egg on face

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ed
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#1 egg on face

Post by ed »

A short tale concerning synergy.

I’ve been listening to the new Robert Plant album, ‘carry fire’, after Chris(stratmangler) recommendation. IMO it’s awesome......But

On the current music room set up(SB3 – DAC AH Lite – F6 – electrostatics) it sounded a bit woolly in places. Now RP is renowned for his industrial and distorted percussion so I wasn’t unduly concerned, just a bit uneasy. So, fetched the headphones and plugged them into the dac directly. Wow, all the percussion suddenly appeared separated and ride cymbal rhythm on track 6 suddenly appeared from nowhere.

Panic...either the electrostatics or the F6 have developed a feature.

So, put the F6 back in the studio set-up (echo layla – DAC AH – F6 – Ariel 6) and wow, all the aforementioned clarity came back in spades together with the very prominent ride cymbal rhythm on track 6. Phew!!!

I changed the music room setup(SB3 – DAC AH – TPA3116 class D – electrostatics), and wow, all the clarity and content etc. Phew!!

So, the upshot(of which I’m certain) is that the F6 cannot drive the electrostatics.

I think the point of the story is that a few times in the past at Steve Shiels place we’ve identified high or low bits of a recording going missing, or becoming shy when swapping kit in and out. At the time the general feeling has been that the kit in question has been inferior. In a lot of cases this just simply won’t be true.

Egg on face?, well the F6 has been in the music room set up for a while now and I hadn’t noticed until the RP album came along.

It does beg the question though, how many opinions one reads on forums about how people advertise bits of kit as being 2nd rate because “they’ve heard” it in “their” system, and it was crap.

So, to précis, If it doesn’t work for ME in MY system, it doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t work.

Am I lecturing?, perhaps I’d better go and have a lie down.
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steve s
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#2 Re: egg on face

Post by steve s »

Had a similar problem myself this last week I tried my valve Phono in to a chip amp when I had a turntable shoot out the other night..
Did not sound anything like it what I'm used to...
Got an immaculate 301 + sme3012 last week so had to have a test against my thorens 124+ fr 64s
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IslandPink
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#3 Re: egg on face

Post by IslandPink »

Well electrostats are about the most difficult speaker to drive, if they're big. I remember the ones Colin brought to Eggborough and how they sounded pretty good from a GM70 run at 1800V :D With my Aurora PP 300B amp they were pretty good but not as nice by a good way as the same amp driving Quad 989's which aren't quite as big. On the day it was best with the WAD 300B PP which had feedback option and hence a lower output impedance. The electrostats are known for having a pretty high capacitance which drives the impedance down to 1 or 2 ohms in the HF so a lot of amps will sound muddy & lacking HF if nothing else. I though the F6 was of sterner stuff so that's a surprise.

But I'm not convinced al the 'matching issues' are just random, it's often something to do with impedance mismatches, with pre-amps and power amps, or volume controls which can screw up your phono amp's Zout.
Eg :
steve s wrote: Thu Oct 19, 2017 2:01 pm Had a similar problem myself this last week I tried my valve Phono in to a chip amp when I had a turntable shoot out the other night..
Did not sound anything like it what I'm used to...
What's the output impedance of the phono amp ( or the output valve & configuration ( eg. CF or not ) ) ?
The chip amps, even if small, have 50k input impedance, and bigger ones probably more like 20K or even less. Maybe there's something in that.
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