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Post by Clive on May 31, 2015 22:16:08 GMT
It's hard to disassociate the tactile connection of vinyl but I find a high end vinyl setup easily beats a CD or streaming setup, pretty much regardless of the price of the digital setup. Excellent vinyl setups though tend to be very expensive vs the digital setups. It need not be like that though. My gripe with vinyl is with the phono stages on offer. The friend of mine who assembles my DACs etc. also happens to assemble a number of phono stages that carry the brand name of some well known companies. I have tried a couple of them in recent years and also had a look at the construction. Given the price that they are sold at, versus the simplicity of the design and the components used, I am not surprised that people have to spend quite a bit just to find a decent phono stage. One design uses a NE5532 (cost less than 50p for one) and critical RIAA components with wild variations in tolerance. That same preamp sells for around £150. Add the TT and cartridge and you are quickly talking a couple of hundred quid. You can get a terrific sounding CD player for that sort of price these days and still have change left over to buy some more discs. I don't disagree. My phono stage only cost £399 but is superb. The real cost of my setup is in the record deck and cartridge. Lesser components can still be excellent....it's a tricky balance.
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Post by Clive on May 31, 2015 22:19:41 GMT
It's hard to disassociate the tactile connection of vinyl but I find a high end vinyl setup easily beats a CD or streaming setup, pretty much regardless of the price of the digital setup. Excellent vinyl setups though tend to be very expensive vs the digital setups. I understand why you find that. Until you hear a digital system where clocking is really state of the art, vinyl will win. It was only when I achieved clocking accuracy greater than 1 in 10 -13 that the balance changed; suddenly digital has the qualities we associate with analogue and also has the resolution only high end digital can produce. That kind of accuracy really is the turning point, however the only way you'll get it is by hydrogen maser or a BVA clock. Until Oscilloquartz resume production, sadly no one else seems able to produce a BVA. so in absolute terms you are wrong but in practical terms given what digital clocking technology is available you are probably right. Intetesting. I don't have any reason to not believe you,I've not heard such a clock. It seems even USB receivers are huge culprits too.
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Post by aurender on May 31, 2015 22:31:20 GMT
I was surprised by the effects of stepping up clock accuracy. Other factors are at work in clocking too. Possibly the waveform shape is important too. If you try rubidium clocks with poorer short term stability than the normal OCXO, they often produce a "better" sound although that may be a matter of taste. I provided David Stevens, ceo of DCS with some sample rubidium atomic clocks to test against standard OCXO. We both agreed there were differences but couldn't decide which was better. I'd like to repeat those DCS tests with a BVA clock where I think the comparison would be much more clear cut
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Post by MartinT on Jun 1, 2015 5:40:39 GMT
In the absence of Oscilloquartz BVA products, what would you recommend for a modular oscillator of at least rubidium performance, Aurender? By all means, start a new thread as we're likely to go off-track here. I'd like to discuss what is possible in the real-world for both my Ayre and Technics decks and possibly the Caiman-II DAC which I use for streaming sources.
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Post by MikeMusic on Jun 1, 2015 7:00:43 GMT
I thought CD was catching up so was surprised there was the gap
So far as the touchie feelie with LPs ... honestly I can do without it
Roll on streaming at the same quality, and I don't think it is far off
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 7:03:21 GMT
SFZ still have their BVA clock listed as available. This uses the Oscilloquartz 8607 so I assume they have one or two units left. Looks beautifully engineered but at $40k it ought to..
Ilet me look online at the Ayre and the Caman to see what the practicalities are in terms of accepting an external clock then I can give you some thoughts
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Post by MartinT on Jun 1, 2015 7:05:42 GMT
Looks beautifully engineered but at $40k it ought to. Yeah I saw that and instantly dismissed it.
Thanks for any information you may glean. Charlie Hansen of Ayre is a nice chap, he may be prepared to give info like the clock frequency etc.
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Post by stanleyb on Jun 1, 2015 7:33:20 GMT
You'll be wasting your time fitting a clock to the CMII Martin. The DAC already has a chip in it that derives the required clock frequencies for the different playback frequencies. The kind of DACs that might benefit from an external clock are the ones that use chipsets like the CS8416, which don't use a clock, but a simple RC oscillator. Replacing that RC oscillator in those types of DACs would make a big difference. If you reference everything with a master clock, you'll be disappointed if you have the CMII in circuit. Each audio data bit takes a certain amount of time to wind its way through the electronics. If you start slicing the data at a fixed reference, some of it will be cut short in their tracks and end up getting registered as a 0 instead of 1, or visa versa. The result will be a terrible mess like a scratching sound. So don't believe all the hype.
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Post by MartinT on Jun 1, 2015 8:28:32 GMT
Thanks for that, Stan. I knew your circuit was different, but that has shed some light on it.
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Post by jandl100 on Jun 1, 2015 8:39:26 GMT
Sorry to keep going on about streaming but a subscription to Tidal removes the need to ever go browsing again.
I never thought I'd agree with this viewpoint, but having recently signed up to Tidal and started streaming, I heartily concur!
For classical anyway, the choice is breathtaking. No, Tidal doesn't have everything in its catalogue, but enjoy it for the astonishing amount that it does have.
And the sound quality is nothing short of astounding. I've seen Aurender compare it here favourably with his (to me) gobsmackingly expensive digital front end, and I am not surprised.
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 8:42:59 GMT
Martin The Ayre looks like a very good cd and sacd player. I'm very impressed with the designers at Ayre and since they claim to have developed their own proprietary clocking arrangement, I think it's not an obvious candidate for experimentation.
stanleyb, really? Are you serious?
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 8:47:08 GMT
Sorry to keep going on about streaming but a subscription to Tidal removes the need to ever go browsing again.
I never thought I'd agree with this viewpoint, but having recently signed up to Tidal and started streaming, I heartily concur!
For classical anyway, the choice is breathtaking. No, Tidal doesn't have everything in its catalogue, but enjoy it for the astonishing amount that it does have.
And the sound quality is nothing short of astounding. I've seen Aurender compare it here favourably with his (to me) gobsmackingly expensive digital front end, and I am not surprised.
I'd recommend you try the free trial of Qobus also. Sadly my Aurender software can't currently stream Qobus but on the Squeezeboc Transporter I'd say Qobus has a slight edge on sound quality
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Post by jandl100 on Jun 1, 2015 8:54:37 GMT
I've looked at Qobuz and have been seriously put off by the flashy, jerky (at least on my setup) graphics that seem to infest the site. Had a brief look at the music available and didn't see much if any improvement over what Tidal has to offer.
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 9:10:23 GMT
No, there isn't a great deal of difference in the choice since they both use as a basis the same set of data.
Interface: depends what hardware you are using. On Squeezebox I would recommend IPenq which is very clean, stable and means you can run Tidal,Qobus and spotty if you desire side by side with exactly the same onscreen graphics.
All I was saying in my previous post on Qobus was that possibly it has a very slight edge on sound quality.
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Post by stanleyb on Jun 1, 2015 9:15:34 GMT
stanleyb, really? Are you serious? I can only assume that you know little, if anything, about me. I have been doing things for years that others have referred to as snake oil, black magic, or voodoo before they even tried it. But my job is based on work, training, and product design in the digital audio industry that goes back to January 1983. That's well before many other people who are now making money in this field were even old enough to buy liquor. What I don't know about digital audio ain't worth knowing so to speak.
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 9:42:04 GMT
Stanley, I have to confess I know absolutely nothing about you. You've obviously been in the digital audio game a long time and I certainly don't want to get into a hissing contest with you about the technology. ( I think my involvement in digital data and development of algorithms to improve data integrity goes back about 11 years before your start date or maybe, as you so eloquently put it, before you were old enough to buy liquor)
are you claiming clock accuracy is irrelevant or are you saying that you are simply locking onto the clock carried by the incoming data stream and any up sampling uses that as the reference to derive timing?
Please feel free to continue offline if it derails the thread too much or you prefer not to disclose too much to a wider audience.
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Post by stanleyb on Jun 1, 2015 10:00:26 GMT
Stanley, I have to confess I know absolutely nothing about you. You've obviously been in the digital audio game a long time and I certainly don't want to get into a hissing contest with you about the technology. ( I think my involvement in digital data and development of algorithms to improve data integrity goes back about 11 years before your start date or maybe, as you so eloquently put it, before you were old enough to buy liquor) are you claiming clock accuracy is irrelevant or are you saying that you are simply locking onto the clock carried by the incoming data stream and any up sampling uses that as the reference to derive timing? Please feel free to continue offline if it derails the thread too much or you prefer not to disclose too much to a wider audience. I am not claiming anything and have certainly stopped saying too much online and offline about my work. It has made others rich off my back once they got the hang of what I was saying or how I was doing it. So I learnt my lesson the hard way and have much regret about my naivety in the early days of taking part in discussions on forums. You won't see many other designers make the same mistake like I did. And with good reason.
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Post by aurender on Jun 1, 2015 10:44:52 GMT
If Stanley's DAC works well and he is adamant that it operates in the digital domain with no reference to a clock signal either generated internally by an oscillator of some description or by locking onto an external clock signal carried in the incoming data stream, then not a lot to be done with it.
For the other Equipment, rubidium modules are frequently available on eBay as they are surplus telecoms devices often from China telecoms. They will be either a 10mHz reference or possibly tuneable by simple software using the RS232 port.
However you have difficulty then in modifying your particular equipment to accept such a reference signal. The Ayre circuitry, if designed by the people who were involved with my KXR preamp, will be novel and different. It might be worth getting their thoughts on how the unit could be modified to take such a reference signal.
I'm not sure about the turntable. we would need to have a closer look at exactly how the reference signal is generated and how discrete that part of the circuit is.
It would be interesting to see what effect phase noise might have on the turntable performance although my first reaction is that inertia might make short term accuracy not ultra critical but long term stability (in which rubidium excels) might increase in importance,
Since to take it any further is going to involve very product specific detail, if you need help we should talk offline?
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Post by MartinT on Jun 1, 2015 12:18:10 GMT
The Ayre looks like a very good cd and sacd player. I'm very impressed with the designers at Ayre and since they claim to have developed their own proprietary clocking arrangement, I think it's not an obvious candidate for experimentation. It's even better in MP guise - I had mine upgraded to MP (Minimum Phase) firmware/hardware about four years ago. I believe Meridian did a lot of the initial research into changing how the pre-echo and post-echo of transients are decoded, with benefits in moving more of the pre-echo to post. See Ayre's white paper.
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Post by MartinT on Jun 1, 2015 12:35:51 GMT
I'm not sure about the turntable. we would need to have a closer look at exactly how the reference signal is generated and how discrete that part of the circuit is. It would be interesting to see what effect phase noise might have on the turntable performance although my first reaction is that inertia might make short term accuracy not ultra critical but long term stability (in which rubidium excels) might increase in importance I've studied the Technics motor drive circuit in detail, the way it uses a clock to derive all the sinusoidal pole waveforms for the direct drive motor is very elegant. More importantly, it uses two pins of the driver chip to excite a standard crystal, so injecting an accurate clock into the right section should be no more difficult than what Audiocom were doing with CD players with their Superclock.
I suspect it may respond well as I spent some time cutting the motor drive PCB tracks to isolate the 21V current drive, 21V component power, 9.4V and 5V supplies and using Paul Hynes modular regulators to feed each section separately. Some people may feel it's overkill, but honestly the improvement in timing and impact of the music is very noticeable. It gives the Ayre a very close race (and sometimes beats it) and brings the sound of vinyl into line with digital. No excess warmth or bloom.
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