DIY Audio or OCD to the next level

Advertise with us
Kitchen Knife Forums

Help Support Kitchen Knife Forums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Lars said:
I hate dogma :)
Click to expand...

Lars said:
Guess what I'm making...
View attachment 254323
Click to expand...
Buddy_christ.jpg
 
MarcelNL said:
bummer....indeed headphone weather it's not...did both channels die on your amp? that would point at a problem early on in the circuit, fuses tend to fade away slowly, they creep up on you and hit you with dead silence for no good reason sometimes.
Click to expand...
The sympthoms were that one channel (left one) suddenly lost most volume and got incredibly noisy and crackly. Considering this is a 20 year old hand-me-down it's probably some capacitors hitting the end of their life span?
To make matters more confusing today it decided to work all normal again. I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed....
 
Jovidah said:
The sympthoms were that one channel (left one) suddenly lost most volume and got incredibly noisy and crackly. Considering this is a 20 year old hand-me-down it's probably some capacitors hitting the end of their life span?
To make matters more confusing today it decided to work all normal again. I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed....
Click to expand...
capacitors do age, the electrolytic ones that is...possible but what is also possible is that the wiper of the volume potentiometer or a balance control pot has plowed it's way through the carbon resistor path (most likely the volume pot)...a good swiping from left to right may briefly alleviate the issue.
Replacement is cheap enough and usually easy to do.

Capacitors is also possible I'd start at the volume pot (sometimes a spray can of circuit cleaner helps for a while as it can remove loose particles- basically isopropylacohol in a spray can-)

If that is not the issue capacitors or an IC/transistor may be losing it's magic smoke in slow release....obtaining model details and it's schematics is highly recommended...
 
I can recommend the new Samsung 990 pro NVME SSD to anyone in need of a good music file storage disc!
Low latency, much lower than the previous versions and a clear winner (sound) in a 1;1 comparison with the older 970 evo plus.
 
Last edited:
deleted, decided to not embark on this kind of schreibtisch scientist vs empirical science debate.

Pseudo SLC is also good for sound (my OS disc is a pseud SLC), but equally hard to find (at affordable price levels)
 
People believe what they believe and no one Usually changes their mind. I use studio quality wiring throughout my system which is twisted and shielded. No matter how many times people bring over ultra expensive exotic wire, I have never noticed enough of a difference, if any that would make me change what I currently have. I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of how different wiring configurations may effect sound but I have yet to hear any differences that compel me to make a change. Small changes is sound, whether they are happening, or not don’t justify, in my opinion enough to spend multiple amounts of additional money’s for minimal if any differences. My system is so incredibly transparent with, for me just the right amount of warmth or depth if you will that I just don’t see a reason for change. What’s important for me is a dead silent, black background and clarity with no additional artifacts. I have that now and although on occasion, with some recordings there is a bit of harshness on the top end, for most recordings I couldn’t be happier. Music reproduction is a lesson in compromise and we will never get every recording to sound the way we would like.
 
doing research on the shape of the horn while testing lamination with hare glue...as first time user I'm quite enthusiastic about this ancient stuff already!

Turns out Klangfilm may have used a hybrid horn design they patented around the time they started selling Bionor.
anything between 2/3 and 3/4 of an exponential horn followed by the Kugelwellenhorn (spherical), who'd have thought that....
Contours4.jpg
 
Jovidah said:
The sympthoms were that one channel (left one) suddenly lost most volume and got incredibly noisy and crackly. Considering this is a 20 year old hand-me-down it's probably some capacitors hitting the end of their life span?
To make matters more confusing today it decided to work all normal again. I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed....
Click to expand...
Could be. Often times it's also just the switches ot pots due to oxides forming on the conducting materials. Sometimes it cleans up just by pressing the switches a lot / moving the volume knob. If the amp has switching relais for speaker protection that could be another places to look...
 
gregfisk said:
People believe what they believe and no one Usually changes their mind. I use studio quality wiring throughout my system which is twisted and shielded. No matter how many times people bring over ultra expensive exotic wire, I have never noticed enough of a difference, if any that would make me change what I currently have. I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of how different wiring configurations may effect sound but I have yet to hear any differences that compel me to make a change. Small changes is sound, whether they are happening, or not don’t justify, in my opinion enough to spend multiple amounts of additional money’s for minimal if any differences. My system is so incredibly transparent with, for me just the right amount of warmth or depth if you will that I just don’t see a reason for change. What’s important for me is a dead silent, black background and clarity with no additional artifacts. I have that now and although on occasion, with some recordings there is a bit of harshness on the top end, for most recordings I couldn’t be happier. Music reproduction is a lesson in compromise and we will never get every recording to sound the way we would like.
Click to expand...
You have it just the way it should be. As transparent as possible. Then, if you WANT some 'pleasing' distortion on some recordings (or all) for your personal preference, you can dial it in with EQ.
 
Michi said:
As a software engineer with a strong hardware background, I can confirm that the digital source is pretty much irrelevant. If there is any relevance at all, it applies only to the medium.

The digital data stream, once it is on a wire, is what it is. There is no such thing as a string of bits that is "better". Where problems can arise is when the stream comes from something that is essentially mechanical, such as a compact disc. The readout of the data on the disc may not be perfect. There may be dirt, scratches, and so on, causing the readout of the bit stream to produce bad data. There are a whole bunch of tricks that allow a CD player to compensate for this. In particular, there is a decent amount of redundancy built into the encoding, so errors in the stream can be detected and, in many cases, 100% corrected such that the original data remains intact, even though there were some errors during reading.

Some errors are too serious to be repaired. In that case, a chunk of data in the stream goes missing. Good DACs will compensate for this by interpolating the missing data. In essence, they replace the missing piece of data by making a guess as to what it might have originally looked like by looking at the intact section of data just before and just after the error. In many cases, that is good enough to mask the error such that no human will be able to detect it. If the section of missing data gets too large, no amount of guessing can fix it, and you get a drop-out, where there is a moment of silence, or the interpolation is asked to do more than is reasonable and produces a bad guess, that is, distortion.

The important point here is that, in no case is there ever any doubt as to whether an error did occur or not. The DAC can tell with 100% accuracy when there is an error (any error, no matter how small or large). A DAC will never operate on a data stream that contains errors without knowing that there were errors.

If we take the mechanical component out of the equation, the picture changes. For example, if the source data is a Flac encoded stream that is read back from some storage device, such as flash memory, for all intents and purposes, the bit stream that comes out of the memory is 100% error free. The same applies to transmission mediums, such as wires, ethernet, optical fibre, whatever. Modern digital hardware is so good that it effectively never corrupts anything ever.

If we got the Flac stream onto the medium without errors, as is the case with direct-to-storage recordings, the bit stream that ends up on the storage device is also free of errors. Simply put, modern hardware makes no mistakes; at least not by any reasonable standard. I'd be far more worried about getting hit by an asteroid than some bit-level error in the transmission chain.

The only other sources of errors are on the analog side, say with the microphone, the microphone amp, or the analog-to-digital converter that turns the data into digital form. But those are things that, as a listener, I can't do anything about. Whatever distortion was produced during recording will be faithfully encoded in the digital data.

The other error source is in the playback chain, when the data is converted back into analog and processed from there. Lots of potential for errors on that path, in the DAC, in the amplifiers, etc.

But improving the quality of the digital source is likely to be a lost labour of love. There is no such thing as a "slightly better stream". The stream is either correct or it is not; there really is no in between. And because digital hardware is as good as it is, the stream is effectively always correct.

I am aware that no memory is perfect, that there are observable errors in hardware, etc. But they are too rare to matter in this context. My chance of dying in a car accident today is millions of times higher than me encountering a bit error in some digital data stream in the next twelve months.
Click to expand...
Michi,
I understand, but hearing is believing (at least in my case). I suspect it's timing of packets, but I really don't know. Just that it makes digital a very viable alternative to analog for me. YMMV.
Evan
 
Michi said:
Class AB is nice. Not as good as class A, but then I don't have to run a heater every time I listen to music…
Click to expand...
I bought a pair of Class H amps to run in the Summer months. That was a year and a half ago and my Class A OTL tube amps have not reappeared in my system. I still kinda prefer the tubes, but not roasting has its merits, and the difference/improvement is very subtle.
 
gregfisk said:
People believe what they believe and no one Usually changes their mind. I use studio quality wiring throughout my system which is twisted and shielded. No matter how many times people bring over ultra expensive exotic wire, I have never noticed enough of a difference, if any that would make me change what I currently have. I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of how different wiring configurations may effect sound but I have yet to hear any differences that compel me to make a change. Small changes is sound, whether they are happening, or not don’t justify, in my opinion enough to spend multiple amounts of additional money’s for minimal if any differences. My system is so incredibly transparent with, for me just the right amount of warmth or depth if you will that I just don’t see a reason for change. What’s important for me is a dead silent, black background and clarity with no additional artifacts. I have that now and although on occasion, with some recordings there is a bit of harshness on the top end, for most recordings I couldn’t be happier. Music reproduction is a lesson in compromise and we will never get every recording to sound the way we would like.
Click to expand...
I'm a big believer in balanced interconnects. It greatly reduces the sonic impact of interconnects. That said, I still run relatively exotic (although not obscenely expensive) silver in Teflon tube balanced ICs. They sounded the best to me, and are 1/10th or less than the cost of the crazy RCA ICs.
 
ACHiPo said:
Michi,
I understand, but hearing is believing (at least in my case). I suspect it's timing of packets, but I really don't know. Just that it makes digital a very viable alternative to analog for me. YMMV.
Click to expand...
I don't think it can be timing. All DACs use buffering, reading ahead and then streaming the data from the buffer. Packet timing is absolutely precise that way.

I don't doubt that digital can be as good or better than analog. In particular, the noise floor with digital is so much lower, analog doesn't even get a look in. Having said that, I have a bunch of records in both vinyl and CD. Some of the vinyl ones sound very much better than their CD counterpart. But I think that is due to poor (re-)mastering more than the medium.
 
Digital's noise floor can be lower than that of analog, yet there is more going one than zero's and one's coming across. My audio server f.e. does not have a lower noise floor when I start using a CPU with more horse power and TDP, neither will the noise floor of the linear PSU drop.

Digital sound quality seems to evolve around CPU horse power, CPU utilization, latency and speed of current delivery of the PSU. None of those make the bit perfect any more perfect than when I was using a mere laptop as source, still it makes a heck of a difference.

BTW; Let's not make the misstake to compare consumer priced audio (the 'high end') with DIY, the difference in price tag is a factor of anything between 4 to 40.
 
I finally installed two dedicated audio power lines, nice improvement with relatively little effort :)
Dedicated 'solid state' fuses, UPOCC in one line, 4mm^2 solid core copper in the other so I can compare the two.
 
MarcelNL said:
capacitors do age, the electrolytic ones that is...possible but what is also possible is that the wiper of the volume potentiometer or a balance control pot has plowed it's way through the carbon resistor path (most likely the volume pot)...a good swiping from left to right may briefly alleviate the issue.
Replacement is cheap enough and usually easy to do.

Capacitors is also possible I'd start at the volume pot (sometimes a spray can of circuit cleaner helps for a while as it can remove loose particles- basically isopropylacohol in a spray can-)

If that is not the issue capacitors or an IC/transistor may be losing it's magic smoke in slow release....obtaining model details and it's schematics is highly recommended...
Click to expand...

Smidderton said:
Could be. Often times it's also just the switches ot pots due to oxides forming on the conducting materials. Sometimes it cleans up just by pressing the switches a lot / moving the volume knob. If the amp has switching relais for speaker protection that could be another places to look...
Click to expand...
Basically this is already way over my head for someone who never really did any electronics repairs like me... but I guess I'll just keep changing the volume if it acts up again. :)
For now I've decided to just start figuring out what to replace it with eventually. This thing is probably already 25 years old so I doubt it's sensible to keep trying to bandaid it back to work?
But as a normal person the audio world is quite a confusopoly to look into. It's worse than the knife world!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top