The Audiophoolery Thread.

[E93AFAN]

Having been brought up in "musical " household with a mother who played the organ in our local church I learned to play the piano (badly) and appreciate classical music from childhood.

However, although I have a reasonable library of music I have never been tempted to spend much on equipment as for me the joy is in the music. This was brought home to me in the mid seventies when I used to attend the BBC lunchtime concerts at St Georges Church in Bristol. A work friend, who had invested heavily in Radford gear, asked to accompany me to the next concert as he had never been to a live performance.

I can't recall the programme but I think it was chiefly Mozart and the concert was glorious. My friend was underwhelmed and on questioning him he said that he was disappointed as it didn't sound like his hifi system. He went on to explain the sound was thin and lacking in bass and clearly the acoustics of the church were all wrong as there were echos. In fact the venue is superb and is still used to this day.

The experience proved one thing to me, strive as you may, pay what you will you cannot replicate the concert hall in you front room. So why not just enjoy the music and let your brain compensate for the deficiency in reproduction, works for me, but I suspect I'd be decried by the phools.

[Refugee]

Churches have an internal shape made up of many hard surfaces.
They all have there own "voices" depending on the number of columns and window frames the sound reflects from.
The reflections from the columns are likely to up-shift the bass if anything.
Each building to some extent produces a mechanical guitar pedal effect that is unique.
Purpose built concert halls and studios have soft wall coverings and rely on the musicians providing there own guitar pedals.

[knobtwiddler]

That makes it difficult to impossible to match a suitable cartridge

I'm slightly staggered that an arm costing £5K would omit this obvious and much-needed spec. In its absence, the only method I can think of to match a suitable cart is going to be to try a variety, noting their lateral / vertical resonance.

[Radio Wrangler]

Originally Posted by Refugee

Churches have an internal shape made up of many hard surfaces.
They all have there own "voices" depending on the number of columns and window frames the sound reflects from.
The reflections from the columns are likely to up-shift the bass if anything.
Each building to some extent produces a mechanical guitar pedal effect that is unique.
Purpose built concert halls and studios have soft wall coverings and rely on the musicians providing there own guitar pedals.

There are some fine non-ecclesiastical instruments in concert halls with well-damped acoustics. They can be played quickly without the sound turning to mud with all the overlaid slowly decaying echoes.

The concert instruments are a lot easier to play with some variation in expression.

Here's a recent and excellent example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOxIoqATFWE

And this instrument in a hall designed for it does sound quite like the recording. I've sung on that staging.

There is also a recent youtube film of Xaver Varnus playing the familiar toccata & fugue in D-minor in Berlin. This is in a building with plenty of reverberation time. He takes it at a slower tempo and lets the echoes decay somewhat to get some space between notes and skirt the mud problem. It takes guts to play like this when almost everyone else tries to show off how quickly they can play. It's a waste of effort when buildings impose speed limits.

Enjoy!

David

[avocollector]

Originally Posted by joebog1

Fosters is mostly used for cleaning mag wheels.
The mineral water is made close to Brisbane and I have never seen it. Its just a wee 2000 kliks by road from there to here.

But I like the humour.

Joe

I used to love Fosters - but last time I was in Sydney (2013??) it was really hard to find. Sadly it vanished from here in NZ a long time ago.

[The Philpott]

The harmless variant of audiophoolery is of course finding the resonant frequency of the shower cubicle (or better still, bath) and humming as loudly as possible. At least no-one gets conned out of their money with this.

Referring back to organ music, didn't the organist at the funeral for HM the Queen do well covering up 2 or 3 little fluffs? That takes real talent, no phooling. I'm told the critical aspect is not losing your place.

Dave

[RichardGM]

Perhaps deserving of a mention on this thread is a video debunking an audiophool ethernet switch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo

[Radio Wrangler]

That's an excellent video!

The audiophile world seems to have no understanding of redundant codes, error correction, jitter and re-clocking.

David

[knobtwiddler]

We have a box at my day job that comprises a relay and 555 timer, for the purpose of testing new components' reliability, prior to them going for EMC testing etc. (you don't want to fork out for that if the part's likely to fail after a few months). As we all know, in recent times, you have to be constantly vigilant for parts becoming obsolete and react accordingly.

The 'on-er, off-er' is typically left switching said device for a day or two, to emulate the on / off cycle of typical use for a few years.

It occurred to me that there could be a market for the 'on-er, off-er' in the hifi world. There could be spiel about audio devices not being optimum until they've been through several thousand thermal / power cycles (exercising the capacitors makes them fitter and less flabby!). We could selectively preen evidence from a pseudo-scientific study as well.

Anyone here care to invest in the idea?

[Radio Wrangler]

It would probably work as an idea, but the other characteristic of the audiophile market will douse your interest. The prices thereabouts may tend towards infinity, but the sales volumes tend towards zero. You're not going to get rich. I think that the audiophool products that linger are done as hobbies of people with secure day-jobs.

David

[Craig Sawyers]

Now the funny thing is that for certain capacitors this is a real thing. The most hard-bitten objectivist and attack dog against subjective nonsense is Douglas Self.

He examines capacitor distortion. Both electrolytic and polyester capacitors exhibit distortion the well exceeds the distortion of an opamp - around 30ppm peaking in the audio band. In Small Signal Audio Design 2nd Ed.

He reported somewhat surprising results regarding distortion reduction as a function of time for polyester capacitors in Linear Audio V1, April 2011, pp156-161. He found that the distortion from every polyester capacitor he tested halved its distortion over 11 hours, at 1kHz. After 90 days it recovered to the low distortion state in 200 seconds. So there is something of a learning process (what is usually called "burning in"). But each time the test is done after a long break, the process speeds up.

Now he did use 9Vrms to drive it. But he makes the point that the distortion is only a significant issue in circuits using polyester capacitors in time constant defining circuits, such as RIAA stages, tone controls of whatever flavour, or subsonic filters.

He also makes the point that since polystyrene and polypropylene capacitors are easily available, and they do not distort at all (ie beyond measurement technology) the only reason to use polyester capacitors is cheapness.

Craig

[Craig Sawyers]

There are also devices out there for burning in capacitors or cables or whatever. For example https://hagerman-audio-labs.myshopify.com/collections/break-in-devices

Or an earlier one that does cables, capacitors, entire electronics http://www.hagtech.com/pdf/frykleaner.pdf

He's good enough to show the schematic.

So nothing new alas in component burn in devices.

Craig

[Radio Wrangler]

Polyester capacitors are also well known for dielectric absorption (Bob Pease called it 'soakage') Hmm? Coincidence?

David

[Electronpusher0]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

There is also a recent youtube film of Xaver Varnus playing the familiar toccata & fugue in D-minor in Berlin. This is in a building with plenty of reverberation time. He takes it at a slower tempo and lets the echoes decay somewhat to get some space between notes and skirt the mud problem. It takes guts to play like this when almost everyone else tries to show off how quickly they can play. It's a waste of effort when buildings impose speed limits.

Enjoy!

David

I just watched / listened to this, fantastic, perfect timing and no music.

Peter

[Ed_Dinning]

This effect may also have been noticeable in good quality paper in oil caps.
Nalders instruments made power system frequency meters and used these caps as a reactive element. The entire stock was permanently energised on 50, 60, or 400Hz supplies, at working voltage for at least a year before being used in production

There was also a seminal work on capacitor distortion in WW by one of the senior guys at Plessey? who also presented his design of capacitor distortion analyser using a computer sound card

Ed

[Craig Sawyers]

It was Cyril Bateman RIP. I think he worked for Erie.

There is a complete set dowloadable here https://linearaudio.net/cyril-batemans-capacitor-sound-articles

Craig

[knobtwiddler]

Here's another bargain for you all - don't say I'm not kind in tipping my forum friends off: https://www.monoandstereo.com/2022/12/robert-koda-k-15-ex-preamplifier-review.html#more

A massive, custom-designed, and built L-pad eight-channel switch/attenuator looks (and feels when turned) like a finely crafted Swiss watch mechanism and uses only one pair of 256 finest nude audio resistors per channel in the signal path with the volume selected. These are very special parts made exclusively for audio.

From a craftsmanship point of view, this is obviously a beautifully made component. Good for you if you can afford such a thing, in the same way that you might have a Rolex watch. I think it's a shame that so much of what amounts to audio jewellery is marketed as having audible benefits. Why not just market it on the basis of being nicely engineered instead of peddling what amounts to pseudo-science (at best)?

NB - that site is definitely good for audio jewellery. Do have a look around!

The K-15 made me listen to the whole album again instead of skipping tracks. This made it a time capsule that took me back to other times when life was less hectic, the world less complicated and people more cheerful, and relationships more fulfilling

I'm sold!

[Radio Wrangler]

"Inverted Transconductance Couplingcircuit, ITC"

Inverted transconductance? That would be transimpedance, then?

It looks like the usual 20dB more effort went into fancy names than is likely to have gone into circuit design.

David

[knobtwiddler]

I forgot to mention the 'ITC' circuit when I made the posting. I thought someone here would pick up on it

[Craig Sawyers]

Sounds like a folded cascode with a transconductance stage bolted on. An approach that Bob Cordell used in his Vinyltrack phono stages. He followed that with a bootstrapped diamond buffer.

Craig