quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or

Real, I never got that outrageous, but I like to think I got pretty good sound.If this gets too deep we can go to the other side.

I understand damping factor, and 3000 is out of this world, especially if you're talking into 4 ohms, but hell even 1500 into 4 ohms is out of this world.

As someone who can design, I have the following opinion :

It would make no sense to build a stereo amp with that high of a damping factor. I would build monoblocks and have the amps located right near the speakers and just send the pre-out to them. Then you don't need welding cable.

And it does indeed take welding cable to maintain such a high damping factor even for say a ten foot run.

Also, that is theoretical damping factor. Even if you mount the amp right to the woofer and run bus bars to it, there is still the resistance of the flexwires as well as the voice coil itself. So if you think of it a certain way, that is to say on a different scale, one that approaches reality, a damping factor of infinity could be thought of as a real damping factor of one.

Remember a damping factor number is a ratio to start with. So all you are doing is approaching a real damping factor of one.

I used to be a big fan of amps with a higher damping factor, but that has waned. When not bi-amping most of it is wasted, except for maybe the very low bass. And that's only if the coil in the crossover is very heavy duty. As a result many of the good speakers out there that use a lower bass to mid crossover frequency have better low bass, but there are other reasons for that as well.

Also there is a whole other school of thought, the tube people. With a very low damping (used to be called dampering) factor, the crossover affects the behavior of the amp. Usually at the crossover points the impedance rises a bit, and a low damping amp then puts out a bit more voltage at those frequencies. This might smooth the crossover points and that might be the ju-ne-se-qua (sp) they experience.

However

BBIAM

quote:

ORIGINAL: farglebargle

"oh yeh tubes are cool"

Hot, actually.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Real0ne

quote:

ORIGINAL: Estring

It goes beyond digital vs. analog though. The cds are compressed so much and mixed so loudly that ear fatigue sets in very quickly. The reason this is done is that many nowadays believe louder is better.
I have a large collection of DVD Audio and Sacds and after listening to these and vinyl for that matter, the poor quality of cds becomes very apparent.
I don't think that all cds are recorded this way. It seems to be a new thing.

\

what you say is true, they are companded actually but that is semantics.   Another big fake out is that vinyl will produce a pretty good squarewave even above  10khz and digital is clucky to produce one at 20hz LOL

The point is diggital is sampled where as analog is continuous.  songs that are encoded by fraunhofer using winamp or whatever are usually 44khz sample rate, so you get 2 saples at 20khz and that is supposed to reproduce a sign wave.  ah huh

dbx does make a impact restoration unit but you can never get it all back.   That and much of the 80's and 90's music was really bad for using high compression and worse lmiting techniques on their recordings.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or

Real, real quick, what you described suggests that you have a height issue between 300 and 1,000 Hz. While you may like the sound, I doubt it sounds the same sitting down and standing up. Anymore on speakers let's start another thread.

Now, as most of us know now, a DVD can produce better sound than a CD. But there are other ways.

The earliest was probably a half track reel to reel running at 15 ips with Dolby A. Now understand that it would be damn hard to tell, but even if CD is a bit better, this has never been digitized. Yes it is chopped up by the tape bias, but that amounts to simple PWM on the tape, that is NOT the same as digitized.

Years ago many claimed to not like CD sound, said it sounded shrill or something. Various descriptions were given. But now we are to the point where so few people have heard really high quality music reproduction that was never digitized there is no point of reference.

However there were other digital methods, mainly using videotape. The Sony PCM-F1 plugged into the video jack of a betamax and recorded audio better than a CD. The PCM-F1 had the option to drop it to CD quality though, a feature not found on it's predecessor, the PCM1 which cost ten times as much.

In my opinion, beta hifi sounds better than a CD. The highs are smoother, like my turntable used to be. This is basically two discrete FM carriers on videotape, and you can have video with it, but mine had the option to shut off the video for better quality. Gotta use beta 2 so that's only 3 hours a tape I think, and the heads must be scupulously clean.

Also  properly mastered and pressed LP beats a CD. I got fucking proof in a matter of a few letters - CD4. Look it up, it was a process by which they recorded a subcarrier onto an LP to provide truly discrete four channel sound.

You had to buy a cartrige that had response up to about 40Khz, usually with a Shibata stylus, and then hook it into the decoder. Then you either needed two amps or a quad amp. You can't record that high on a CD.

I have a Marantz decoder. I would expect that this is one of the best phono preamps around. And it is practically noiseless. I used an Audio Technica AT13Ea with it and it sounded great.

In fact I ripped a Chistmas album with that setup and it came out great. I was surprised at how well it was mastered, especially since it came out in the 60s.

Personally I think the greatest advancements in reproducing sound came in the late 70s. Perhaps early 80s. And most of that was speakers. Boston, Bose, all the electrostatic speakers. And professional sound equipment got alot better as well. Rock concerts sounded better live or recorded.

Good sound is not all that new. They have had double speed cassette decks, Tascams and the like for how many decades ? Even hear one of those things, they are good enough to do a mixdown AND have the output good enough to burn to CD. I know someone does it all the time.

I'll be back.

T

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertRat

quote:

ORIGINAL: Real0ne

quote:

ORIGINAL: Estring

It goes beyond digital vs. analog though. The cds are compressed so much and mixed so loudly that ear fatigue sets in very quickly. The reason this is done is that many nowadays believe louder is better.
I have a large collection of DVD Audio and Sacds and after listening to these and vinyl for that matter, the poor quality of cds becomes very apparent.
I don't think that all cds are recorded this way. It seems to be a new thing.

\

what you say is true, they are companded actually but that is semantics.   Another big fake out is that vinyl will produce a pretty good squarewave even above  10khz and digital is clucky to produce one at 20hz LOL

The point is diggital is sampled where as analog is continuous.  songs that are encoded by fraunhofer using winamp or whatever are usually 44khz sample rate, so you get 2 saples at 20khz and that is supposed to reproduce a sign wave.  ah huh

dbx does make a impact restoration unit but you can never get it all back.   That and much of the 80's and 90's music was really bad for using high compression and worse lmiting techniques on their recordings.

The standard CD sampling rate of 44.1 khz limits the high-end frequency response of the medium to 22 khz and some change. Human hearing rolls off big-time at 16-20 khz. Some people can just barely 'hear' an old-fashioned TV's mistuned horizontal oscillator, which operates at 15.75 khz; others can 'somehow tell' when there's a TV set running nearby. So, 20 khz is supposed to be outside our hearing range. The thing is, we CAN hear beyond 20k...it's subtle but it's there. It's more like feeling than hearing. It's the realm where overtones...harmonics that are multiples of fundamental tones...live. The overtones are what tell us about room ambience, the warmth of an instrument and lots of other cues that add to the realism of the material.

To get this, one must have a system that can reproduce the subtleties. I do, sounds like you do, RealOne, and I know plenty of others who do, but it doesn't matter to alot of folks.

edited to add:
Also, as suggested above by T, analog recordings on good vinyl can go way higher than 20 khz quite effortlessly, but you have to have a good turntable, tonearm and cartridge to do it. (T, I used to have a very good table with an A/T 14S cartridge with, yes, a Shibata stylus; the day I installed the A/T, it was like I bought a new amp!)

Bob

quote:

ORIGINAL: camille65

Skipping over the techie stuff ( because it is way over my head lol) I have to say I get such pleasure when I play records. The depth of sound is so different and lush whereas compact discs sound almost 'sanitized' to me.

I don't miss playing my 8 tracks though! They always seemed to jam up in my baby blue Pinto stereo

quote:

ORIGINAL: camille65
I don't miss playing my 8 tracks though! They always seemed to jam up in my baby blue Pinto stereo

quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or

And I want to see any cassette do a 10K square wave. Maybe at quad speed. You need response to like 150-200K to even approach a square wave. Or did you mean a 1K square wave ?