Nickfest

[Ali Tait]

First of all,I'd like to say a big thanks to Nick for hosting Mo and myself,for what turned out to be a very enjoyable, interesting,informative and educational day.

The Slatedecked SP10 was a revelation.No other word for it.It's easily the best source of any description I've ever heard.I found it connected me to the music in a way I've never experienced before.As Nick commented,it just seems to "plug" the music into your head.The air and space was almost frightening,with this incredible void between the instruments.I also now know what the term panoramic soundstage really means,with some transients etc seeming to come from behind your left or right ear.We heard it initially with the original cartridge,but in the time it took me to drive Mo to the local shop,Nick replaced it with his new 103r.This obviously needed running in,but it was immediately apparent how much the noise floor had dropped,and we could hear the sound improving when we had a final listen before we left.I want one!

Next we tried Nick's dac.This sounded very nice indeed,though nowhere near the SP10.We were chatting about the dac and digital in general,and Nick commented that there is an element of not being able to polish a turd as far as digital music is concerned,and after hearing the SP10,I know what he means.The dac sounded great,but to me you were back to a wall of sound rather than the huge staging of the SP10,and it didn't connect me to the music in the way the vinyl did.We'd had my Audio-note dac warming up for a while,so we tried that next.It sounded very nice to my ears,but with a more midband-oriented sound than Nick's,and not quite the frequency extension top and bottom.Nick's was better in this respect,and allowed a little more detail through.Didn't suffer too badly by comparison though,so I was quite chuffed given what I paid for it.

We then tried changing output transformers on the liang.This was an interesting exercise.Tried James first on 7k.Stonking bass,but nothing above about 10k.Next was some AE amorph at 10k.Not quite the bass extension of the James,but all the air and space was back along with the highs.These are very nice transformers.The most interesting part was putting the amp back to stock form for a listen.It turns out the stock trannies are actually pretty good,and noticeably superior to the James which was quite a suprise given this is a Chinese amp.Sounds like AE is the way to go for me.

The liang sounded very nice in Nick's system,but there was no comparison to his 211.It's one thing being impressed at Owstfest,but given a chance to have an extended listen in his own system,this is one very special amp,better than anything else I've had a chance to have a long listen to,and I think exactly what I need to drive the statics properly!.I want one of these too!

Bored you all long enough,so I'll just say thanks again to Nick,and see some of you at Chester.

Regards,Ali.

[swampy]

Ali....

you need to lampizate your liang with the new circuit by Dietmar Gerhold if you want to take Liang to the next level. However I don't think a pair of panel speakers are really efficient enough to get the best out of this amp.
http://lampizator.eu/AMPLIFIERS/CHINA/8 ... 45_v42.pdf

[Paul Barker]

Nice one Ali

so was that my james transformers?

All the things you have discovered if they are so imply nothing has changed while I am away; yet.

Slate is the only platter

digital is still a turd

845 isn't a 211.

[Ali Tait]

Yes Paul,your James's.As for the rest,yep you are about spot-on!

[Ali Tait]

Interestingly though,on Nick's baffles the Liang sounded rather nice and the KEL sounded pants.

[Cressy Snr]

digital is still a turd

What I have always found difficult to reconcile about this "digital is crap" business is that in the good old days of compression free Radio 3 broadcasts, no one ever explained how something like the Linn Kremlin, Naim NAT 01 or Leak Troughline tuners were capable of such mind blowingly brilliant sound, from such an "inherently flawed method of coding"

All the studio to transmitter uplinks were 13 bit PCM after 1973, In fact I was on several of the teams that were still installing new PCM links into the mid 80s when I worked for the Post Office. So who was having us on then?

You'd get Christ Frankland extolling the virtues of the NAT 01 in one of his typical gushing homages to the Gods of Linn and Naim, whilst at the same time and often in the same issue of the Flat Response condemning digital out of hand. He didn't get it for a while......why? It was not digital that was at fault, but the CD. However a few years later in Hi-Fi Review he did finally cotton on to it.

I would argue that there was, has bever been and is nothing wrong with digital. It is capable of superb sound given the right circumstances.

The CD however is much like Microsoft Windows in that just as Windows ushered in a Dark Age of computing from which we are only just starting to emerge, so CD plunged digital into its own Dark Age, that with the advent of music servers and high capacity hard disks, is starting to get back to the quality of which it was capable whilst chiefly in the hands of the BBC and the GPO.

It is ironic how digital has only come into its own by being transmitted over miniature versions of the old PCM uplinks (CAT5 cables) to little radio transmitters we call Wi-Fi access points, just like it was thirty five years ago.

Removing the CD from the equation has belatedly allowed digital to flower.

Steve

[Nick]

Well, its just my opinion, but as such I need to state it

Linn Kremlin, Naim NAT 01 or Leak Troughline tuners were capable of such mind blowingly brilliant sound, from such an "inherently flawed method of coding"

All the studio to transmitter uplinks were 13 bit PCM after 1973

Of the above I have only heard the Leak, and I agree it does sound great. In regards to the 13 pit PCM, I assume that they get the most from it, making sure levesl are such that the full bit range is used (assuming that no form of companding is used), so that would give a S/N ratio of 80dB, and 80dB is a lot more than you will get from a tuner, first one I found, the Linn Akurate quotes 69dB. And in reality, both are more than you would ever hope to get from vinyl. And the difference between the PCM S/N and the FM S/N would hide any quantisation distortion from the PCM.

You'd get Christ Frankland extolling the virtues of the NAT 01 in one of his typical gushing homages to the Gods of Linn and Naim, whilst at the same time and often in the same issue of the Flat Response condemning digital out of hand. He didn't get it for a while......why? It was not digital that was at fault, but the CD. However a few years later in Hi-Fi Review he did finally cotton on to it.

Well, NK still seems to refuse to understand digital encoding if his last article was anything to go by.

I would argue that there was, has bever been and is nothing wrong with digital. It is capable of superb sound given the right circumstances.

Now, this IMHO is the problem, yes it is, given careful processing and all the rest capable of very good sound, but it all falls to the ground and just doesn't sound as good as vinyl, sorry, but everytime I have listened to a digital source, and been thinking "this sound very nice", within seconds of replacing the digital with analog, the next thought is "ok, it sounded good, but this is better in every way"

Removing the CD from the equation has belatedly allowed digital to flower.

I have to admit to not being sure of that, I agree that hard disk storage is great from a convience standpoint, but I still haven't heard anything that makes me think that CD is fundamentally less capable than hard disk storage, and the end of the day, it can't be, assuming that the CD is doing a good job, and lots of error correction isn't being needed.

All IMHO of course.

[Cressy Snr]

I would argue that there was, has bever been and is nothing wrong with digital. It is capable of superb sound given the right circumstances.

Now, this IMHO is the problem, yes it is, given careful processing and all the rest capable of very good sound, but it all falls to the ground and just doesn't sound as good as vinyl, sorry, but everytime I have listened to a digital source, and been thinking "this sound very nice", within seconds of replacing the digital with analog, the next thought is "ok, it sounded good, but this is better in every way"

All IMHO of course.

Hi Nick I agree totally with you about analogue being better than digital, but again given the right circumstances. IMHO it all depends on what turntable/ arm/ cartridge you use.

Unfortunately for me I'm very sensitive to treble distortion and sandpaper effects at the top end. I detest end-of-side distortion and mistracking and still cringe when I think about life at the wrong end of a Linn K18.
I've had a love-hate relationship with vinyl as long as I can remember precisely because of this problem. The only record player which ever really addressed this sufficiently thoroughly to make vinyl playback pleasurable for me was my Roksan (long since gone) Radius 5 with Denon DL103.

CD was a relief from this "feature" of analogue but for me introduced its own set of problems ie a hard mechanical and soulless "perfection". Hard Disk storage and the SB3/DAC were, for me a revelation. Gone was that "digital sound" It satisfies my musical needs nowadays and I can't imagine life without it.

For the first time I am able to just play music (apart from when I'm messing with PX25s etc)

I'm not a digital fanboy and still love to hear a good analogue front end but these days a music server suits me fine.

[ed]

I'm not absolutely sure where this discussion was intended to go, or in fact where its going now, but.......

Has anybody listened to the difference between folkalley and all the other internet streams, in terms of quality....well I can tell you there is a big difference...and the medium and the transport are the same for all, so the playing field is fairly level...

my take on it is that they use a different exciter on the digital content...at its most basic an exciter is a signal process, usually used in the mastering process, which enhances the finished product so that its tweaked for its audience or transport medium.......beleive me when I say it can make a whole world of difference.......

I also believe we havn't touched the surface of digital capability..at the moment its smoke and mirrors because you can criticise it till the cows come home, but you really don't know whats been put into at the moment......

now the contentious bit.........I listen to all the feedback and reviews about how good this or that vinyl system is...but in reality the judges weren't there at the recording so how can they say its truthfull or not.....at the end of the day most of us either like it or we don't and I don't think we should be more pretentious than that......

for the most part we are listening to what the engineers want us to hear, not what the medium is capable of.


rant over

[Clive]

Steve, you mention end of side distortion and treble issues with record decks, you've got to hear Vic's Terminator parallel tracker - the CD destroyer. It takes on the strengths of CD then add adds the strengths of vinyl.

[cressy]

very true ed, i have an original vinyl copy of wish you were here and a remastered cd. the cd in my system is much better than the lp and the deck itsself is no slouch when sufficiently tweaked and faffed with to get its best. the engineer doing the remaster has a base to work from with the master and then can play with it to his hearts content to get the best from the carrier its intended for. its the engineers interpretation of quality that give the cd the edge, not the player. the same is true of the remastered 30th anniversary dsotm i got recently on vinyl, i find its better than my original copy. i cant put my finger on why, but i suppose it was mastered digitally not analogue as the original would have been.
i suppose im fairly lucky not to have really heard any nasty digital, as the players ive heard have all been quality units such as the mcd i have at the mo, the cd303 that set me off trying to get a multibit player,the xray and the delta 170.3 and x24k dac. the only one i ever remember being crap was a technics slps50 the old man had around 1987ish that was very strident at the top end.
they can increase sampling rates, bit rates, whatever, bit if its mastered badly it will sound crap wether its analogue or digital
having said that, like most of us i do prefer vinyl done properly like the radius 5, the jvc qly5f, gregs slatedeck and wills lenco but in truth i really dont care what the format is through a good amp and speakers. it all sounds good to me

[Nick]

now the contentious bit.........I listen to all the feedback and reviews about how good this or that vinyl system is...but in reality the judges weren't there at the recording so how can they say its truthfull or not.....at the end of the day most of us either like it or we don't and I don't think we should be more pretentious than that......

for the most part we are listening to what the engineers want us to hear, not what the medium is capable of.

Well, all I can say, is yes, maybe we are hearing the material and not the medium. And certainly red book CD should be goo enough to be faultless (and I don't mean that in a sarcastic sense).

But the consistent observation (I wont call it a fact) remains, that vinyl seems to work for my ears in a way that CD doesn't. And given the fact that the S/N ratio of CD is much much better, the flatness of the frequency response of CD is much better (and exceeds my ears), the level of distortion is much lower with CD. Then its clearly not the case that vinyl is producing a more accurate copy of what happened in the studio, not that I have ever suggested it is.

Statistics would lead me to assume that if it was down to different mastering, then at least one CD would do to my head what vinul consistemtly does, despire the noise and distortion.

I am certainly not trying to be pretentious, and if its happend anyway, sorry, its not intended. And as for the direction the thread is taking, who know, does it matter?

[Cressy Snr]

Steve, you mention end of side distortion and treble issues with record decks, you've got to hear Vic's Terminator parallel tracker - the CD destroyer. It takes on the strengths of CD then add adds the strengths of vinyl.

Now that sounds more like it!

Sorry Ali for the thread hijack But EOS distortion and cartridge mistracking was the final deal breaker for me when it came to listening to vinyl.

It drove me crazy, so much so that I would get completely distracted waiting for it to happen on some Paul Simon "sss" sound or a band's drummer hitting a cymbal particularly hard. Most of the time I simply did not enjoy listening to vinyl records. I was an early adopter of CD, buying my first player in 1984 and to be frank, it was a revelation, if a bit sterile sometimes, but by then I was into jazz, which seemed to work well on the new format.

Of course "upgrading" the system with Naim then Linn amplification in the early 90s was in retrospect a rather silly thing to have done, given that the old Linn/Naim equipment did not mesh too well with CD, emphasising the sterility of the medium to a frightening degree and forcing a return to vinyl via a Linn LP12

Back of course came the mistracking and EOS distortion. I could neither listen to vinyl nor CD at that point so I sold the gear on and started from scratch with a simple Roksan/Musical Fidelity/KEF system.

I really would love to be able like vinyl and see in it what others see but I can't stand it for more than a couple of record sides unless the mastering is impeccable (no hope of that then) Also I object to paying £15 upwards for new vinyl issues. I found that quite a lot of the secondhand vinyl I bought was second rate and I could hear the damage done by previous playings using mistracking cartridges. Miles Davis' and Freddie Hubbard's trumpets and Bill Evans piano being particularly cringe making on poor surfaces.

Now an air bearing parallel tracker with a good cartridge gliding across a record carried on a Garrard 401 in a Slatedeck plinth I'd love to hear. If it could banish that grit and fuzz from the ends of record sides and squash that ssszzzzth noise as the stylus lets go on loud vocals I'd start saving in a heartbeat.

Steve

[Clive]

Hi Steve,

I'm having an evening on my own tonight so loads of music is being played. I am mixing CD and LP, both are good but LP is mostly better, a lot depends on recordings. The sssh you dislike I find is more of an issue with CD but pretty much it's banished from my system. My deck is not a 401, it's a 301 on a twin tier Slatedeck with the Terminator arm and an ZYX R-100 cartridge. I also have a Kontra B and Pickering 7500. As I'm near Altrincham I may not be so far from you. If you are over this way maybe we could meet.

Clive

[ed]

I am certainly not trying to be pretentious, and if its happend anyway, sorry, its not intended. And as for the direction the thread is taking, who know, does it matter?

noooooo, not suggesting that for one minute!

I think I wasn't paying attention to my wording when just trying to point out there is good and bad in both mediums.

Ed