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Free Advice Response D-15 Audiophile excellence in a dynamic new floorstanding design Griffin Audio Box 733, Montreal, QC H4A 3S2 Tel. (514) 945-8245 FAX: (514) 221-2247 griffinaudio@cs.com proac-loudspeakers.com Signature Audio, Vancouver (604) 873-6682 Rotac, Québec (418) 653-7768 ally. However both Krell and Creek are well-established companies, likely to be able to repair anything that could go wrong with their products. You can safely choose by ear. Your article in issue No. 59 on recording LPs onto CD via a personal computer was very informative. However I fi nd myself with a nagging question. In your opinion, would a standalone CD recorder of comparable cost to a high-quality PC soundcard create superior CD recordings of LPs than would a PC? That is, would a standalone CD recorder costing, let’s say, $800, produce higher quality recordings than a good Pentium PC equipped with something like the US$399 Digital Audio Labs CardDeluxe? My gut feeling is that it would, considering all the digital noise swirling around inside a PC. Also, is there any inherent quality advantage to using “audio” CD-R disks rather than the cheaper “computer” CD-Rs? If so, I would certainly spring for the audio discs. Jerry Cash TORONTO, ON EXPERIENCE THE CHORD EFFECT! Distributors of Exceptional Audio Equipment 16 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine Chord audio cables offer outstanding performance and exceptional quality at real world prices and honest value. Chord has been designing and manufacturing high quality audio and A/V cables for 15 years and is distributed in North America by Bluebird Music Ltd. For more information about Chord audio cables, call 416.638.8207 or e-mail: sales@bluebirdmusic.ca or visit www.bluebirdmusic.ca There is only one advantage, Jerry. Standalone CD recorders (as opposed to computer CD burners) are deliberately crippled so that they cannot record on ordinary blank CDs. They can use only special music CDs, whose extra cost goes not to better materials but to a fund that supposedly compensates copyright-holders for the music you plan to copy. In most countries, by the way, standard blank CDs also have an extra levy for the same purpose, but it’s smaller. Don’t get us started! You’re right that there is plenty of noise inside a computer, though CD recorders don’t exactly maintain radio silence either. Our experience suggests that audible noise in PC recordings is more likely to be caused by ground loops than by airborne noise. Connect a complex stereo system to an equally complex setup of computer and peripherals, and the results can be dismaying. On the other hand, some of the CDs in your collection may have been made on a computer. Check the share values of large recording studio shares in the financial pages, and you’ll see that they’ve been heading for the basement
Free Advice for a while now. There’s a reason. The best sound can be had from professional-level I/O cards, which cost considerably more than the CardDeluxe. However the CardDeluxe will sound better than most of the sound cards you’ll see in PC stores, and it can even record in 24 bits and 96 kHz sampling rate. Shut down all unneeded peripherals, disconnect from the Internet, and record onto a high speed hard disc that has been freshly reformatted. I am building a new music/family room. The music system has 10 plugs, including tape decks and spotlight. Should I have the electrician set up five of your hospital grade connectors in tandem on one circuit, or is this overkill? Would one or two (for the power amp/ preamp/ CD / turntable) suffice with the balance of equipment on regular connectors? Ron Kennedy DEUX-MONTAGNES, QC Ron, if your electrician puts in that many plugs, he will daisy-chain them, and from the third outlet onward the quality will deteriorate. A better choice, though admittedly a more complicated one, is to have him put in two lines (the labor costs a lot more than the wire), and daisy chain from each Hubbell on those circuits to cheap outlets. Add a Gutwire Stingray power bar (4 outlets) and you have a total of seven good connectors and four ordinary ones. In the Hubbell closest to where the power line comes in, plug in the power amplifier and the power bar. Naim is giving me no end of trouble, when they tell their authorized dealers that customers will “blow up” a Naim amp if you connect it to any other preamp ! Have you done this before and is there any risk? I am now worried that I might damage my new Copland preamp! If they were trying to scare me, they succeeded! David McGuire DALLAS, TX We’re not sure why they do this, David. Spectral also does something like this: their warranty is void if you don’t use their cables, or the ones from MIT. There’s no danger of damaging the Copland, and (although our lawyers wouldn’t want us to get too categorical) we don’t put much stock in the warning about the amp either. It sounds like a grain of truth that got expanded into a whole beach by the time it got to the dealer. The possibility is this. If the amplifier is very wideband but was designed on the assumption that the preamplifier would limit the bandwidth, then it may misbehave. Specifically, very high frequency signals (available from analog and SACD/DVD-A, but not CD) may cause slew-rate distortion. That’s a worst-case scenario. Translating that into the amplifier “blowing up” is, we suspect, a case for the X-Files. I have a peculiar problem with my sound system which I cannot resolve. My system consists of an NAD 5300 integrated amplifier, Cambridge Audio DiscMagic and S-700 DAC. All components are powered through a hospital laboratory-grade voltage conditioner. On occasion the volume will momentarily dip (no more that a tenth of a second) to inaudibility and then back to normal volume. This occurs at all volume settings. I was told to run ground wires from both CD player components to the amplifi er ground post. It now happens much less frequently, but nevertheless it still does. This problem has existed before I upgraded to the S-700, but would occur once or twice when listening through a CD. When I upgraded to the S-700, the sound would cut out maybe two to three times per cut on a CD. Roland Auffrey CAMPBELLTON, NB The cause seems evident, Roland: it has to be the transport, not the DAC, since the problem existed before the DAC arrived. All sorts of problems can throw a transport off stride, but the fact that grounding reduced the problem points to one likely cause: static electricity. The effects of static on electronic equipment, and especially on equipment with digital controls, are often underestimated. We once lost a $900 computer hard disc just by touching it with an index finger, much as God touches Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A similar spark would lock up a solid state preamplifier so solidly we had to unplug it for a full minute before it would work again. And we’ve seen momentary CD dropouts as well. All we needed to do was touch a light switch. But that doesn’t happen to us anymore. We are regular users of antistatic fluid. We don’t buy the commercial version for $8 a litre, but a home-made substitute: fabric softener diluted 4:1 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 17
Page 1 and 2: No. 67 $4.99 LOUDSPEAKERS: A new im
Page 3 and 4: Cinema Placing the Centre Speaker 5
Page 5 and 6: AVOID THE DOG-EARED COPIES A surpri
Page 7 and 8: Feedback I really enjoy your magazi
Page 9 and 10: Free Advice Free Advice Box 65085,
Page 11 and 12: Live the Musical Experience! NEW SH
Page 13 and 14: Free Advice your opinion with these
Page 15 and 16: Free Advice 2252 Kingston Road, Tor
Page 17: Free Advice Actually, Michael, the
Page 21 and 22: Rendezvous The High End in Power? K
Page 23 and 24: Rendezvous The UHF Reference System
Page 25 and 26: Nuts&Bolts that will “store” en
Page 27 and 28: Nuts&Bolts sound waves behave like
Page 29 and 30: Feature large speakers were driven
Page 31 and 32: Feature Wilson Benesch Discovery sp
Page 33 and 34: Listening Room Choosing a Centre Sp
Page 35 and 36: Listening Room Castle Bastion We’
Page 37 and 38: Listening Room Totem Model One With
Page 39 and 40: Listening Room mean the JMLab is le
Page 41 and 42: Listening Room This is by far the h
Page 43 and 44: phrase in the dialog. There’s so
Page 45 and 46: same instrumental family were hard
Page 47 and 48: THE ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION: Issues
Page 49 and 50: Listening Room ably manage the extr
Page 51 and 52: Listening Room There were other cha
Page 53 and 54: Listening Room initial impression w
Page 55 and 56: Listening Room In the next issue of
Page 57 and 58: Cinema Placing the Centre Speaker I
Page 59 and 60: Software Dolly Parton on her 1987 a
Page 61 and 62: Software Many Colors, destined to b
Page 63 and 64: Software I wish I had my old fishin
Page 65 and 66: Software music. She will never lose
Page 67 and 68: Software Record Reviews Brahms Sona
Page 69 and 70:
Software traditional song in the an
Page 71 and 72:
Gossip&News Gossip&News DLP Rear Pr
Page 73 and 74:
Gossip&News New Digs for Pierre Gab
Page 76:
INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED Now perfor
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