Like you Ed, I have no idea what ‘golden eared’ means. It’s highly likely, nay an absolute certainty, that my attention span is too short to be a Golden Ear.ed wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 11:24 am I wish I could get excited about this stuff, I really do.
Back around 2005 or so there was all this talk of golden ears and spending loads of money on boutique parts because some people said these parts removed the errors in the reproduction(don't even mention the word better).
well, I put my head above the parapet and said, quite honestly, that I couldn't tell the difference most of the time. There were exceptions, of course, such as better iron.
At the time Greg said to me that if I get more practice at listening I will get an idea of the differences and maybe develop ' golden ears'.
Since then nothings has changed for me.
I am only prompted to post because I've been listening to Scala radio recently(not a lot though) and the sound is not one I like. I realised that it sounds exactly like a post-production process that I use in the studio called an exciter. It then occurred to me that the end user(listener, hifi officianado or whatever) has no idea what the engineer has done to the recording to make it sound like it does.
Take that one stage further and apply it to the expert that states this bit of kit makes the cello sound real or the guitar sound authentic or when you change this bit to a boutique component then the whole thing sounds much better.
Yes, I know we're all different and do this diy thing for different reasons but I thought I'd get on my soap box and light the controversy bonfire again.
It's fine to listen to the equipment, It's just that I prefer the music......the line to join the firing squad starts over here!
I do however, carry around a certain sound inside my head; something that I have worked towards for the past twenty years, which broadly argues that there must be no midrange hardness of any description in the sound that comes out of the speakers, even if it (and TBH it rarely is) part of the recording, and interestingly, it’s been push-pull pentodes and single-ended ultralinear operation and big single drivers, that have provided most effectively, the desiderata.
I went through a phase of using boutique components at much cost, when I first started DIY, around 2005, and basically got nowhere. Interestingly the only ‘boutique’ components that have ever provided an utterly fab sound (see above for my requirements) were some red, hand-built coupling caps Greg lent me, that I can’t remember the name of. These were really rather special. Sadly, I didn’t follow up by buying my own and the time has passed where I would be interested in such things. I’ve found a niche now that works for me.
For my own amp builds these days, I use JJ or F&T, 500V electrolytic can caps in my power supplies, and Mallory/ Jupiter ‘Astron’ tubular, or Sprague Orange Drops for coupling stages. Mills for cathode and anode resistors, Arcol carbon composition for grid stoppers and Sprague black/green electrolytics for cathode bypasses. None of these are particularly expensive. Together these components, which apart from the Mills resistors are mostly found in guitar amps, combine to give the kind of tone I hanker after.