The Audiophoolery Thread.

[elanman99]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Never mind the tweaks - £695 for that?. Two op-amps and some bits?

I watched the video showing the caps being swapped, but what is the 'that' you are referring to?

Ian

[Radio Wrangler]

Must be paying 50 quid a letter just for the maker's name.

The bit in the video where I stopped was "The first thing we must do is remove all the electrolytic caps"

All? At once? yeah, right.

David

[DrStrangelove]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Never mind the tweaks - £695 for that?. Two op-amps and some bits?

Apparently that's the "economy version": the next one up is £1200.

I think I could include that in the "Glad I didn't buy one" thread.

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by elanman99

I watched the video showing the caps being swapped, but what is the 'that' you are referring to?

Ian

A fair bet at the component cost would be £30 per unit in a reasonable sized batch - say 50 units. Using the conventional 5x formula, that makes about £500 excess profit a throw. Nice work if you can get it...

[Radio Wrangler]

Ten letters in the name, 50 quid a letter = 500 quid. It looks like our estimates agree precisely

David

[Jez1234]

As a manufacturer of a (far superior and infinitely better value) rival product to this I will point out that hand building such things in small quantities in this country is a vastly more expensive undertaking than if they were being mass produced in China for one thing!

I make each one entirely by hand and it takes around 15 hours ish in total.

Another even more salient point is that the price is less determined by the cost of the parts than by the comparatively minuscule market for such things.
Vinyl may well have made a comeback but what percentage of the population do you think is actively engaged in buying/using vinyl records in 2023?

Then, of those what percentage are swayed by the idea of hi fi reproduction? (there are awful Chinese made all plastic modern equivalents to the Dansette but with a USB output from makes such as "Crossley". Also as vinyl attracts the retro people, many actual Dansettes and similar have been restored and are in use).
Of those interested in the fidelity of the reproduction what percentage are keen enough to spend >£200 on just a small box to give better sound from vinyl specifically (ie a phono stage)?

Even if it did cost only £30 for the parts (more like at least double this) the final selling price has to reflect the fact that only relatively small numbers per year are sold and an income (or part of one) has to be made from this.

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

There was also stuff about how to use multiple bits to feed a DAC and to wind up with a close approximation to Gaussian white noise.... and at the very end were the masters' final exams... some of us had no choice but to go for full immersion. It left nightmares! doing bit by bit arithmetic and throwing away all the carries just seemed so wasteful.

From a point of having used it, our data error test sets used PRBS maximal length sequences as laid down by CCITT so that wasn't a problem. The receiver shift register was just forcibly flushed with current data and then looped with the feedback path once full so it could run independently as a comparison for later incoming data so errors could be counted. The flaw is that if the error rate is too high, the chances of an error corrupting the synchronisation brings the whole house of cards down.

The user knows that things are bad, but not just how bad.

David

It can get worse. Back in the day, the outfit I worked for got a project in which the only way to get it to work at the speed needed was to write self modifying code. Of course when it crashed, there was no way to find out why it had done so. I watched the nightmare unfold at a safe distance.

Craig

[Jez1234]

OMG! lucky it didn't turn into HAL-9000 there.

Touch of the Zanzibar fallacy to David's story there!

Intriguing article in EW by Ian Hickman on weirdnesses happening over max + peaks not averaging the same as max - peaks depending on number of SR stages and tap points and sample time etc... all very chaotic.. but more so than was intended it seems.

[LPsmash]

Originally Posted by Jez1234

As a manufacturer of a (far superior and infinitely better value) rival product to this I will point out that hand building such things in small quantities in this country is a vastly more expensive undertaking than if they were being mass produced in China for one thing!

I make each one entirely by hand and it takes around 15 hours ish in total.

Another even more salient point is that the price is less determined by the cost of the parts than by the comparatively minuscule market for such things.
Vinyl may well have made a comeback but what percentage of the population do you think is actively engaged in buying/using vinyl records in 2023?

Then, of those what percentage are swayed by the idea of hi fi reproduction? (there are awful Chinese made all plastic modern equivalents to the Dansette but with a USB output from makes such as "Crossley". Also as vinyl attracts the retro people, many actual Dansettes and similar have been restored and are in use).
Of those interested in the fidelity of the reproduction what percentage are keen enough to spend >£200 on just a small box to give better sound from vinyl specifically (ie a phono stage)?

Even if it did cost only £30 for the parts (more like at least double this) the final selling price has to reflect the fact that only relatively small numbers per year are sold and an income (or part of one) has to be made from this.

Glad to see you are still around, Jez.

Shame you can no longer post on those other ''regular HiFi forums''.

Have you ever come across the newly Michael Fidler Phono Stages?

https://michaelfidler.com/

S.

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by LPsmash

Have you ever come across the newly Michael Fidler Phono Stages?

https://michaelfidler.com/

S.

Active cartridge loading is hardly original, but it does give a small improvement in S/N ratio.

[Jez1234]

Originally Posted by LPsmash

Glad to see you are still around, Jez.

Shame you can no longer post on those other ''regular HiFi forums''.

Have you ever come across the newly Michael Fidler Phono Stages?

https://michaelfidler.com/

S.

Thanks, yes I'm still very much around! I noticed my Arkless GTI being described as the best MC phono stage a couple of folk had ever heard at any price over on a certain forum a month or so ago...

I've never heard of that brand no.

[Welsh Anorak]

Slightly (!) more prosaic, but I've just seen a YouTube video on getting that 'germanium transistor sound'.

Do you think we'll see audiophile preamps bristling with OC71s any time soon?

[Ted Kendall]

Some boutique mic preamps have already jumped on that bandwagon. The market doesn't understand the difference between closed loop (when the characteristics of the active devices are generally swamped by the NFB) and overdrive/open loop conditions (where all bets are off).

[Sergeauckland]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

Slightly (!) more prosaic, but I've just seen a YouTube video on getting that 'germanium transistor sound'.

Do you think we'll see audiophile preamps bristling with OC71s any time soon?

I've seen posts claiming that the Leak Stereo 30 sounds better than the Stereo 30+.

Crossover distortion ... feel the love!

S.

I'm not going to knock the guitar fraternity for their search for interesting sounds and distortion for their playing, that seems perfectly reasonable, an electric guitar playing through a HiFi set up is the most uninteresting flat sounding instrument IMHO.

(And I've made a few small transformer driven open loop, pure class B germanium output stage, practice amps for players.)

For the lunatic fringes of audiophool culture to start to hanker after the technology of soot however (and they do), is beyond me. Hissing, noisy, leaky things at best: takes all sorts.

[Sergeauckland]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Some boutique mic preamps have already jumped on that bandwagon. The market doesn't understand the difference between closed loop (when the characteristics of the active devices are generally swamped by the NFB) and overdrive/open loop conditions (where all bets are off).

Originally Posted by G.Castle

I'm not going to knock the guitar fraternity for their search for interesting sounds and distortion for their playing, that seems perfectly reasonable, an electric guitar playing through a HiFi set up is the most uninteresting flat sounding instrument IMHO.

(And I've made a few small transformer driven open loop, pure class B germanium output stage, practice amps for players.)

For the lunatic fringes of audiophool culture to start to hanker after the technology of soot however (and they do), is beyond me. Hissing, noisy, leaky things at best: takes all sorts.

Indeed, there's a huge difference between the musician or recording engineer who want to create a sound, to the HiFi enthusiast who should, in my opinion, be only interested in the most accurate reproduction of a recording.

Using highly distorting replay devices at home seems to me to be the very antithesis of High Fidelity.

S.

[Beobloke]

Originally Posted by Sergeauckland

I've seen posts claiming that the Leak Stereo 30 sounds better than the Stereo 30+.

Crossover distortion... feel the love!

S.

Says the man who is a fan of that modern source of magnificent crossover distortion, the Behringer A500!

[Sergeauckland]

Originally Posted by Beobloke

Says the man who is a fan of that modern source of magnificent crossover distortion, the Behringer A500!

There is none in the A500. It's an artefact of the measurement method. If the input and output measuring instruments share a ground connection, there is a small amount of crossover distortion in the residual. However, if the measuring instrument has a differential input without a ground connection, there is no crossover distortion.

In normal use into loudspeakers, loudspeakers do not share a ground connection with the input, so there is no crossover distortion.

It did take me a while to work that out, but the three I have here all behave in exactly the same way.

S.

[knobtwiddler]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

Slightly (!) more prosaic, but I've just seen a YouTube video on getting thet 'germanium transistor sound'.

Do you think we'll see audiophile preamps bristling with OC71s any time soon?

Germanium has been seen as quite the thing in recording preamps for some time now. Here's a review from 2006: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/chandler-germanium

Chandler even use it in their compressors: https://chandlerlimited.com/germanium-compressor/

One company has stockpiled germanium in order to make a replica of a famous '60s spring reverb - at over £3K a pop!

I don't think this qualifies as audiophoolery. As has already been said, copious amounts of distortion can be implemented as an artistic decision. I like my mud as the artist intended, so adding further THD via the repro chain doesn't appeal to me, but each to their own!

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by Sergeauckland

There's a huge difference between the musician or recording engineer who want to create a sound, to the HiFi enthusiast who should, in my opinion, be only interested in the most accurate reproduction of a recording.

Using highly distorting replay devices at home seems to me to be the very antithesis of High Fidelity.

S.

There it is in a nutshell