and they will speak up - and sure enough they did.

But what about the phenomena a vendor experiences by being Lamp-blasted. Someone, sitting in a small room at a remote part of the world, can, without ever having purchased the product or had it shake the dust off a woofer cone, suddenly convince a few of us that, well ,it a piece of roach do-do.

Your emails were great, "He Sounds angry", "He has a bone to pick" etc. etc.

You can use boards to exchange information and give courteous detailed reviews or you can use it to "get even". When someone is using it to "get even" we should all perk your ears up and consider the source and most importantly, the motivation. Now, I obviously am biased, and I state this ad-nauseas. I am not going to defend the MHZS CD 88 or counter the rant. What I would like you to do, is to consider the following Lamp-blast that if were posted, would have kept me out of high end audio.

"Its some company out of, guess where, Minneapolis. Some small shop that I never heard of. The darn thing is a throw back to the 1950s, and guess what, it still uses tone controls!! The piece of Sh#$t thing even uses a loudness contour. Now, I ask you , how 'High End' can this thing be? Written on the front are the words, "High Definition Stereo Control" - with tone controls? Ha! do not make me laugh. Then I opened the thing up, it still uses those cheap 12AX7 tubes. What is worse, I saw a transistor in the power supply from 'Delco' - the car parts people. Well I bet it makes noise and hisses just like an old steam engine. .. and what about those people from Minneapolis? - nothing good can come out Minneapolis you know what Sinclair Lewis said"

And that my friends, is the canard that says its all. The MHZS CD 88 requires no defending and nor does the Audio Research SP3 or for that matter, the hard working ethical people of Minnesota.

All the best,

Vic

2008-06-13T06:37:00.005-05:00

12AU7 -a-go-go

Trying to find some good NOS 12AX7s these days is the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack, try as I might, they are all too expensive for NOS or they are used at premium prices. *SIGH*

Brtheren in glass plugs, do not despair for there are some great deals in 12AU7 and 12AT7 NOS tubes. My attention turned to the 12AU7 'cause I had to do the "Tube Righteousness" section for the bargain basement - great performing Classic 9.0 Preamp. The 12AU7 and its derivatives (6189, 5963, 5814 et.al), can still be had at great prices that even a Jack Benny devote will be proud of.

The Classic 9.0 is a great preamp for the money. Solid construction and an external power supply make it one of the quietest preamps ever. Although it is not as detailed, clear or concise and the Doge 8 or the Ming Da MC 2A3, in its price class - it cannot be beat. And, because it took just two tubes, it is a great test bed for tube sound quality. On hand I had a GE 6189, a GE 5963, an RCA 5963, German RFT and a JJ Tesla 12AU7. Here we go, a-go-go......

GE 6189 / Sylvania 6189
These are essentially the same. The 6189 produce a big bold sound. The bass was big and fat and turned the Classic 9.0 into a Dynaco PAS 3X. If you like this kind of sound, then this is the tube for you. Maybe that is why it sounds so good in the Bada DC-222 - as it slightly colors and uplifts the midrange in the preamp section so it does not sound so sterile in the amplifier section.

German RFT 12AU7
The German RFT was the complete opposite. It was polite, smooth and accurate. In a sense, it made the Classic 9.0 slightly boring and uninteresting. While it did not veil the midrange, it brought out the Classic 9's short comings and the sound stage was very flat and the bass anemic. This tube is probably a great bet for the Ming Da MC-7R, where toning down some of the tubey-ness of that preamp would be a plus. It would be terrible in the Bada DC-222, my guess, and it would make it too sterile, well, too German.

JJ Tesla 12AU7
The Teslas were an over-all, well rounded performer. They did not excite nor dull. They did make the sound a little velvety and greasy in the midrange. Use these in a system where it sounds a little harsh and tranistory to you. They perform well in the Bada DC-222. They may make the Ming Da MC 7 a little too smooth - so unless you like that sound consider other choices.

GE 5963
As far as the Classic 9.0 goes, this tube is one that I can live with. It is smooth and detailed throughout the midrange and delicate in the highs. It has a slight bass hump, and while it is not fat in the bass, it is a little pudgy. It had one of the best instruments and space placements and really let orchestras play through. All in all, it turned the Classic 9.0 into a different preamp. Use it in the Bada DC-222 if you want a more accurate sound with tube warmth and detail. It matches well in the 7R as it lets the rectifying tube perform its magic without too much interference.

RCA 5963
The RCA one ups the GE in terms of spacial acuity, high end articulation and detail. The bass is tighter and firmer, but not lean. Use this in the same way you would the GE. In the Classic 9.0, it was my favorite and the one I recommend (while they last).

All the best,

Vic

P.S Look for the Launch of my social network, "The Halo Getter", where we will discuss Audio, tubes, the high end industry and other fun-sense.

2008-05-28T21:19:00.002-05:00

The Velvet Underground

If it weren't for Stephen Mejias' Stereophile Blog, I would never know about the Vacuum State of the Art Conference & Show in Vancouver, WA. You can reach their site: http://www.vsac2008.com/index.html

Now I bet you thought I was going to talk about a New York band - so sorry to disappoint. I am talking about the underground of audio that exists and few seem to venture into it. Let me encourage you, there are some real gems here.

Looking for Citation tube amps? Look no further than Jim Mcshane, who has come to be sort of a legend here at Pacific Valve. How about some great cables? Consider Jena Labs, known for great cables and now some cool looking loud speakers.

We also partner with some under ground folks: Response Audio and APL Hi Fi. Since we are part of the "underground" our best bet is to partner with them, where they can mod our products and offer you, the consumer, an upgrade path for your investment.

What else makes the underground so cool is that you can get great products, upgrades and personal support at rock bottom prices. Theses craftsmen (and woman) put all their rubles into making great products and not advertising in main stream audio magazines. These craftspeople are here and making the hobby great. What a gift they are.

There are many, many underground folks, some compete with us. Please Google them: Morrow Audio, Vacuum Tube Valley, the Tube Store (great, just great), tube depot (answers all your questions), Brent Jessies Vacuum tubes - and many more.

All th best,
Vic

2008-05-06T09:01:00.004-05:00

Old Tubes, New Tubes

There are certainly some tube purists out there. Some folks will only entertain NOS - New Old Stock tubes. These tubes go by the now defunct brands of: Telefunken, Siemens, GE, Sylvania, RCA etc... Others will entertain the mix, adding in the makers of new tubes: Electro Harmonix, JJ Tesla, Tung Sol, Sovtek etc.

Why the divide? Why do some purists "poo poo" the new makers of tubes. Over all, I am sot sure, but I would like to take the time to open the eyes.

12ax7s
We have a con-num-drum here is that I am very little of the 12AX7 derivatives out there. Tung Sols seem to be the best all-around performers. Forget ELectro Harmonix and Sovteks sans the excellent Sovtek LPS, which is an exception to the Sovtek grainy rule. If you are looking for NOS tubes, Telefunkens are the ones to get. I would not pass by any 12AX7 NOS at this point including GEs, Sylvanias etc. Some of these NOS brands are either too expensive or not readily available. I undestand that Tung Sol makes an excellent gold standard 12AX7. This new tube is readily available and may fit the bill. Cannot comment, have not heard it.

12AT7s
Cannot find a new tube that I say that I like. Especially when the GE 12AT7s and Sylvanias are so readily available. If you are going new, forget EH or Sovteks. Try the JJs

12AU7s
The JJ Tesla 12AU7s are not bad. But, they do not provide the low noise, see through depth and coherence that a GE 6189, Ge 5963 or RCA 5963 provide. Nor are they as stately as the German RFT 12AU7. Again, some of these NOS brands are readily available. If you are going new, I like the JJs

6922/6DJ8
Here we have another tube-num-drum. The new JJs are quiet and liguid. The JAN GEs are NOS and they are on par if not slightly better in some applications. But none of these have the transparency of the Amperex or RCA 6DJ8s. Those are the ones to buy if you can get them.

There are also some honorable mentions here for new tubes:

The Shuguang 2A3 (highly underestimated, white label)
Shuguang 300BC (white label)
Shuguang KT88-98 (not the KT88)
Shuguang 6550
Electro Harmonix KT88
ELectro Harmonix 6550

Have not heard the Genlexes - I hear that they are great as well

All the best,

Vic

2008-04-04T11:29:00.002-05:00

Game, SET, Match

I amazed and then not surprised. Contradiction? Perhaps. I am amazed at how many audiophiles do not embrace SETs (Single Ended Triode) amps. I first thought it was because of their low wattage. Take the Classic 16.2. For $2000 you get 9 watts, that is, in Phase Linear 400 terms, $223 bucks a watt. Hardly a bargain. Moreover, how many of us have speakers that could drive large rooms with just 9 watts. So I am not surprised at its small customer base.

If 9 watts won't work for you, there is the Ming Da MC 3008-A, which I have blogged about ad nauseum. Now that is 40 watts per channel. So why has this not caught on? Its $54 bucks a watt. But what's with the weird sci fi tube? So, I am not surprised it has a small customer base.

How about the Ming Da MC 84C - that is $40 a watt - but a great entry point - less than $600. But at only 13 watts per channel, it may be great for my den, but not for my system. So, I am not surprised at its small customer base.

What a shame. Single Ended Triodes offer just spectacular sound: deep wide bass, wide open west midrange and seductive highs. If you have never experienced one, its time you pony up and at least give one a try. You will not be disappointed and watt for watt, you will be competing against some amps costing over $20,000.

There I go again, talking about over-priced audio. I just could not help myself. The $20,000 amp is $375 bucks a watt.

2008-03-20T11:26:00.002-05:00

Whats up with OP AMPS??

We have CD players that use OP AMPS and CD players that do not. Then again, there are CD players that use tubes and those that do not. SACD players and HDCD players, top loaders and front loaders - I've got a headache.

So, you are thinking OP AMPS are artificial and solid state sounding - they reek of what solid state grunge does to music - right? Not so fast. I am here to tell you that it really depends upon the sound you are after and not the notion of whether it uses op amps or not.

Take for example, the Lite 15 CD player that we use to carry. A fine CD player that was still better than an NAD or Rotel. It did not use op amps - it was solid state discrete. But, it never did sound better than the MHZS CD 33 or the Bada HD-22SE with the solid state output. The MHZS and the Bada uses op amps.

Then there is the Jolida player - a fine player that I like. But, I do not know if it is as delicate or detailed as an MHZS CD 88. The Jolida does not use op amps, the MHZS does.

You convinced?

Modders swap op amps and interchange them with other op amps and improve the sound - its just like tube rolling. So before you make your selection on op amps or no, use our sound guide and recommendation to help you in purchasing decision,

All the best,

Vic

2008-03-01T11:09:00.002-06:00

In the media spotlights

The news squawk boxes are really pushing out a lot these days. A recent and very sad event at Northern Illinois University near our warehouse has got a hold of my sorrows. And then, there is the socio politico: we have two candidates struggling to find out who will be the Jimmy Carter heir-apparent, and on the other side, a cacophony of upset folks are upset that their candidate did not learn economics from "Bed time for Bonzo." Whew!! Its time to turn my attention to some quality music!

But we certainly have some products that are not in the main stream and you will not find out about on any squawk box, unless you are a frequent traveler to Head fi or Audio Asylum. Three products come to mind: the Shuguang S8 amp, the Image 650 and the Image M12 mono blocks.

Truth be told, we sell very few of these - only because they have not caught on. (we sold very few MHZS products in the beginning and now we can't keep them in stock) They are some excellent amps in every respect: build quality, features and sound quality. Enough said!

The Shuguang amp is made by the same company as the the fine Shugang KT88-98, 2A3C and 300BC tubes. The solder joints and components are all top notch and expertly crafted. (There is a review of the Shuguang S8 from Affordable Audio). There is a bias adjustment for switching out the power tubes to your favorite KT88 or 6550. The sound is the best part as it not as sweet or euphonic as the Mind MC 368B90 (which is our best selling integrated, BTW) . This is one of the "newer" sounding Chinese amps; it more neutral throughout the range, warm - yet real in its presentation. The bass is more controlled and not overly ripe - I am not sure if it beats my favorite integrated, the Doge 6130 - but it comes close enough if that I have to get these two together.

Then there is the obscure Image 650 basic amplifier. This is truly wonderful and detailed. I have to match it with a best preamp (Doge 8 or Ming Da MC 2A3) to get my full satisfaction. My "full satisfaction" is an amp that pushes music into the room; its bloom gives me a sense of excitement. When I listen to this amp, I cannot believe that it is just 50 watts as it sounds as powerful as the Ming Da MC 368B90 or the Ming Da MC 34AB. I must say that I really, really like the EH6550 tubes a la Jim McShane (my tube mentor) recommends. Its low end is not as tightly controlled as the Shuguang or the Doge, but it rocks, what can I say?

Likewise for the Image M12. Which sounds like a powerful Shuguang S8 or Doge 6130. It is a tightly controlled low end, has a tube midrange but no syrup. I powered up my 1977 ARC D150 next to it and could not believe that i had a D-150 that was not over ripe or "dated" in it sound. The image presentation is spectacular as the sound stage of the Chicago symphony widens and deepens with no "fuzz" around the pluck of the violin string.

Dollar for dollar, these three "no brand" did not disappoint. Granted, they do not have the cache of a full page Stereophile ad - but they are truly special, well made and made for tube lovers.

2008-01-31T19:34:00.000-06:00

Sitting

I am in a Cat Stevens kind of mood - " Sitting on my own not by myself, everybody's here with me" and that is how I find myself when folks call in and ask me to compare one of our products to re-branded Chinese brand (NAD, Cambridge) or for that matter, a Chinese brand (Cayin, Prima Luna, Vincent) to one of our brands

And it is not really true that our brands are sooooo superior that they are not even worth the discussion - that is not it all. In fact, the brands, mentioned above a really excellent brands. They are just, well, priced liked the real estate market in 2003-2004.

And this is the part that everyone misses. A new paradigm has emerged in high end audio and I hope you do not miss it. Pacific Valve aside, there is now and there will be for the foreseeable future, a chance to purchase some excellent high end products at rock bottom prices. Pacific Valve aside, companies like Morrow audio and Vacuum tube valley are re-branding the Yaqin products and selling them to you at a reasonable price. They, in effect, are imitating our "Insurance" model of giving you the best from China, but with warranty, repair and support. And although we do not carry the Yaqin products, (sans for an excellent tube buffer), we applaud these folks.

But you may miss it. I still see prejudice on the audiophile boards. And just like the folks that believed in the spontaneous generation during the 18th century, we have folks on the boards that still believe in the combustion generation; Chinese audio equipment self-destructs like the mission impossible tape, and given the chance, a KT88 amp will take the high-road to pyrotechnics. If they are not tooting the fire extinguisher horn, they insists that the efforts of a Pacific Valve, Morrow or VTV result in a slave labor camps that makes the tomfoolery on the "Lord of flies" seems conservative.

But you may miss it - because this nonsense goes unchallenged. Someone asks a question, these ridiculous statements are made, and then the thread ends. The truth of the matter, is that if any of this were true, the gang of 3 (Pacific, Morrow, VTV) would surely be out of business by now. The truth of the matter is, when you buy a Ming Da, Yaqin, Jolida or for that matter a Cayin amp, you are helping a family business grow and prosper in a country where persecution and lack of freedom are to the culture what 12AX7s are to phono preamps. Helping, not hurting a family business in a country like this, well folks, this, is a nice sound.

The folks that import Chinese products and triple the cost they are missing it - not Mr. Morrow or the folks at VTV- they are getting it.

So I am sitting answering these emails asking to compare equipment at a reasonable price with equipment that is triple the price of what you can get it for at a local cafe on Heifei. But why? Don't miss it

All the best,

Vic

2008-01-14T14:32:00.000-06:00

A New Pair of Phones

I am the first to admit that I am not a head phone guy. I just don't get it - why listen to a pair of speaker cans when you can tap your toe to some gut thumping bass.

Alas, we now carry quite a few headphone amplifiers and someone has to comment on them and that someone is me. Oh yes, my new phones are AKG 701s which replace my Grado SRS 225s

Let me say that the AKGs are a world of difference on some of these amps. And let me go so far as to say that the art of headphone - amp matching is a much more arduous art than the art of amplifier-speaker matching. This art's refinement is so much so that your phones can sound thin, tinnny and our of sorts with the wrong amp. Its more than just a roll-off of highs or a softening of the bass.

Friends of the low impedance Grado are not friends of the high impedance AKG - except for one Doge 6120 head amp, who seems to be friendly to all.

The BL Audio is no friend of the Grado, but endears itself, to the AKG - except for the fact that the volume control must be adjusted to the 1:00 position. The BL Audio is delicate, light and pretty darn quite. So unique is the little guy that I dare use it as a passive preamp for a CD player and will be comparing it to my Ming Da MC 2A3

The Bada sound stage is a delicate dance with the AKGs it throws a sound stage wide and deep and yet gives me just wonderful details and warmth.

The Doge 6 is the best all around. It has a slightly warm bass that is needed with phoned (MHO) and silky smooth highs. I equipped mine with Phillips 6BQ5s and 5751s - ah...

The new Ming Da is in a class by itself and it shines above the Doge in just about every aspect except the high end where me thinks the Ming Da is slightly rough around the edges.

And that's the way they sound........

With AKG 701s, at least....

2007-11-21T10:41:00.001-06:00

Sitting in the Middle Row.

I have a listening bias.

I like things upfront, that bloom into the room. I am a detail freak. I get jazzed when I hear fingers on instruments and vocalists wetting their lips. I am all about that. Hence, I really like items like Doge CD players and SET amps.

Management asked me to review the new Image equipment. It was in a room above our warehouse in Dekalb, IL. I was excited to review these amps so I scurried up there.

The equipment in the room was the Ming Da MC 2A3 preamp, the Image M12 and 650, some Thiel speakers, a SONY transport and much to my disliking, the DAC 68.

I just can't figure out DAC 68 people. They are an odd bunch to me. The DAC 68 is a noisy creature (not so with balanced out). Since I am a DAC 62 lover, I always turned it down for the punchier, dynamic, DAC 62. DAC 68 people swear by its tonal neutrality and how it portrays music. I was always disinterested.

But now I am forced to listen. After awhile, I finally realized what they had been saying. Yes, it is a little noisy. If you put your ear up to the speaker, you will hear some white noise. I fitted my with JJ tesla 6922s and started listening.

My problem was and is, that my equipment choices either place me in the front row or in the singer's lap. Not so with the DAC 68. I finally felt myself in the music hall. Seated somewhere in the middle row. I became aware of they ambient hall around me and it caused my head to turn to the left and the right as I heard 'air" coming from the sides of the speaker. Vocalists were not so frontal, they were all kind of laid back, yet detailed - just like they would be at the Erie Crown or the Park West in Chicago.

Ok, DAC 68 people, you convinced me. Now, despite its noise, I see why you are buying these and creating your own little DAC 68 "club". Its sound is not out of this world, but in the middle of the world.

All the best,

Vic

2007-10-17T07:59:00.001-05:00

When Things Sound Similar

If you continue down this sentence, I m about to say something outrageous. For the most part, Audio components sound similar. Not the same, but Similar.

Take for example, the early Audio Research, Conrad Johnson and Dynanco products. They all sound similar: warm sweet midrange, slight lack of detail, rich, fat low end. You could say the same about Byrston and Mark Levinson.

Then you get a product that does not sound similar. These are few. The Ming Da MC 2A3 preamp is one of those products. It just does not sound like anything I heard before.

The Ming Da MC 2A3 is a series of paradoxes. For so many tubes, it does not sound tube like. For such a nice preamp, you cannot select inputs from the remote, and for the price/performance, well, its stupid cheap.

When I look at the preamp and see those tubes, I cannot imagine what it does - and that is, straight wire with gain. I am expecting a lush over rich, over ripe presentation. Instead I get a wonderful presentation of music, gobs of detail and a a slight, ever so slight warmth.

Another paradox is that it has no controversy. From the email we get from people we trust with good ears, it a unanimous vote. The Ming Da MC 2A3 is so out there, there are very few things in the less than 10K price range, that sound similar to it.

2007-09-05T15:36:00.000-05:00

Super, Super Audio CDs

I now have in my hot big hands, a Diana Krall SACD, a the Diana Krall CD in redbook, a Doge 6 CD player and a Shanling SCD300

You know what I am going to do, don't you?

I let each one warm up sufficiently and then took it for a spin. What a difference! Talk about two different personalities!

The Shanling's tubes did what they were supposed to do, provide warmth on the background. To date, this is the most detail I have ever heard from spinning plastic and its rendition was breath taking, to the point where I felt like going up to her (Diana Krall) and asking her where the vending machine was.

Whenever I wanted detail, I always had to give something up: warmth, goose bumps etc. What I got in return was detail, but also fret with irritation. Such is the problem with all NOS DACS that I heard. I like their detail, their dynamics - but, put a bad CD in one of those and look out - you are in for a harsh lesson. The Shanling is the first CD player, first CD player ever, to cut through the muck and give you correct semblance on a cymbal, the sound of the skin on the drum, the pluck of the bass without the background tin.... etc. All of this was truly startling. I never liked any other SACD player because the detail was colored with the solid state gunk that I never liked. Now, all of that was gone.

Enter the Doge 6.

Playing the same cut through the DOGE 6 finally told me what it was all about. The Doge 6 pushed Diana in front of the instruments, gave her air around her voice, let me hear the concert hall. This, this, is what I listen to tubes for. If the Shanling was a new high definition TV. It was clear, crisp clean - it brought you into the music because its cut through all the fog. But, the Doge 6 is a romantic - it just might bring in some fog it feels that the room is smoky. The Doge 6 will do things to music that will really startle you and cause you to sit back in your chair, close your eyes and just listen.

So which one? I have both. When I want to listen clean and through, its an SACD on the Shanling, when I want romance, the Doge.

But it is never, never an SACD on a Japanese label player or a redux Marance. Too solid state for me. I just don't like my SACDs any other way.

All the Best,

Vic

2007-08-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

Digitalis

I admit freely that some of us here are not real cable people. Opinions vary. My beef is that its just one more variant that I have to worry about. So, what drones like myself do, is pick a good set of speaker and interconnect cables and just go back to rolling tubes and tweaking.

Until I got a hold of this digital cable.

It was the most unlikely of things. This is the last piece of equipment that I wanted to bother with or have anything to do with. This is the last piece of equipment that I though would make a difference. The monster coax that I was using between my Lite CD player and the DAC62 was suiting me just fine. Then someone borrowed it. Through serendipity, I picked up the Xindak DC-01. WOW.

Images suddenly snapped into place. Air appeared where there was not before. It gave me, do I dare say it, as big of an improvement as the Amprexes I was using. Then I became addicted. I tried it on the DAC60 Modified, then the Great March 2, then the DAC AM and the DAC AH - on each, it completely changed the sonic character and made them into new DACS.

So,I am reformed. On digital cables, that is. What a difference.

All the best,

Vic

2007-07-18T11:57:00.000-05:00

Three Blind Mice

Two blogs ago, I decided to review the top end CD players: the MHZS CD 88, the Shanling CD 300 (or for an extra $5o0 you can have an extra zero for a CD 3000) and the Doge 6. Today its the MHZS CD 33, BADA HD22 and the Shanling T-80.

Taking a blind test on these is like having someone blind fold you, then taking you on a plane, train or automobile and asking, "which one are you in?" They are all different - completely different- and reviewing them was an interesting endeavor.

Take the MHZS CD 33. The 33 uses the same chip as the 66 and 88 but a different transport and output buffer topology. We replaced the stock Chinese 6N3 tubes with GE 5670s. The MHZS 33 is, I now declare, the best value in CD player history. It has the sonic characteristics of the Shanling CD 300 (or, if you want an extra zero and have $500 to spare - CD 3000) and the life like presentation of its older siblings. Complex dynamic passages lose their edge, pianos sound life-like and vocals are precise. It does not however, have the last word in detail. So the MHZS places you about 15 rows back in the orchestra hall where the congeal of the orchestra, no matter how complex, makes it way over to your ears.

Witness the Bada HD-22. The HD 22 is the boldest of the group. It has the dynamics of the Doge 6 and the detail of the MHZS CD 88. Its dynamic presentation and un-veiled push is fun to listen to. With complex jazz and rock the player places itself in first place as it pumps bass and drives a frontal presentation of the midrange. While the BADA HD-22 is the most fun, its boldness is not always easy to listen to. As a side effect - small quartets and small jazz ensembles come through with uncanny realism and life like performance. As a matter of fact, if this is what I listened to all the time I would own the Bada, no question.

Then there is the Shanling T-80. The T-80 want to be a solid state CD player. It really does. It is dead neutral across the entire spectrum and has uncanny detail for a CD player in the $500 price range. (P.S. I have not found one with an extra zero, so for those of you who insist on spending the extra $500, you may have to wait for the Shanling t-800). The bass is firm and does not have the ripeness of the 33 nor the push of HD-22. If you listen to music that is across the spectrum, the the T-80 is the one for you. Replace the 6N3 tubes and it becomes even more neutral while gently imparting a high gloss over the upper midrange and a slight emphasis in the lower midrange.

So let me some it up with James Taylor, Janis Ian and the latest release from the Jone's Street Boys:

For the MHZS the line up (James, Taylor, Janis Ian and the Jones Street Boys) were in a small cozy night club with a nice set of tube amps,
For the Bada - they were at Ravinia Park (an outside theater) and I had a front seat, and
For the Shanling T-80 (or for $500 we will add the extra zero - T-800), you were in the studio with these cats.

All the best,
Vic

2007-07-08T19:31:00.000-05:00

Amer-A-Chord

When I was a small boy growing up in Skokie, IL my parents had, ever since I could remember, a Telefunken console Hi Fi. It was a big wood thing with a Phono, Am/FM/Short Wave and speakers running along the bottom. It was pure mono. I would peak around the back, after I turned it on, to watch the tubes glow. I am guessing, at this point, that they were probably EL84 tubes. The sound that it produced was as smooth as silk, a little shy on the bass and lacking dynamics.The mid range, especially vocals, were unbelievable.

I also remember going over to some friends that my parents had at the time and got a chance to poke around the back, of what was the largest hi fi console I had ever seen in my life, a Fisher console - vacuum tube, of course. The Fisher produced wonderful EL4 based sound.

Just as I was done playing ball one day, we went over to a friends house for some kool aid, and there it was. I never seen anything like it. It floated the LP on a chassis that was suspended, what seemed to be mid air. The platter was as large as the disc. It said, "AR, Inc" on a brass palate that was attached to a wood plinth. It sat upon an H. H. Scott integrated tube amplifier and fed an Electrovoice speaker pushed in a corner. My fried played "Cecilia" from Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water and I never, ever, to this day, heard such an ass kicking low end.

Growing up in the Skokie - Evanston area there were many high end stores to choose from as there still are today. There was a chance for a hobbyist and even a novice to get decent sound.

Now I live in another suburb of Chicago and I am afraid that my children will never experience Telefunken/Fisher/ AR, Inc hi fi that I once had. When they go over to their friends houses, they have something they bought on sale or worse yet, a TV / AV system they purchased at Best Buy. The sound is never smooth, there is nothing innovative from a sound quality point of view and nobody really cares what it sounds like, just how it looks. Such is the strip mall like hi fi land that they live in. Their friends see the tubes and weird looking speakers in our house, but no one is interested. Maybe its because it does not get 330 HDTV channels.

Such is the past, such is my child hood. I have very few friends who have a decent stereo in their homes or even have the inkling in purchasing one. Before my wife's grandmother passed away, she had a Grundig console sitting in her living room. "I suppose I should get rid of this big thing", she quipped, "But it just produces such good sound, and I can't buy anything that sounds like it"

Now she does not know anything about cables, power conditioning or DACs - but she does know good sound, and she too is part of the past.

2007-06-07T20:25:00.000-05:00

Moe, Larry & Curly

I have often wrote about the differences between Cd players. I make such incredulous statements like, "The differences between CD players is greater than the differences between cartridges" So what I am saying is that the differences between a Lyra and, say a Dynavector diamond is smaller than the difference between an NAD and Rotel.

And such is the differences between three high end CD players: the MHZS CD 88, The Shanling CD 300/3000 and the Doge 6. (Moe, Larry and Curly et. al)

Take Moe, the MHZS CD 88. Fitted with Tung Sol tubes or GE 5751 black plates + the obscure OB2 tube (Sovtek) swapped for the even more reclusive WY2 tube is a player that it is the most articulate. Take a voice like Elvis Costello's where you can here the crisp vocals that almost sound a little "etchy". This CD player, can be very delicate yet at times, very detailed int he mid range and rips every last bit of detail from the disk. Note that I did not call the MHZS CD 88 "Edgy" I called it "Etchy" where you are drawn into the subtleties and details of the canvas. I kind of like this sound.

Then there is Larry, the Shanling CD 300/3000 or just add them together for the 3300. Fitted with JJ Tesla 6922s, the Shanling is the smoothest of the the three and comes across rich, lush and musical. Here Elvis Costello sounds like he just had some nice hot tea and lemon and the "etchy" part of his voice was missed. The Shanling paints a smooth water color canvas with a broad stroke and places you in the center of the concert hall where the music blends together nicely. Classical, quartets and bar room jazz are great with the Shanling.

And now for Curly, the Doge 6. The Doge 6 clowns around with the music and reveals things to you that are there that you thought were not there. The MHZS CD 88 and the Shanling are CD players, but the Doge 6 is the master tape - it reveals something quite different and that's why nothing else sounds like it.

Sorry it took so long for this post. I experienced a loss of a loved one and I was out of pocket for a while. Now I am plugged in.

Next time we will take a look at some low cost CD players: MHZS CD 33, the BADA PH-12 and the Shanling T80.

2007-04-24T15:31:00.001-05:00

Getting the Highs Right.

DAC 62 folks seem to fall into two camps: The high end is just like vinyl or the high end is veiled. Hmmm, discrepancy. What are these vinyl people hearing that the other camp is not hearing?

When I hear that it is veiled, the comparison is almost always other CD players and DACs. When I hear that it is just like vinyl, you guessed it, its from some former Decca lover.

This caused me to pause and try to understand what is happening. Why the phenomena,? Why the duality? And, more importantly, who is right?

Here is my theory. Thanks, no less to mid-fi manufacturers and “The Bunch” (See my previous BLOGs), our ears have been inundated with high end grunge. We are used to the biting, rice krispie crackle of high end digital conversion that passes from our beloved tweeters into the room. We have been conditioned to think that this is what a high end sounds like. So akin are we to this, that when the grunge goes away, we think that some of the high end went with it.

And such was the dilemma facing one Henry Kloss when he first showed us a tape full of hiss, and then a high end compression – expansion appliance crafted by one Ray Dolby. I swore Dolby took away some of the high end of the cassette. I vowed never to use such a thing because I would rather listen to hiss and more high end, then listen to no hiss with some of the music missing.

But that was not the case. Dolby does not remove the music and so neither does a correct conversion process. My new test is that if I am listening to a new DAC and notice some of the high end “veiled”, I now take a closer listen. Perhaps it is the ghost of Henry Kloss.

2007-04-04T14:33:00.001-05:00

The 805 Tube

I have been asked to audition the Ming DA MC 3008-A mono block amp that uses a 805, 300B, 12AX7 and 12AU7 tubes. The amp, in the newest designs from Ming Da, can be used as a “basic” amplifier (i.e., needs a preamp) or as an integrated amplifier (Preamp included). I chose the “basic” setting and used the Ming DA MC 2A3 mega tube preamp.

I have to admit that I never seen(except pictures), ergo, never heard an 805 tube This always bothered me, being the SET nut that I am, I have never been in the same room with an 805 or an 845, for that matter. I opened up a large tube box that looked like it should hold a pint of Mcallan Scotch instead of a tube. Nestled inside was one of these 805 retro blimps.

I sported a pair of white gloves and removed the 805 pop bottle from the container and placed it in the amp. Twisting to the left, the 805 torpedo snapped firmly in place. Now for the weird part, on top of the pop bottle was the anode cap where Ming DA Supplies a white bead like wire that snaps firmly in place. This is the weirdest tube installation that I have ever done.

I was ready to go. I turned on the amp. The 805 lit up like a roman candle. So bright was its display that I thought it was going to blow up. But alas, it remained that way for a while and both mono blocks were identical in their luminary flirtatious display. I was not used to this as all the tubes that I know light up slowly and then reach their operating current. Not so with this one – it was more like turning on a light bulb. Luckily the Ming DA provides a warm up circuit that gives the 805 plenty of time to stabilize.

I couldn’t stand it; I let the amp warm up for an hour and then gave it a go. On went “Marlena” from Joni Mitchell’s Travelogue (excellent recording, BTW and a must for any reviewer).

What a completely different experience. I was usually use to the low wattage 2A3s (my favorite), 300Bs and EL84s. 40 watts of this stuff? What a surprise!

Before I start my rave, I need to discuss something that I think is missing in most equipment: authority, Authority is transparency, imaging and dynamics combined to create the image solidly in the room.. I do not know if it was the Doge 6, the Ming DAs or the combination, but I felt authority, I heard bass without boom, midrange without over-voicing or etching and a high end without glitter.

The SET sound is unique. The bane of small wattage surrounds it, until now. These high powered over sized fire flies are causing me to throw all my KT88s and 6550s away. Is it possible?

2007-03-17T13:15:00.000-05:00

A Question of Quality

We hear it all the time, “I heard that Chinese equipment, in particular those tube amps, are a piece of junk – they are built like krap” or “Ha, buy one now, and buy one three years later” or how about someone trying to be polite, “Chinese equipment is of dubious quality and origin” But my all time favorite is, “The equipment is not made for 110v even though you can plug it straight into 110v” What??

Let me set the record straight: The origin of Chinese equipment is not dubious, its from China. As far as its quality goes, lets take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

The Dayton Wright electrostatics arc’d themselves to smithereens given any good crescendo.
The Sonus Blue cartridge was held together with peanut butter and in the middle of a good Sheffield labs would self destruct with the cartridge body spinning around like it was on the mad tea cup ride at Disney.
Connect a solid state amplifier to an ARC SP-3A AC jack and you will smoke the SP-3's Scott transformer
You will need a good stiff beverage when your $8000 Beveridge amp smokes the main lens and cylinder
Once you arc your Quad ESL 57, its rip, rip, rip all the way home
Turning on your Audio Research D-90B was always a celebratory event: smoke and flames flying everywhere – better have Leonard on speed dial.
Ever wonder why there is not an Audio Research SP-6D? By the way, I am NOT picking on Audio Research here. I love them
“You mean to tell me that you still have a Magnepan tone arm that is still working”?
Or, “Oh yes, after a couple a years or so the Mylar glue weakens and you will have to send it back to us”
Clean your KLH 9s lately?
Who can forget the bass of the "flames" Linear 700, 700B or 400? Once you blew an output transistor, you were dead in the water until you replaced all of them
Any G.A.S. Ampzilla Meter.

And so on……

You see, high end equipment, like Jaguars, that push the state of the art are not the most quality driven things. All I can say is that my Dayton Wrights, Quads, Magenepans, Sonus Blue, Beveridges and ARC amps gave me years of pleasure. I hope your high end experience does the same for you. The truth of the matter, Chinese equipment is not any more or less quality oriented that some US made equipment. Owners who stock both Chinese and American gear will tell you that.

On another note, most of the quality opinions come from audiophile boards. Those authors are of dubious origin. Perhaps its fear, fear that a $4000 amp and $3000 CD player do not sound any better than a Ming Da $699 amp and a $499 Bada CD player. Hmmm. This industry is due for a good house cleaning and shake out.

All the best,

Vic

2007-03-07T19:39:00.000-06:00

Those Mercurial 12AX7s

The 6922/6DJ8s are pretty normal acting preamplifier tubes. If they sound bad, they sound bad no matter what the application: preamp, tube buffer etc. Same with 12AT7s / 12AU7s

Not so with 12AX7s. 12AX7s are, well just plain weird.

Take the Sovtek 12AX7LPS. Its common knowledge that I am not a fan of Sovteks. My initial suspicion occurred when a guitar player said, “Yeah, I like those tubes, they distort the sound pretty good”! Ok – so this is where Vic and musicians part ways. The 12AX7LPS though is a phenomenally great preamp tube. It has a great low end and a warm midrange without smearing things together a la JJ Tesla. Place the same Sovtek 12AX7LPS’ in a Doge 6 CD player and it is just plain awful. Place them in the Shuguang CD player and it breaks free form its Jolida roots and sounds articulate. Put in back in the Ming Da MC 7R – don’t do it to me - yuch!

Then there is the GT Mallards Replicas. In the Doge, Shuguang and Ming Da amps, just wonderful. So So in the Doge 6 CD player and too much Jolida in the Shuguang CD player.

Then there is the JAN 12AX7WA - My favorite all around tube which even makes a C&Y*N amp (you do the math) sound good. So go figure. I have never heard these tubes sound bad, they sound good although do not have the spectacular presentation that the Mullards or Sovteks do.

The JJ Teslas do not excite me no matter where I put them.

I have not heard the Tung Sols – I know, I Know , I will let you know when I do.
Then, we also have the 5751s – yikes!

All the Best,

Vic

2007-02-25T19:59:00.000-06:00

Mapleshade.

I must be on some list. I keep getting the Mapleshade catalog. As catalogs go, its a very interesting one. In the front of the catalog you have music, in the middle you have your tweaks and at the end, you have vintage equipment that looks like the best of Jim McShane's garage.

I thought that I would give the music a listen. I picked up two CDs: one from the John Previti Quartet, "Swinging Lullabyes For My Rosetta" and the other, Yacca Flats, "Garden of Weeds"

What a treat. Not only was it good music, but recorded wonderfully. Listening to it with the Doge 6 was exciting. Listening with the Great March 2 on Yacca Flats really brought out out the low end.

I am going to be listening and buying more from these Mapleshade people. What treats they bring us, what tweks they teach us and what vintage they have!!

All the best,

Vic

2007-02-20T16:03:00.000-06:00

Sitting with the AR a 10-Pis

AR 10-Pis? You must be talking about some math or geometry lesson, right Vic? ‘Cause you can’t be talking about the speakers from the 70s – those over-sized-3 ways, right?

Yes, I am talking about these. Long story short – a friend of mine ask me to get these for him on eBay – so I put in a bid. I did take his pulse and asked if he was mixing Valium and Demurral, but, he insisted that he was not. He indicated that all I do is listen to them.

I got them out of the box (‘cause I had to inspect them anyway) plugged them into the Doge 6130 amp and Shuguang CD player. Put on a CD and sat back.

I have to admit that I had some prejudice. I expected a dark, wooly sound in the bass and nothing but tin in the midrange and high end. Then I did remember myself making a big mistake in the 70s, pooh-poohing the Shore V15 Mark IV because of the Sure name and going for the likes of high compliant cartridges like the ADC XLM and the Sonus Blue. All the time not knowing that the Sure could track the heck out of the other two and sound quite neutral and detailed if given the chance. But, my audio snobbery got hold and I passed it by.

I also passed by this speaker. It was time to give it a listen and undo some of my audio stereotypes (the pun, intentional). In went to Dire Straits, “Brothers in Arms” .

I was surprised. What surprised me was how coherent the speaker was. I was also surprised by the lack of cross over distortion in the speaker. The 12” woofer also surprised me as it pushed bass deep into the room and if it wanted to , could shake the room. Mated with a good tube amp, like the Doge 6130, the speaker was a real treat to listen to. Yes, it was colored and not for everyone, but colored in such a laid-back euphonic way – I was really enjoying myself. The down side, and it is a big one for me, was the lack of detail. The 70s drivers were just not fast enough, so significant smearing occurred.

These speakers, as I am now learning, have quite the cult following. They go quickly on eBay and are fetching a cool $500 a pair. For $500, you are not going to get a more coherent, euphonic speaker than the AR 10 Pi. Interesting.

2007-02-06T19:56:00.000-06:00

Those New Chips.................

We are in quite a - well, as "Neuman" put it, a "conundrum" with some new DACs and CD players employing the PCM1798 and the CS4398 DAC chips. Something mysterious must be going on: they both end in "98" and they both sound the same.

Where as the other chips: the AD 1853 sounded "sweet" and the PCM1704UK sounded "bold", both of these "98" suffixed chips sound surprisingly neutral and both demand that they have the best circuits around them, otherwise they sound flat, veiled and generally uninteresting.

Look for manufactures of the DACs and CD players using these chips to charge you 4X the price they should be to try and get them to sound "right".

For my book, the DIYEDEN Great March 2, Musiland MD-10, DIYEDEN SVDAC05 and the Doge CD player are the best values in audio.

2007-01-24T06:15:00.001-06:00

On a Desert Island Part 1

It’s the old desert island question: If you were on a desert island, what would you take with you? I could ask you that question but I need a “twist” to make it interesting. Something like, oh, let’s say, a budget. So the new question is, “If you were on a desert island, and had a budget of $1500, what audio components would you take with you?”

Hmmm. Interesting question – because now I have to consider my tastes, bias, the kind of music I listen to, etc – and what can I fit in. I need to start with the hardest component first and work my way back – that is the speaker.

There are speakers from a Chinese manufacturer called BL Audio that fit the bill. They are called the BL Audio Muge. They image like a son of gun and are fussy about the midrange. Drive them incorrectly, and you get a nasal quality. Drive them too hard and you get congestion. Drive them just right, - look out. Total cost for the speakers are: $650.

Oops, just used a big hunk of my spare change. Next would be an amp. I do not need something powerful, so the BADA DC-222 is out. What a pity, with new tubes, it sounds like some of the amps we have for sale costing $1000. Next would be the Ming DA EL34 amplifier. Still too powerful – plus, its push on the midrange bloom is great for Quads, Vandersteens and B&Ws, but not for these puppies. I need something a little delicate in the midrange, yet detailed enough to bring out the speakers qualities, tonally accurate in the high end yet forceful in the lower registers. Plus, I need something where tube life is at a premium. The Shuguang 208B EL84 amplifier is perfect. It has a delicate high end whose detail extends into the midrange. Its forcefulness in the lower registers will add detail and presence to the midrange. Tube life will be great, plus it can take a lot of abuse that a desert island will give. Cost is $530. A total of $1180. I have$320 to spend on a CD player.

Not going to do it. I can’t find a CD player for $320 that will work with this system. I need one that is going to compliment – one that has detail in the lower registers and not too bright, garish or pushy on the top end – particularly the upper midrange and – I do not want CDs sounding like CDs. The MHZS Audio CD 33 is perfect for this and highly underrated for its quality (just Google it, if you do not believe me). This will give me what I need. Plus the up sampling flexibility is something I can tailor to my CDs to get the sound I want. Its cost is $530 – which brings me to $1710. I will just have to go to the island people and request the extra $210 that’s all there is to it.

So there you have it, and there it is – my desert island system under $2k. The BL Audio Muge, the Shuguang 208B EL84 amplifier and the MHZS CD 33. I think I can live with these components for a long, long time.

All the best,

Vic

2007-01-16T15:06:00.000-06:00

The sound of Chips........

I was going to start with something really, well annoying: Chips Ahoy!, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Fish & Chips - well you get the picture.

What this BLOG is really all about is that converter chips, no matter what the DAC, have a certain sound. I'll walk through them with you.

Analogue Devices.

These DACs, found in DIYEDEN and the Lite DAC AM, DACs 39, DAC 68 and the Lite CD 15 CD player, have what we call a very "British" sound. Viz., the bass is often lean, kind of shy on the dynamics, wonderful lush tube-like mids, soft rolled off "Mullard" like highs. If configured right, you will get some "air" and "space" around instruments. The DAC AM modified does this as does the DAC 68. I never heard a bad CD through analogue devices chip (1852, 1853, specifically) Like wise, I never heard a great CD sound "great".

Burr Brown

Lets include the PCM 1704UK and the PCM1732. The DAC 60, DAC 60 modified, the DAC 62, the BADA CD player, the Shuguang CD Player and the DAC 38 all have this chip. This chip must be tamed otherwise it can sound quite garish in the highs. The HDCD rendition is absolutely stunning and worth getting one of these players if you can make a commitment to HDCD Discs. They have a more "American Sound" - the bass is deep and dynamic, the mids are detailed and trasparent. Properly configured, the chips can pull instruments away from each other and can image like a son of a gun. The DAC 62 and other folks who modify the DAC (Sonic Craft et. al) modify the DAC 60 and obtain this. The highs, if tamed are articulate. If the AD1853 is used for vocals and orchestra, the PCM1704UK can be used for rock, jazz.

Delta Sigma CS Series.

Found in the DOGE CD player and Musiland MD10. This so, far maybe the best of the bunch in terms of imaging, spatial coherence and midrange detail. Absolutely stunning in the DOGE and very nice in the Muisiland. The bass, however, needs work. It can be slightly fat as in the Doge to too pronounced below 60Hz and non-existent above 100 Hz as in the Musiland. In other words, the Doge is slightly bloated and the Musiland slightly lean. You will have to ask about this when you order or audition a digital device with a DS CS series chip.

That is it for now......

All the best,

Vic

2007-01-11T15:51:00.000-06:00

Tube-a-docious......Random musings about tubes.

ELectro Harmonix and Sovtek are not the same tubes. They are both owned by New Sensor, but are made in completely different factories with different specs.
The Sovtek tubes are inexpensive, the Electro Harmonix are not. Never pay the same for the same tube.
The Sovtek 12AX7LPS is a good 12AX7 tube for the money, you heard it here first.
The JJ 6922 is the only non-NOS tube worth considering.
All Chinese tubes are bad --- WRONG!! The Shuguang KT-88 derivatives, KT-98, KT-100 are great tubes. The Shuguang 6550 is a GE clone - try one of these, you Citation freaks. The Shuguang 12AX7 and EL84 are great tubes
Some Chinese tubes are bad --- RIGHT!!! The tubes that Ming Da and Xian Sheng sometimes provide - Chinese tubes without any markings, should be changed right away.
The Winged C 6550 is probably the best 6550 you have ever heard.
The rumors surrounding the EH 6550 and KT88 are true - they are great tubes.
Groove tubes has a 12AX7 that is a Mullard clone and this is the best 12AX7 you ever heard.
The Groove Tubes 12AT7 is also great.
Dollar for dollar, you cannot go wrong with a JJ tube
Much ado about EI tubes. They were not that great. They are now gone. Don't pay the premium
Valve Art tubes are the best of Shuguang tubes.

That's all folks - please send me you comments. I know that I pissed someone off here.

All the best,

Vic

2007-01-09T14:34:00.000-06:00

Can't Listen to Anything Else

I just took a listen to the DOGE CD player. Now I can't listen to anything else. What to do?

I also do not know what gives this thing its magic. Apparently, if I am to understand the design, there are not any semiconductors after the conversion circuit. If this is true, then all filtering and amplifying of the signal is done through tubes.

Its true, the drawer (Phillips) is shoddy, but the rest of the thing is built like a tank. What I heard was uncanny: Images thrown to left and right of each speaker, a detailed high end and are you ready for this, a detailed low end very detailed. I am now rediscovering my disks. Truly, truly remarkable.

2007-01-03T21:23:00.000-06:00

What I listened to over the holidays.........

I had some wonderful music that produced rich vocals and musical timbre. A great album for musical quality was "Christmas with the Rat Pack" on Capital, John Prime, "The Missing Years", and Dire Straits, "Brothers in Arms" what great music, what a gift.

The Deano vocals are the best on the Rat Pack. Unfortunately, Frank's numbers are a bit too distorted for my tastes. Sammy, is well , just Ok.

I listened on a pair of Infinity Kappas, Acoustats and Infinity 360s. Equipment used was the incredible DOGE 6 CD player, a new top loading CD Player from MHZS called the CD 88 with 4 tubes, the Ming DA EL34 amp and a new amp from DOGE the 6130.

Had a great holiday, hope yours was the same.

All the best,

Vic

2006-12-31T14:52:00.000-06:00

Those EL84 Amps

If ever an urban myth there was, there is, the myths regarding EL84 tubes.

I have had the pleasure of listening to both the Ming DA and Shuguang EL84 tube amps (with of course, Shuguang EL84 tubes) and came away with a completely different disposition that I had going in. Most audiophiles are not familiar with these tubes or amps and on first notice, see their diminutive size (in both tube and amp size) as a negative. Hmmm. For those of you With size issues, I am here to help.

Myth # 1 - The Power is too small.
That's what I thought. Until I heard these amps drive Quads, Acoustats, ribbon speaker etc. to reasonable listening levels with uncanny detail and smoothness.

Myth # 2 - These small tubes can't produce deep bass
If ever a myth needed dispelling, its this one. On the contrary, watt for watt, these tubes produce a deeper bass than a comparable EL34 amp and even close to KT88. They even take the best of a solid state amp - deep bass and transparency to a new level. I am not talking tubby bass here, folks. Bass real tight and deep. Kick drums are a new experience

Myth # 3 - Folks will make fun of me if I drive Large horns with these amps

This of course, I cannot help. But, they will not make fun of the sound. These amps are the most neutral and detailed of all tube amps that I have heard and a perfect match for folks who own horns and other high efficiency speaker systems.

Myth # 4 - I am not the SET amp type.
Well, these EL84 amps really do not soud like a SET amp. As mentioned before, the deep kick drum bass response and the extended high end are not necessarily what I associate without the best of SET amps. With the EL84, you get seem to get the best of solid state/SET / KT88 amps in a low cost package.

What a shame if will be this year, when folks take their hard earned money and buy and NAD, Rotel or Cambridge amp and miss the detail, deep bass and righteous high end of these amps.

All the best ....

Vic

2006-12-29T07:16:00.000-06:00

The State of the DAC Union -

So, I have been kind of out of it. But, I promise to be back with a vengeance discussing DACs, CD Players, preamps and amps. But first back to the DACs.

So much has happened since we started the foray into the upsampling comparison. I have had to stop and re-think my ranking. So far, this is what I have. (and by the way, after much berating, I am switching my ranking. #1 being the best and #X being, well, the most challenging to listen to.)

DAC 62
Modified DAC 60
DAC 68
DAC 38
DAC AM Modified
Great March Madness!
DAC AM
Great March Modified
Great March
DAC AH Modified
DAC AH

If its not on the list - I have not heard it. More DACs we will be getting in: Musiland MD 10, Great March II and DIYEDEN DAC 05.

2006-09-13T20:23:00.000-05:00

DACS With Up Sampler

Okay, I am chopping at the bit to see if my theoretical as described in my previous BLOG http://victrolax.blogspot.com/2006/06/whats-with-oversampling-upsampling-and.html was correct. The premise was that up sampling will exacerbate and not fix shortcomings in DAC sound. So here is my revised ranking (hypothetical) going from no-so-hot to hot sounding (this ranking assumes that the signal is up sampled to 96 kHz and is based on my listening bias):

1. DAC AH Modified
2. DAC AM
3. DAC 60
4. DIYEDEN Great March Modified
5. DAC 38
6. DAC 68
7. DAC 60 Modified

Music

I had to pick music that I thought was revealing. Here is what I listened to:

Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
The Jones Street Boys
Eileen Farrell, Torch Songs
Chicago, Theme from the Movie
Harry Connick – When Harry Met Sally
Rickie Lee Jones – Traffic from Paradise

Equipment:

XianSheng D-2020A KT88
The smoothest integrated around. The D-2020A neutral midrange and neutral high end – Poseidon adventure shattering bass for a 30 watt tube amp make it a perfect amp for evaluation.. Its the 5Z3Ps that I am addicted to.

Speakers:

Infinity 360s
Acoustat Spectra 11
Aurm Cantus Leisure
Proac 1sc
Headphones: Grado SR 225 with Ming Da MC 66AE headphone amplifier

Categories:

I broke my listening biases into categories an assigned points. Here they are:

Smooth High End
A DAC scored above 15 if the high end was smooth and rolled off. Constrictions and beaming scored points less than 15.

Mid Range Smoothness
Lucid and smooth scored over 15 points. A sucked out midrange scored between 10 and 15 points. Nasal sounding midrange scored less than 10 points.

Deep tight Low End
A deep tight low end scored more than 15 points. A rolled off low end scored between 15 and 10 points, a flabby low end scored less than 10 points.

Annoying Mid bass
Over 15 points meant that the mid bass was relatively neutral. Less than 15 points was a slightly bloated mid bass.

Resolution – distance between instruments
A DAC scored over 10 points if the background vocalists were clearly distinguishable from the lead and had placement. Over 15 points if the background vocalists were then distinguishable among themselves, Less than 10 points if I could not tell who was who

Dynamics
A DAC scored over 15 points if the movement from quite to loud shocked me. A DAC scored between 10 and 15 points if I noticed a difference. A DAC scored less than 10 points if I felt like I was listening to a CD through a pancake.

Articulation
If I clearly hear the plucking of guitar strings, I gave the DAC over 15 points. If the guitar strings were just Ok and had no sense of depth or presence, It scored between 10 and 15. If it sounded like nails on a chalk board, I gave it less than 10.

Now that I have my music, equipment and criteria, here we go.

The “Bunch”

First, let me give you a reference. We took a “bunch” of CD players readily available on the market and put them through our tests. The CD Players ranged from $300 - $1000. We then averaged the scores. Here is how they played out.

The “Bunch” Scores:

Smooth High End 10
Mid Range Smoothness 9
Deep Tight Low End 15
Annoying Mid Bass 17
Resolution 9
Dynamics 10
Articulation 10
Total 80

The “Bunch” scored a value of 80 , which we will now have to try to beat either through stand alone DAC or up sampling.

The DAC AH Modded

I was not sure what to expect when the up sampler was used with a NOS DAC. My first thought was the upper midrange and high end would become glossy and have a metallic sheen to the sound. In other words, it would exacerbate the DAC AH’s weaknesses.

The compete opposite happened.

I chose the 96kHz up sample with the DAC AH.. What a difference! Gone was the aggressive constrictive high end. The upper midrange just sang. And here is the best part: the dynamics of the NOS method were kept in tact. This is definite winning combination that places the DAC AH / Up sampler combination above the pack.

The DAC AH Modified without the Up sampler

Smooth High End 10
Mid Range Smoothness 12
Deep Tight Low End 17
Annoying Mid Bass 17
Resolution 12
Dynamics 19
Articulation 17
Total 104

The DAC AH Modified with Up sampler

Smooth High End 18
Mid Range Smoothness 18
Deep Tight Low End 18
Annoying Mid Bass 17
Resolution 14
Dynamics 19
Articulation 14
Total 118

The Lite DAC AM

And now I turned my attention to the DAC AM, the DAC I like best in the less than $400 dollar range. As a matter of fact, I like it better than the stock DAC 60 and I highly recommend it if your system can reveal inner details of the midrange. It’s a killer combination with the XianSheng D-2020

To my surprise, the up sampler just ruined this DAC and turned it into a syrupy mess.

The DAC AM Modified without the Up sampler

Smooth High End 18
Mid Range Smoothness 18
Deep Tight Low End 14
Annoying Mid Bass 18
Resolution 18
Dynamics 14
Articulation 18
Total 118

The DAC AM Modified with Up sampler

Smooth High End 18
Mid Range Smoothness 18
Deep Tight Low End 10
Annoying Mid Bass 18
Resolution 15
Dynamics 10
Articulation 16
Total 105

In my next installment, I will visit the DAC 60 Modified, the DAC 68, the Great March Modified and the DAC 38.

2006-06-12T17:18:00.000-05:00

What’s with Oversampling, Upsampling and Non-Oversampling (NOS) ?

When we were vinyl, we had our own vocabulary: belt drive, direct drive, servo, anti-skate, counter weight, tracking angle – remember? Now that we are optical, a whole set of new words spook our vocabulary: Upsampling, Oversampling and Non Oversampling. Needless to say, these words are creating confusion out there in the press and among some audio jockeys (not you, of course) and they are used interchangeably, which is a big no-no.

Let’s first start out with some basics: oversampling is the realm of the conversion between digital to analogue and the upsampling is the realm of digital. Non oversampling is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. You cannot use these words interchangeably because they all mean different things.

You want a DAC to correct the anomalies in the conversion process. Take some of the earliest DACS, that were 16 bit and extracted data at a rate of 44.1 kHz / 16 bits. When the DAC converts data in the 20-20kHz range, it leaves some canard above the 22kHz range that must be cleaned up. If it did not, inter modulation distortion and ultrasonic frequencies would wreak havoc on your system – destroying tweeters, midrange drivers and turning mylar into chewing gum. In order to prevent this, a filter is applied. The filter that filters this out is called a “brick wall”, and it abruptly chops off frequencies at 20kHz. This filter, while not allowing the digital leftovers to blow your tweeter to smithereens, does cause audible distortions. The abrupt filter is responsible for some of the sonics coming from early vinyl copies of Fleetwod Mac’s Tusk that were digitally recorded and mastered or some circa 1980 digital recordings(Ry Cooder) . Cymbals sound like tambourines, highs are compressed as well as dynamics. If digital was going to make it into high end, something had to be done. Enter Phillips with its 4X oversampling player.

In a 4X oversampler, the digital signal is fed through a special digital converter that samples it four times. When a CD is sampled four times the sample rate becomes 176.4 kHz(44.1 X 4). When the filter is applied here, there is less of chance that the filtering roll off will make its way into the audible range. A filter applied at 176.4 kHz sweetens the music as it removes most of the grunge. As cost allows, oversampling pays off in a big way. The DAC 60 and DAC 38 use Burr Brown’s latest PCM1704UK chip which is 8X oversampling at 96kHz. The DAC 68 uses Analogue Devices AD1835 chip which samples as high as 192kHz. The AD1853 is fully compatible with all known DVD formats and supports 48 kHz, 96 kHz and 192 kHz sample rates with up to 24 bits word lengths. The higher bit lengths of these DACs allow them to act more in a linear fashion during the conversion process and results in superior sound quality.

Now I digress, to the DAC AH that is a non oversampling DAC using 8 TDA1543 chips with no digital filtering. From our discussion above one would assume that the grunge left over should have blown up tweeters and mylar alike. But, that’s not what happens. So what gives?

This has to do with the 8 TDA1543 that the DAC AH employs and the algorithm used for designing non oversampling DACs. The non-OS algorithm by definition introduces a slight roll off in the treble, so by the time you get up to damaging frequencies, the output of frequencies above 22kHz isn't really all that high. Hence, intermodulation distortion still makes its way into the DAC AH and other non oversampling DACs. This may explain why some non oversampling DACs sound compressed at the higher frequencies. The DAC AH modded, less so, only because the superior OP AMP compliments the conversion process in that it is able to open the sound a bit. Some NOS DACs add a digital filter – but that really defeats the whole purpose of the NOS DAC anyway – its kind of like adding MSG to a low salt diet.

So what is “upsampling”? First let me take away some of the confusion. There is belief in many an audiophiles’ minds about the power of upsampling or oversampling to create data. It is not possible to create more accurate information than is already in the digitally sampled signal. Think of blowing up a digital picture: if the data is not there, blowing it up does not increase detail.

Upsampling differs from oversampling in that upsampling is between the transport and the DAC. In the case of the Lite DAC 39, it sits between your transport (CD player) and a DAC – like the DAC 60 or DAC 38. In this case the DAC 39 feeds the DAC 60 a 96 Khz signal instead of the 44.1 kHz. In theory, when a superior upsampler is mated with a DAC that can handle the upsampling, the true 96kHz 20 bit processing can be achieved. The resulting filtering process operates in a linear fashion which yields better sound quality. So, it has to be a careful match. An upsampler should only be used with a DAC capable of handling the high sample frequency.

So the next question is how do they sound? Theoretically speaking, I could rank the DACs in order according to their sampling characteristics. Doing so, I come up with: (from worst sounding to best sounding)

1. DAC AH Modified – the OP AMP upgrade will only exacerbate the lack of filtering
2. DAC AH
3. DIYEDEN Great March
4. DAC 60
5. DIYEDEN Great March Modified
6. DAC 38
7. DAC 60 Modified
8. DAC 60 + Upsampler
9. DAC 60 Modified + Upsampler
10. DAC 38 + Upsampler
11. DAC 68
12. DAC 68 + Upsampler

In my next BLOG, I will throw away the theoretical and move to the actual. We shall see ..

2006-04-08T10:18:00.000-05:00

When they first came out CDs left me cold. Like all audio enthusiasts, I was unimpressed. That is not to say that I did not like some of the early digital artists. Pick up a copy of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk or some of the early Ry Cooder. Okay, the 16 bit conversion voodoo makes it sound a little compressed and cymbals sound like tambourines. But the music was just as progressive as the technology. Probably Lindsey Buckinghams finest work is on the Tusk digital master.

CD players under $800 leave me feeling like I just listened to one of these early works. I listen to them if I must, and I must listen if I want to hear some of my favorite artists without spending $2000 on a CD player. I am stuck in a world of compromises from NAD, Rotel, Music Hall and Cambridge (what I call, the gang of four). Its not that these are bad CD players, they try to do the unthinkable- provide a glimpse into excellent CD sound without costing an arm and a leg.

So we have two DACs here: the Lite DAC-AH, and the Lite DAC AH-M1 from Pacific Valve. From what I am reading about these non over sampling black bricks is that they offer less fatigue along with more detail than one can ever extract from a CD rotating over one of the gang of four's lasers. The DACs keep their promise is by feeding the digital signal from one low price DAC chip to the next and avoid the over sampling hocus pocus. Errors produced as a by product of the conversion process are fed from one converter to the next and so on, until the signal passes through 8 converters and hence 8X oversampling. This is less costly, Lite tells us, than providing the top notch BB PCM-1704UK chip in the DAC 60 along with all the necessary circuitry to produce an accurate analogue signal.

The DAC AH series has a push button switch on the front along with a faint blue light implying that it is to be left on all the time. On the back there is a power plug, analogue out (gold plated), Coax in, TOSLINK in, and a switch to switch between Coax and TOSLINK inputs. That's it!! Quite simple.

The stock DAC AH immediately improves the sound from the gang of four. Comparing the stock DAC AH to the NAD C532BEE one immediately notices some light into the midrange and immediacy in the music.

The stock DAC AH has an excellent midrange presentation sans the harshness. What we also get is some grain on the high end that makes its way into the listening room as the quality of the recording twindles. So good is the DAC AH at doing this that one must re-think their entire music collection while listening to one of these.

What both the DAC AH and the DAC AH-M1 also do is provide a sense of continuity from low end to top end that is missing in the gang of four. CD players on the mid-fi range tend to "bloat" or over-emphasize the midrange and high end and leave the low end, not anemic, but lacking in authority. Not so with the DAC AH(s) whose real job is to bring the detail and tonal balance of $2000 DACs into the hands of audiophiles stuck on price performance.

Enter the modified DAC AH- M1. Pacific Valve, with the help of Lite Audio, desired a price performance modification to the DAC AH with a price under $300.00. The solution was simple, swipe out the stock OP amp for the OPA27M from Burr Brown and wah-lah, price performance.

The only thing that the DAC AH and the DAC AH M1 have in common is the blue light on the front and that's it. Where the DAC AH sounds bright, the M1 sounds smooth, Where the AH sounds harsh and compressed, the M1 sounds open. Cat Steven’s the first cut is the deepest is an example of a recording that cannot be listened to on the DAC AH. Not so on the M1 who tends to be more forgiving in the top end by opening it up and let it bloom into the room. It’s still a so-so recording, but unlike the DAC AH, I am not reminded of it at every crescendo.

The DAC AH M1 is capable of some startling detail at the $250.00 price point. In Harry Connick's When Harry Met Sally Lets call the whole thing off, for example, the plucking of the bass is clearly heard as the bassist makes his way across the strings. In the stock DAC AH, while this is a smooth rendition, it sounds kind of squeezed together and not as clear. And, it is that point, where you can some up the difference between the two. Where stock DAC AH sounds compressed, the DAC AH M1 pours music into room with politeness and detail.

If was on a budget, I just wanted to upgrade my CD player from 1993, then the stock DAC AH will provide an improvement. If I wanted a taste of high end without spending above $500, then the DAC AH M1 fits my bill. If I really wanted an excellent DAC for the money, then the Pacific Valve modified DAC 60 is the one to beat. I differ from other staffers here at Pacific Valve who just love the DAC 68 with its "British" sound. The modified DAC 60 is the one with dynamic punch and low end, and so far, the DAC to beat.

Vic Trola

2006-03-29T17:44:00.000-06:00

The Lite CD 15 is the slowest CD player I have ever seen in my life. While Jeff thought that this exuded confidence, I saw it as a minor annoyance that it should take 10 seconds for a drawer to close and another 10 seconds to index a CD. (Okay, after recent soul searching, I am exaggerating - Its more like 1 second in, and 1.5 seconds to find the TOC - but it is deliberate, I mean it does suck CDs in like a vacuum cleaner) All the time, I wonder if it worth the wait.

Well, it is. This has to be the smoothest CD player under $500 and now serves as my reference when the DAC 68 is out on loan. ThatÂs right, I donÂt use a DAC 60, even though it has the technically superiors PCM-1704UK chip. I prefer the smoothness and detail that comes across in the multi -tiered sampling of the Lite architecture and AD 1835 chip set. I have not heard the modified DAC 60, what I am told of this mod, is that it brings the DAC 60 more in line with the DAC 68 plus an extended low end. The Lite CD 15 presents a formidable sound stage and I agree with all of JeffÂs comments on its tonal accuracy. It does have a ÂBritishÂ sound as does the DAC 68. Both of these products present like the EL34 tube does Â uncanny detail in the midrange, smooth high end and polite low end. The DAC 60 has more of a USA sound, and sounds like a 6550 Â articulated in the midrange, nice mid bass and punchy low end.If you cannot afford the DAC 68 and if the noise floor of the DAC 68 bothers you, you will not be sorry with the Lite CD -15 CD player.

2006-03-24T16:31:00.000-06:00

My Reference System & Listening Bias

My Reference System includes:

Lite Audio DAC 68
Pacific Valve Modified DAC 60
Lite Audio CD-15 CD Player
XianSheng D-2020A Kt88 Integrated Amplifier
Pacific Valve Modified LS27 Preamp
Lite Audio T62 Amp
Acoustat Spectra 11
Infinity 360
Aurum Cantas
Various Interconnects

I bias toward the midrange. I favor detail and spatial dimension over tonal balance. So, I favor equipment that gets the midrange right over a tight low end. I am biased toward tube preamps over tube amps. I like hybrid amps. I do not favor a bright top end. The top end for me has to be very smooth otherwise I do not like what I am listening to.