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Free Advice<br />
Free Advice<br />
Box 65085, Place Longueuil<br />
Longueuil, Québec, Canada J4K 5J4<br />
uhfmail@uhfmag.com<br />
I find <strong>the</strong> on-line sample articles from<br />
your magazine at least, if not more, interesting<br />
and useful to me than what<br />
I’ve been getting from my subscriptions<br />
to Stereophile, Absolute Sound and <strong>the</strong>ir<br />
multimedia counterparts. There appears<br />
to a minimum of technical jargon in <strong>the</strong>se<br />
magazine articles and what’s <strong>the</strong>re seems to<br />
be clearly explained.<br />
For many years my primary focus<br />
was on <strong>the</strong> loudspeakers, and <strong>the</strong> upstream<br />
components were an afterthought. I was<br />
never happy with <strong>the</strong> resulting sound quality.<br />
Over <strong>the</strong> past couple of years I decided<br />
to “bite <strong>the</strong> bullet” and have spent, for me, a<br />
substantial sum of money incrementally over<br />
<strong>the</strong> past several years upgrading my interconnects<br />
(Audioquest Viper) , speaker cables<br />
(Audioquest Volcano), controller/amplifier<br />
(B&K Ref 30 and 7270), four Vienna Acoustics<br />
Waltz surrounds (ceiling mounted), and<br />
a Sony CD/DVD/SACD player. I’ve added<br />
a HTPS 7000 5 way power conditioner, a<br />
REL Stadium 3) subwoofer and power<br />
cords to both <strong>the</strong> amp and controller. I was<br />
prompted by <strong>the</strong> unsatisfactory sound I was<br />
getting from my Vienna Acoustics Mozart<br />
speakers. They are gorgeous as furniture<br />
but were not delivering <strong>the</strong> sound quality I<br />
was expecting to hear in my small 14’ by<br />
15’ listening room (7.5’ ceiling). Instead or<br />
blaming my disappointment on <strong>the</strong> speakers<br />
I figured it was garbage in, garbage out.<br />
These speakers had sounded far better in<br />
<strong>the</strong> showroom than <strong>the</strong>y did in my listening<br />
room. No doubt I have made some dumb<br />
choices and squandered a lot of hard-earned<br />
money. I watch very little TV except for<br />
DVD’s and spend most of my available time<br />
at home actually listening to music. I’d be<br />
willing to give up almost everything but my<br />
wife, eating and sleeping before I’d give up<br />
music.<br />
Given <strong>the</strong> dimensions of my room, my<br />
musical tastes, and my requirement for 7-<br />
channel surround sound for movies, what do<br />
you believe would be an optimal hi-fi system<br />
for under $20,000 US? My sound level<br />
seldom exceeds 75 dB except momentarily<br />
when ei<strong>the</strong>r listening to music or movies.<br />
I wish I’d heard of your magazine several<br />
years ago before I started my upgrades.<br />
Keith Birdwell<br />
BELLEVUE, WA<br />
Keith, <strong>the</strong>re are elements of your<br />
system that are familiar to us, and<br />
o<strong>the</strong>rs that are not. The ones that are<br />
not, quite specifically, are your controller<br />
and speakers. Oh, and your player, since<br />
you don’t specify <strong>the</strong> model.<br />
And perhaps that’s where we should<br />
begin. The source, as you already know,<br />
is of great importance, since <strong>the</strong> amplifier<br />
and speakers can do no more than<br />
reproduce with (perhaps appalling) clarity<br />
anything that <strong>the</strong> source gets wrong.<br />
Early DVD players were dreadful as CD<br />
players, and we were warning people off<br />
<strong>the</strong>m. That has changed somewhat with<br />
<strong>the</strong> appearance of SACD, and specifically<br />
<strong>the</strong> first Sony DVD players. Sony’s conventional<br />
CD players were not what we<br />
would recommend to our friends, or<br />
even casual acquaintances. It was a big<br />
jump from that to <strong>the</strong> excellent players<br />
<strong>the</strong> company has made in <strong>the</strong> past three<br />
years. But all manufacturers are running<br />
into <strong>the</strong> laws of economics, which<br />
means that as players get cheaper, <strong>the</strong><br />
price competition will also makes <strong>the</strong>m<br />
worse (that is, “nearly as good,” and <strong>the</strong>n<br />
“nearly as good as that,” and <strong>the</strong>n...).<br />
To see what your player really<br />
sounds like, take it with you when you<br />
go listening. See whe<strong>the</strong>r it can charm<br />
you using <strong>the</strong> best gear your dealer can<br />
demonstrate. That will tell you whe<strong>the</strong>r<br />
you should supplement it with a standalone<br />
CD player. Your budget can buy<br />
something pretty good. We would look<br />
for a first class preamp controller, something<br />
like Simaudio, EAD or Lexicon<br />
for instance. We would get a good CD<br />
player, if your exploration indicates that<br />
this is necessary. We would add a pair<br />
of multi-channel amplifiers (a quadruple<br />
plus a triple, say) from someone who also<br />
makes high quality two-channel audiophile<br />
amplifiers. Since your room is small<br />
and your listening levels are modest, we<br />
would look for a very high quality small<br />
speaker. The Totem Model One Signature<br />
we reviewed in UHF No. 65 comes<br />
to mind, but several o<strong>the</strong>r manufacturers<br />
are worth looking at too. Your existing<br />
subwoofer is probably all right.<br />
Last but not least, we would lay a<br />
bit of cash aside for good cables. Are<br />
we up to $20,000? Probably. All we<br />
can add is that, if you take <strong>the</strong> time to<br />
listen carefully, and you take coherent<br />
notes on what you hear, you’ll probably<br />
find a system that gives you <strong>the</strong> visceral<br />
satisfaction you’ve been missing so far.<br />
Lately I have been compiling my own<br />
audio CDs on my computer. I take music<br />
from vinyl LPs and CDs and edit <strong>the</strong> waveforms<br />
using Sound Forge Studio software.<br />
With CDs, I extract <strong>the</strong> audio data directly<br />
using any one of three CD “strippers” available<br />
to me, and with some CDs I get surprising<br />
results.<br />
When I load <strong>the</strong> .WAV file into <strong>the</strong> audio<br />
editor, I see that <strong>the</strong> amplitude peaks are<br />
clipped — sometimes quite severely. I have<br />
seen some that are more than 10 milliseconds<br />
long. Why are <strong>the</strong>y producing CDs like that,<br />
and what does it do to our equipment to play<br />
<strong>the</strong>m? After all, have we not all been warned<br />
repeatedly about amplifiers clipping signals?<br />
Is this <strong>the</strong> same thing, or does my amplifier<br />
just “see” it as a very flat 0 dB waveform?<br />
Is it damaging in any way?<br />
Lloyd Marshall<br />
EDSON AB<br />
If it’s real clipping, <strong>the</strong>n definitely,<br />
Lloyd. It’s unlikely that <strong>the</strong>y’re letting<br />
CDs out <strong>the</strong> door with pronounced and<br />
repeated clipping, but we’ve seen some<br />
egregious sonic crimes perpetrated by<br />
desperado producers, so who knows?<br />
But if <strong>the</strong> clipping were real you would<br />
definitely hear it, because it sounds really<br />
ugly, with jagged white noise that accompanies<br />
each note. What’s possible is that<br />
<strong>the</strong> waveform-rendering algorithms in<br />
ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY <strong>Magazine</strong> 7