Audiophile Musings

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Variety

As I write, the flute, oboe, viol and bassoon of Couperin serenade me on a piece from the Pandora music channel I had never heard. Sometimes I feel like there just is not enough time to hear all of the things I want to hear from the plethora of performers in the world. It's nice to listen to my select favorites but when a random mix of lesser-known artists and even more rare performances of well known ones, I can truly begin to appreciate the amount of true genius that has graced this earth. The way each instrument enhances the other, the timing, the intensity, the interpretation, it all is so magical to me.

I've been writing professionally from my first formal position out of college, a service manual for an electronic scalpel. I have a reasonable vocabulary and yet the numbers and meanings of adjectives in the English language from which to choose is rather limiting. Reviewers struggle to describe nuances comparing sonics to random non-musical occurrences and esoteric synonyms from everywhere to help describe those emotions realized in listening to something new, something really different.

Words fail me at times when I hear something done right. For example, the ambiance and echo captured during the recording to me is as important as the actual technical execution, and when properly revealed by the playback system introduced an emotion that help you get an insight to what the musician was thinking and feeling at the time. I can only imagine what different levels of appreciation musicians and conductors have that I still must learn to understand. But I do know that as I listen to more and more variety, I gleam further insight to these undiscovered pieces of this grand audio puzzle.

As the level of my playback system became sufficiently refined, there was a point where a distinct turn was made from reproducing sound to recreating segments of reality. This extreme level of refinement came after carefully listening and thinking about what was right, and what was wrong. One friend recently stated that the front end was as good as it gets and now I had to focus on the extremes (he meant the extreme lows and the extreme highs the system struggled to reproduce). While true, limiting the bandwidth allows me to hear more of the content in that limited region and for this I am grateful. I am grateful that the bass is not earth shattering and the highs are not ear piercing. I am grateful that what is left is - in a word - right. For now, instead of listening to the equipment, I can listen to the performance.

One day in our Conifer home, I had connected a function generator to my system and was sweeping a band at the low crossover point (638Hz). I was trying to address a dip in that region where I believed I could address by hand selecting various capacitors, resistors, and inductors in just the right proportion. The near-field calibrated microphone, headphones, real-time-analyzer, and function generator were all piled in front of the speaker as was my notebook and soldering gun. I was listening to how the minute changes in components impacted the sweep either improving or degrading the sound. After about 30 minutes (Althea is a true sonic angel), my wife came down from upstairs and said one word to me, ENOUGH, and turned around and walked back upstairs.

In that moment, I realized what an obsession I had in getting it "right." What I was focused on was something even I had a hard time hearing consistently and her point was well made. I immediately stopped what I was doing and never went back again, at least not on this speaker. There comes a time when an audiophile's obsession with quality becomes an addiction, and I had crossed that threshold, It was a moment I would be eternally grateful for in all of the coming years. That was the summer of 1989, a mere 23 years ago.

Today, I enjoy listening and understanding music and sound, especially from those cryptic messages reviewers convey in their columns, but combined with the wisdom imparted by a chance encounter with a conductor. The variety of things discussed and the attention to detail these well-trained critic's ears embrace is truly remarkable. One day, I went to listen to the Nashville Symphony back when Maestro Kenneth Schermerhorn held the baton. In a meeting with the audience before the performance (sort of like batting practice for classical performers), Maestro Schermerhorn described withs similar enthusiasm but greater passion than these critics the sound of the orchestra he planned to produce and the techniques he intended to use to do so. I was immediately thrust into another level of music appreciation, one that if I had not taken the time to consider would have been missed.

The point is this: there is always something to learn and one way to find variety is to, as Monty Python's Flying Circus routinely professed, do something different. By putting variety into your acoustic life, you can feast from different culinary masterpieces and enjoy more musical emotion than by focusing on your present acoustic addiction. Variety is truly the spice of life. Sample yours today.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Speaker Tweak #2

Two wires carry the electrical signals in your stereo; one in one direction and one in the opposite direction. If you were to freeze time, one wire carries a positive signal and the other a negative. And as time changes, so does the voltage and polarity of the electrical signal inside these wires.

Historically, electricity was carried through copper wires insulated first by air (mounted to glass suspension points) and then with cloth on these same glass, ceramic, or wood insulators. Coating wires with rubber or vinyl jackets came later as the manufacturing process improved to what we know it today.

Bell Telephone used glass insulators to suspend wires for early communications but there arose a problem when these long runs came close to other electrical signals. Interference with the telephone signals was introduced by the proximity to these nearby signals producing noise and background distortions.

To improve immunity to such influences, Bell developed a method to change the physical position of the wire so that the left-hand wire would travel on the right and vice versa from one telephone pole to the next.

This physical arrangement greatly improved the immunity of the signal inside these wires from such external influences. Looking at this concept, Bell employed it in creating wire inside the home eventually routing it all the way to the telephone. Called a "twisted pair," this wire had another property unknown at the time: it could also carry more information than wires that were not twisted (greater bandwidth). Today, computer wires that carry signals in the Gigahertz band (billions of cycles per second) use a special variation of this twisted pair concept to do so (called CAT 5e cable).

The point to understand is that non-twisted pair wires can be made into twisted pair wires by merely twisting them together. In doing so, the electrical characteristic of the wire changes and so does the sound.

Most speakers, especially less expensive ones, use two non-twisted conductors between the crossover network and the speaker driver. To improve the bandwidth to the speaker driver, all one must do is to twist the wires that are already there. So, if you have performed speaker tweaks 1A and 1B, you can also twist the wires that go to these drivers thus improving the bandwidth of that wire.

Now some manufacturers use a bonded-pair wire commonly called "zip cord" or "appliance cord" where the two wires are physically connected to each other by the same material that insulates the wire. In this case, these wires are too stiff even when separated and it is not possible to smoothly twist these wires together. But you can REPLACE them with better wires.

Regardless of what you do, twisting or changing the wire inside the speakers changes their sound. Just like changing the wires between your amplifier and your speaker changes the sound, changing the wires inside will do the same.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Is it Live or is it Memorex?

Sound: the final frontier. These are the musings of the audiophile Philip Rastocny; his ongoing mission: to seek out intelligent life forms in the universe and to boldly go were no one has gone before...(sounds of radar pings trailing off into the silence and French horns swelling in the background).

It's really early and my allergies kicked in last night blocking up my nasal passages (again) and waking me from a sound sleep. A quick spray of saline water into each nostril and I will be better by the time I finish this diatribe. But it IS early and my mind has not fully engaged. Possibly at the end of this first cup of coffee...but we shall see.

Throughout scientific history, A-B tests have been conducted, even in audio realms. But in a scientifically meaningful A-B test, only one variable may change at a time to produce quantifiable and repeatable results. If more than one variable changes, the test becomes essentially meaningless since it is impossible to know when or how these interact. Think for a moment about what this means for an audiophile.

Have you ever watched someone make a room measurement of a stereo's (non-) uniform sound pressure? Such resulting graphs deviate wildly disclosing hidden resonances and standing waves that actually raise or lower sound pressure at a point. Now, have you ever seen someone move the measuring microphone just a tad and make a second measurement of the same room? Probably not. If you did, the measurement would show VERY different results..

The point is this: even making the same measurement without moving anything else in the room, much less the microphone, or even standing in a different place than you did for the first measurement changes a variable in the test. If you are trying to hear differences between two pieces of equipment, think of all of the variables that could possibly change from one test to another, such as head position, height above the floor, reading glasses on or off, leaning forward or back, friend in a different chair, and so on. Every one of these minor changes contributes to changing a variable or variables in a test.

Playing a vinyl record the first time produces one sound and playing the same record a second time, especially before allowing the record to properly cool down, creates a different sound (normal wear of the groove by the stylus, stiffness of the vinyl due to temperature changes, etc.). Using a digital signal source eliminates these variables but introduces others such as those introduced by sampling errors, antiailiasing filters, thermal drift and jitter, and a host of other minute variables all that alter the signal source.

How can one ever hope to reliably or scientifically compare A to B? Is it even possible? Good question and one that I presume you already know. Let's answer it by asking another question: have you ever turned on your stereo system one morning, sat down in your favorite chair, and listened to your favorite piece, and heard something being just a little "off" or "different" from what you remember? If you are intimately familiar with your stereo, as most audiophiles are already aware of its strengths and weaknesses, you probably have. For some reason, today the system just sounds flat or dull or undynamic or weak or whatever. It's exactly the same system but today it just sounds either better or worse from how you recall. (Sound familiar?)

So what gives here? What's up with that? This is a classic example of how altering variables alters the test results. Repeatability is the key in correlating data. If even minor changes take place, all bets are off when comparing two results. Great pains are taken in laboratories to assure this does not happen (Standard Temperature and Pressure, proper voltage, noise immunity, on and on). So testing any stereo with your ears can only get you close to where you believe you hear differences; today you may tomorrow, well not so much.

Given these variables, can an audiophile trust his or her ears? An audiophile WANTS to hear the following answer: "Of course you can" when in truth your brain also influences your perceptions and subconsciously makes assumptions about anticipated change. Say for example you bring home a $10,000 amplifier and plug it in place of your $1,000 amplifier. You expect to hear differences not based on the quality of the sound the $10,000 amplifier produces but rather based on your financial investment. Of course your mind is preconditioned to expect not only to hear differences but to hear several folds if improvement simply because your bank account is now much lighter than before.

So how to train your brain becomes the issue for the true audiophile. Reacting to the $10,000 amplifier in a positive way merely because it sounds different ore even "better" (whatever that means) does not mean that it sounds more REAL. It may have better dynamics, better inner detailing, quieter, more fluid or melodic, or whatever adjective a reviewer pulls from his or her repertoire, but the bottom line is this: Is it live or is it Memorex?

For those of you younger readers, let me explain a bit of acoustic history. During the climb of quality of cassette tape machines, one company created an ad using Ella Fitzgerald singing into a microphone. Ella apparently in one scene is able to manipulate her superb voice in such a way as to actually cause a wine glass to spontaneously explode breaking the glass. Next, the cassette tape recording made of Ella's voice was played back and the glass also broke. The tag line for the tape was "Is it live or is it Memorex?" This ad, by the way, caught on and sold a lot of cassette tapes for an otherwise mediocre cassette tape manufacturer.

My advice is this. When listening to a system, get away from the crowd that follows blindly the light created by hype and flurry. Forget about how A sounds compared to B or which sounds better or worse. Think rather if either A or B sounds more REAL. IS IT LIVE or IS IT MEMOREX? After all, is not the goal of audiophilia to reproduce instruments accurately?

BTW, my nostrils are fine now. Maybe I'll go back to bed.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Monday, February 13, 2012

Tweak #1b you can do on almost any speaker

Resonances are everywhere and the more you eliminate, the better the sound will be. Take your existing speakers, for example. Go up to the cabinet and reap your knuckles against the side. What you hear, sounding similar to a door knock, is the natural cabinet resonance, hopefully occurring at a pitch higher than that of the operating frequency of the drivers inside.

Everything resonates at some frequency, including the individual components of the speaker drivers themselves. The cone or dome resonates at one frequency, the mechanical motion in and out resonates at another, the interaction between the cone and the magnetic pole piece deep inside resonates at yet another, just to mention a few. How well the manufacturer controls these resonances will determine how little these resonances alter the natural ability of the driver to uniformly reproduce sound.

Some resonances can be controlled even after a speaker is manufactured and some cannot. One resonance that can be controlled is the one the driver makes against the baffle board. In tweak 1a, you were shown that three mounting screws reduces the number of undulations a driver basket makes when attached to a baffle board. But the basket still creates resonances, although with three mounting points they are greatly controlled.

To reduce the remaining basket undulations there is one more tweak. Now note that I said REDUCE and not ELIMINATE. Regardless of what you do, some undulations will remain and the goal is to lower their audible impact. This tweak requires the removal of the driver from the baffle board and installing a different seal in place of the existing seal.

Most loudspeaker manufacturers use one of two methods for mounting a driver to a baffle board:

Use a cardboard gasket between the driver basket and the baffle board
Use caulk between the driver basket and the baffle board

The third method is a thin compressible foam gasket, probably the best method for absorbing minor resonances at the edge of the driver basket. However, removing the driver, removing the cardboard or caulk seal and replacing it with a simple foam seal is an equally viable and very inexpensive option.

If you have already removed the redundant screws in tweak1a, removing the three remaining screws is a small task. To do this without harming the speaker, lay the speaker on its back, remove all screws from the driver basket, and carefully remove the driver.

Once removed, you can add a thin piece of closed-cell weather stripping to the back of the basket and reinstall the driver using the three-screw triangular pattern described in the earlier article.

In the image above, I removed the driver from the speaker wire but it is not necessary in most cases to do so. The new gasket is applied in a uniform smooth manner around the edge with a small amount of overlap. The other option is to apply the gasket in a similar to the baffle board itself and then put the driver back into the baffle board.

Whichever method you use, keep the edge of the driver basket away from the recessed cutout hole for the driver (center it as best you can). Then tighten down the three triangular-pattern screws until the seal is compressed and the screws are snug. Be careful not to over-tighten these screws since in doing so will strip out the hole. If this happens, you must rotate the speaker slightly, drill pilot holes for the screws, and be more careful when tightening these three screws.

There is one more tweak you can do before putting the driver back into the hole on some speakers. We will learn about that tomorrow.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Tweak #1a you can do on almost any speaker

Saturday mornings are clm in our household. I can be reasonably assured that only the sound of the grandfather clock will disrupt the sweet sounds streaming from my old Bozaks. Mozart first thing in the morning - what more could one ask for?

So back to audiophilia. Let's start with speakers and a little remembered article I read in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES) back in the 1980s. The JAES is the pinnacle of electronic publications and if one is published there, those contrubuting engineers have pretty much "made it to the top," at least as recognized by their peers.

A well known loudspeaker company discovered that minute vibrations occurred in the baskets of their drivers as the piston moved back and forth. Lasers had just been drafted into measurement techniques and polishing the basked and watching the reflections with sensitive optical detectors easily showed when and how such vibrations occurred. Such vibrations, once resonance is reached, contribute to the distortion generated in the speaker itself. Hmmmm...very interesting. So as the piston moved back and forth, faster and faster, there were certain resonances occuring that sympathetically exaggerated or diminished the sound coming from an otherwise perfectly linear diaphragm.

This company tried many, many different methods to eliminate this artificial contribution to distortion by changing the thickness of the frame, going to exotic metallic compositions, using cast instead of stamped frames, but although in theory everything they tried SHOULD HAVE WORKED, the measurements showed only MARGINAL IMPROVEMENTS.

What they had discovered was any loudspeaker they played was literally gyrating on the baffle board regardless of the style or type. After numerous failed attempts at eliminating the problem, someone looked at it from a different perspective - a different point of view (sound familiar?). I will tell you what was finally figured out that caused these undesired resonances at the end of this article but see if you can come up with your own idea in the meantime.

Now to me, this was a ground breaking discovery and one that I thought would be immediately adapted by every loudspeaker manufacturer in the world. However, it pretty much went unnoticed in the audio industry (maybe audio engineers are too busy listening to marketing tell them what to design rather than reading how others solved problems, who knows).

I was working on the model 24 speaker at the time, a floor standing 3-way 12", and decided to try what it is they discovered. I applied the trick to the woofers and could not believe my ears. although the change was at first subtle, once I knew what to listen for I could hear its effects. The sound at first was interpreted as being quieter, that is less loud, and as a result the change was initially undesirable. But I persisted and allowed my saddened ears to adjust from what I was "used to" to what I now heard.

There is much that can be said for maturity and patience when raising children or learning to play an instrument or whatever. When it comes to my stereo, patience sometimes is not one of my strong points and I tend to let my personal acoustic biases get in the way. Instead of asking myself "does it sound more real?" I was asking myself "does it sound better?", and which is the better question to ask of the two? You decide this as an audiophile.

After a short time, a period of adjustment let's say, I began to hear things that I had not noticed before. Yes, the overall sound seemed a bit less loud but what arose from the background were inner details the speakers were always capable of reproducing but never given the chance because of these resonances. Resonance in box designs is a well understood issue today but resonances in speaker drivers not so much. It is a mystery to me why everyone does not embrace this simple solution. It may be that the ego is involved and lord knows that audiophiles and audio engineers especially have some of the biggest egos on the planet. But for whatever reason, here is what was discovered and it takes no ego to at least try this trick. Here we go:

Remove the speaker grill and count how many screws there are holding the driver to the baffle board
If there are more than three, there are too many. Remove all screws except for three resulting in as close to an equilaterl triangle pattern as possible (or Y-shaped pattern with say one screw on the top and two on the bottom)
Replace the grill and turn on some music to which you are intimately familiar.
See if you can hear a difference.

Remember that not all things are immediately obvious so be patient and listen carefully. Play a variety of music and notice what it is that you may hear.

Yes, the trick is a three-screw mount. How many points does it take to define a single plane? Three. This is the theory behind how basket resonances are better controlled in mounting a speaker to a baffle board. In the model 24, there were eight holes in the woofer basket and so I put in eight screws to hold the woofer in place. What I did is what anyone in the industry assumed at the time and that is "more s better." Well, in this case, less is better and something that runs contrary to generally accepted designs. Below is a picture of what I did to my Bozak B-209A midrange driver to transform a four-hole mount to a three-hole mount (I drilled a new hole midway between the top two holes).

You can now understand why I was appalled - and I still am today. You can see who has read this old JAES article by looking at a speaker and who has not; it's as simple as that. Regardless of what the marketing group has developed to proudly proclaim the benefits of a new design, the fact is this: if there are more than three screws holding a driver to a baffle board, resulting resonances in the driver frame itself will color the sound, period.

The good news is that in some cases you can try this tweak without voiding warranties or compromising designs. Take off your speaker grills and try this for yourself, remember that you can always "back it out," so to speak if you do not like what you hear. Know that there may be tiny holes through the baffle board to the inside of the box as a result of removing these screws that should be plugged up if you decide to leave the screws out after your evaluation. A dab of Silicon Caulk should do the trick nicely.

Wait...there's more. Next time I will tell you about the second half of this trick.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Friday, February 10, 2012

Clarity: Measurable vs. Audible

Almost anyone with two ears can hear differences between any two people's stereo systems; all you have to do is pay attention and listen. For example, your first introduction to high fidelity may have begun in a friend's car where thunderous booms could be heard eminating from the trunk. Or you may be fortunate to have known another audiophile early on in life and heard their system with your own ears. However the "audiophile bug" finds and bites you, once bitten there is literally no going back.

Take my wife, for example. All her life she grew up surrounded by today's famous country-western stars starting her young life in Madison, TN. What folks do for fun in music-rich communities was far different from what I experienced growing up in a blue-coller town in Wisconsin. She attended Madison High and lived down the road from June Carter. She watched as a youth Johnny Cash court June as she played in pond in June's back yard. With stories of big black cars pulling into the driveway and balcony serenades by Johnny made her experiences seem larger than life. But this was normal to her. Where for me pep rallies in Wisconsin were boosted by music from a struggling group of pimple-faced teenagers sporting well-used band instruments, hers were a host of banjo, guitar, and violin packing talents who loved jamming together and made real spontaneous music off the tops of their heads. She thought THAT was normal.

Her exposure to what instruments sounded like is part of why she was attracted to me. When we met, I had the Fisher gear (see the History post). This was her introduction to high fidelity and when asked today she still tells people she married me for my stereo.

So suddenly, one day you were transformed as the audiophile bug bit you, some succumbing more that others to its magical venoom. What one notices immediately is that music sounds more real coming from a good system than from, say something you listen to in an elevator or in the Wal-Mart car stereo display. A whole new world of tantalizing toys and a venture into new, uncharted realms awaits, the bug lying in wait around each corner ready to bite you again thereby increasing its impact on your perceptions.

So what the heck makes things sound different? After all, a transistor is a transistor is a transistor, right? Wrong! It's all about the playback chain where the system - regardless of type or purpose - is only as good as its weakest link. And in high fidelity, there are numerous weak links.

Most audiophiles begin life by swapping this piece of gear for that piece of gear; this is the most noticeable way to hear differences in systems. The speakers provide the biggest difference and hence this is why there are so many successful speaker companies. Speakers appeal to an area of your sonic discernment, meaning that there is something about speaker A that sounds more real to you than the same source heard through speaker B. So you swap this for that and then sit back reveling in your choice and feeding your ego for finding that particular speaker for that phenomenally low price, or something like that.

But why did this piece of gear make such a difference to you? What was it about it that appealed to you? This is where I hope to go - audiophelia: a place where no one has gone before...

Audio critics love adjectives to describe the nuances heard between this and that with thunderous superlatives for one obvious approach that fed their own bug bite and equally-painful comments on what they percieve as mediocre gear. What such critics are trying to do is relate what they hear with their own ears something that transcends electrical measurements. Does this make them wrong? Has the bug bite clouded their perception and oozed something into their being that distorts their perception of reality? Are they crazy? No! Absolutely not! Misguided at times and biased as we all are, but definitely not crazy.

So what is it about a $30,000 CD player that makes it worth the investment over a $200 unit? Why are people drawn to one style or design over another? How does one afford their Champaign dream of sonic nirvana on a beer budget? Knowing what to look for in a system's design can help cut through all of the fluff and hyperbole critics spout in their columns and manufacturer marketing representative sing so well.

Good gear does not have to cost much, but much like a formula one race car, a stock Fiat 500 will not finish first on race day. So there are well understood things about auto racing that when applied to cars makes them faster, more nimble, and more reliable helping them reach the finish line first. So it is with audio gear, and some of the secrets will soon be understood. Let's begin with one etheric thing that is hard to put into words: clarity.

What is clarity to you? What is clarity to your friends or your wife or your significant other? Most of the time, people will say something like, "I don't know what clarity is, but I know it when I hear it." This is true. The average person, and even a wel seasoned audiophile, hears something and says, "I like that!" not even caring about why. Take for example the most difficult thing to correlate with measurements: loudspeakers. Why are come people attracted to low-efficiency planar speakers and others to high-efficiency horns? Both have similar electrical measurements of sound pressure or phase vs. frequency and the waterfall charts show very nice settling times and so on. But yet when asking any audiophile which they prefer, their answer comes instantly and without hesitation.

So why do speakers sound so different and why do people prefer one sound over another? After all, music is music and what all speakers should do is reproduce an instrument as accurately as possible, right? Well, on the one hand, yes they all should try to do this. But on the other hand a horn speaker's sound to a planar speaker lover is much like fingernails on a chalkboard. Something should be measureable that correlates to such extreme audible differences.

Part of this sonic preference depends on a person's individual psychoacoustic tendency where for example they prefer accurate-sounding guitars over all else. So leaning to what their favorite instrument sounds like is where the next level of audiophile refinement occurs. The audiophile bug has bitten this person and its venom causes a sort of "sonic tunnel vision" in that acoustic direction. So if horn speakers make guitars sound better, such a person migrates to the sound of horns and absolutely despise the sound of planer speakers.

The mearured data is where the problem lies. The differences are there both electrically and acoustically, but how the data is presented is the real problem. Sifting through squiggles in charts or comparing this number to that is tedious to the average audiophile so they prefer using their ears as their reference. And this adventure in aural evaluations continues today. But wouldn’t it be nice to know how to filter out the trash before having to listen to the garbage? How do you know for sure if what you hear with your own ears is actually coming from that piece of equipment and not from something else?

So this is where we are headed. What we want to understand is everything down to the finest detail but at a level that our audiophile minds can grasp. How can I expect my wife to understand the same acoustic biases I have when her preferences to music are so different from mine? We'll see as this series continues...

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Dissatisfaction with Vinyl

How did the system sound? Amazing. What people found most striking was the depth, width, and height of the sound stage and how solid it was, especially the front-to-back depth. Regardless of the music played, each instrument retained its position in 3-dimensional space independent of other instruments. People would close their eyes, point to an instrument, and point at a position 6 feet or more to the outside of the speaker.

As the level of refinement grows in any playback system, so does the level of dissatisfaction of source material. The worse a production, the more unappealing it becomes. The number of vinyl records I played dramatically dropped from hundreds to tens overnight. It was a wishful-sinful achievement.

Realizing that the system's potential was more than the source material could ever supply, I now had to find another signal source or just live with the few recordings that made it to the top of the pile. I chose to do womthing else than live with off-the-shelf recordings and decided to do live recordings I would make on my own.

I was friends with Frank Nowell, a musician who I talked into making his own harpsichord and who was well connected to the University of Denver's school of music. He had recently graduated with a degree in conducting and knew other recent graduates and undergraduates in the system. Another connection was a DJ, Gary McBride, at the classical music radio station KVOD, aka the Voice of Denver. The three of us collaborated on first making recordings of local performances at the Grant Avenue Church's Music Series, an irregular number of performances by these same collegiate connections.

I had never attempted live recording and had zero equipment, but I was confident that with the tips I got from AP Van Meter, I could do this. Well, what I thought would be simple was truly not. I started with a pair of Radio Shack PZM microphones and a JVC cassette deck. Results were in a word, terrible and I realized then that I would have to apply everything I knew about coaxing sound out of a playback system to the recording end.

I was not opposed to taking anything apart, so the microphones were at the top of the list. These mics were licensed knock-offs of the Crown PZM 30d but made with plastic parts attached to a metal base. Corded to a line transformer and battery, I modified the budget circuit and created a single-ended system for this gear. After publishing the technique to the web, many studios added this microphone to their collection. It is unknown where this microphone appeared in subsequent recordings but it did get a lot of attention.

I rebuilt a Radio Shack part number 32-1200A (aka 320-1200) mixer removing the tons of built-in ground loops thereby drastically improving the signal-to-noise ratio and sound quality. I also installed a 9V phantom supply specifically for these microphones and added standard XLR3 connectors. Star-quad microphone cables made from Mogami 2893 cable topped off the front end in a custom wiring configuration (non standard to eliminate ground loops in the cables) and a custom isolation transformer removed most of the troublesome wiring problems I discovered when plugging the system into wall outlets.

I tossed the JVC and replaced it with a Nakamichi BX-2 to retain portability and ease of setup.I replaced the flimsy tin RCA jacks with hard-wired Mogami star-quad cables and RCA male plugs. With this setup, I was ready.

I used either two or three microphones at concerts taking sometimes hours to set up placement using the guidelines I learned from AP Van Meter years earlier. The initial results equalled the quality of my best vinyl and I was on my way.

After gaining experience in comparing what I recorded to the actual instrument, things began to get pretty close and the PZMs being omnidirectional easily captured hall ambience. The PZMs did, however, create other problems easily avoided with directional microphones. I decided to live with these issues opting for the realism captured with the omnis. I still have the Nak, the mics, the mixer, and a few of the master tapes and still use these tapes as a reference when reminding myself what things should sound like.

Despite the fact that the recordings were mastered on cassettes, the quality was superior to any other source material I had and still have today. I recall with fond memories huddled at the foot of the stages headphones clamped over my ears watching the performers do their best to bring out the music that slept inside their spirits. Some of these performances were absolutely brilliant despite the fact that their names never made it to the billboards. It was a truly remarkable time.

So now I was armed with everything I needed from good source material to a good playback system. In the years that rolled on, I patiently waited for ditigal recordings to catch up to what I was enjoying, but it took longer than the time I stayed in Colorado to do so.

I left my mountaintop home in Colorado in 2001 after 21 years of sheer audio bliss and moved into a big-rig RV, briefly settling down in Tennessee and then Florida. In 2005, we bounced into Brooksville and are still there today. The old trusty speakers were sold to a very good friend and replaced with a pair of tweaked Bozaks. The MC-2100 is stil with me having undergone yet another round of modifications (torroid power transformer, 0.28 Farad internal supply), and the preamp is a Dared MC-7P again tweaked (notes in audiogon or contact me for a PDF). The turntable is now a Pioneer PL-L1000a again tweaked.

So this is where I am today and I will next address what to look for in good gear, regardless of type, trying to correlate what is measurable to what is audible.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Moving to Colorado

So where were we...ah yes, Colorado.
Althea, my wife, visited Colorado as a child and had a dream to live in Silverton. My friend Gary lived in Denver and on the map it was a lot closer to Silverton than OKC was. We loaded up the gear and headed out to the great west, probably the best thing we ever did.

Denver was in the middle of a severe recession after what they called the "oil shale bust" where only a few years before had been a thriving economy. What they were trying to do was extract the huge amount of oil reserves that were locked inside porous rock albeit unsuccessfully. Over the following few years, the economy of Colorado took a huge hit and people were scrambling to survive.

Being recent graduate, I could start at the bottom of the pay scale and thought that would be attractive. Although it was, it took a few months to find something other than assembly line work. I landed a job working with a company making electronic scalpels and this gave us a toehold in the southern part of the city. Bouncing or a few years from job to job, I eventually landed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in north Denver where they built large business PBXs.

I felt at home working with about 1,000 of the most brilliant minds on the face of the planet and became the Chairperson of the Bell Labs Audio Club after only a few months. Although the campus was huge with a 1,000,000 square foot manufacturing plant and about half that in support and R&D offices, there were only a dozen people in the club and then only three who showed up to meetings.

I was Chair for about 13 years during which time I met Ron Gold of Gold Sound and most of the local owners of the high end stereo salons in Denver and Boulder. I recall one highlight event where I booked the auditorium and in 1983 the first commercially available CD player was demonstrated to a standing room only house. The Sony system glowed onstage as eager ears of engineers strained to hear what transpired. The first disks were passed around the audience and geeks gazed at the rainbow effect marveling at the new technology.

I was heavily into the high end at the time focusing on vinyl and the CD players of this era literally hurt my ears. Screeching anti-aliasing filters and nonlinear DACs allowed sound to emerge from any stereo system but it was definitely not high end music. Plus the touted dynamic range of 90dB soon proved to be inadequate as dying echoes in auditoriums suddenly and abruptly stopped as if the entire system had gone deaf. It would take about as long for CDs to mature as it did for cassette tapes, another 20 years.

At this time, I had built a home high in the nearby mountains seven miles from the nearest highway gazing from a mountaintop to the nearby wilderness area. I chose this location for its solitude and for its pristine views. We lived in the clouds for 21 years in a home I designed around a listening chair.

During this time, we embraced all of the outdoor sports Colorado could provide settling on cross country skiing as our favorite winter activity and backpacking during the summer. Weekends found us anywhere in this beautiful state exploring, fishing, hiking, climbing, and of course sitting by campfires after a full day of fun. During the work week, I was focused on our stereo trying to nudge more from its in every regard. Below is the northwest view from the deck. The distant snow-capped mountains are Rocky Mountain National Park.

I bought an Onkyo P-303 preamp because of its "almost" design and set about to hand match each transistor and hand measure each resistor assuring total balance. I gutted the circuit board from the chassis, added an outboard toroidal supply, converted it to true dual mono (its original intent), and redesigned the phono stage. It too went outboard leaving the line stage to itself. The phono stage was positioned below the Yamaha YP-D8 turntable with its own toroidal supply and all was well. The system sounded pretty good and I had built the 34th version of my speaker design from back in college. It consisted of a Gold Sound 12" woofer (originally conceived for two in an isobaric arrangement), a Dynaudio D-54 dome midrange, and two Panasonic EAS10TH-400A ribbon tweeters. Networks were second order Butterworth hand tuned with a Bell Labs RTA. The network underwent numerous revisions over their lifetime to the current version, Rev-M. This reflex system had a measured bandwidth of 28Hz-over20KHz (microphone limit) +/- 2dB at the sweet spot and a 1 Watt efficiency of 93dB. the 2100 produced 135 watt yielding a potential dynamic range of about 114dB.

I hand made all speaker wires from #26 wire-wrap wire (silver plated, OFHC, Teflon jacket) in a star-quad arrangement twisting individual wire sets clockwise and counter-clockwise until a tight bundle appeared. Terminating the tens of wires at each end proved to be the biggest challenge but I settled on braided copper and 50-amp solid copper self-compressing lugs for speaker terminals. Speakers were bi-wired to the amp. This same star-quad wire connected via silver-soldered brass screws, mated the speaker terminals to the crossover components and then more star-quad wire to the speaker terminals themselves. The McIntosh MC-2100 was still with me now fairing a 0.5 Farad outboard power supply, regulated front end, and of course rewired with similar star-quad wire after removing the numerous ground loops within. I also hand matched everything in the 2100 as I did with the Onkyo and added the 50 Amp lugs as speaker terminals. Below is a photo of the system in the listening room. The 2100 and line filter sat on the floor behind the TV. All equipment sat in a recessed wall cabinet at the opposite end of the room (on the left as viewed from this angle). Interconnect cables were also hand made from Mogami 2893 star-quad microphone cable and all ground loops through all interconnect cables eliminated.

Tomorrow, we will talk about how this system sounded and what I had to do to get a quality a signal source.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include: