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