kaanage

I'm wondering about your thought process here. You seem to be hell bent on finding a difference because you believe that there should be one rather than taking the normal scientific detachment of seeing if one exists or not as well as how large any difference might be. The "dead end" that you speak of is just another one of the possible outcomes and going by pure electrical theory, it is the the most likely one. I do applaud your conclusion, especially with respect to the 'Gremlin' cable - a lot of people would not have the honesty to say just how inconclusive they would find a comparison of interconnects. I also agree with MLXXX that a double blind test is the only way to be really sure when a sighted test is as inconclusive as this (plus that a WELL RECORDED AND MASTERED CD should be indistinguishable from DVD-A/SACD/other hi-res recording of the same music given the same playback device).

Up to a degree - if the room is too bright then then reflections start blurring the sound as they will be of similar magnitude to the direct path waves. The big questions are How open is the area? How much cannot be filled with non reflecting surfaces (like a kitchen area - impossible)? How much flooring is exposed? Can large portions of the walls and glass be covered over? So are Bose.

Equinox will be there (I'll be helping man the stand at some stage)

15m x 10m open plan, hard flooring with lots of glass makes for a very difficult room treatment task. To soften it (acoustically) would need a LOT of furnishings which would clutter the space and alter the feel. I would listen to some speakers in the $2-3k range at the same time as the expensive ones to see if there is much benefit in that room - they will certainly sound different but I wouldn't care to bet which would sound better due to the room response.

Exactly. lavs, you will really struggle to find any speaker demo room set up to be acoustically similar to your living space. A home demo is a must in your case and I feel that any high end speaker will end up sounding as you have described. You may be better off using mid level ceiling/wall speakers + sub for movies/casual listening and a good set of headphones for critical listening. Or find another room for your critical listening where your can control the acoustics better.

What size room, type of flooring/walls and furnishings need to be specified too. Plus what sort of sub you intend to use (if any)? The will also influence the AVR power requirements And what sort of music do you tend to listen to and at what levels? Greg

Good idea but there's an even simpler way to do the comparison after redigitising - time align the outputs for a track from the 2 recordings and subtract one waveform from the other - what's left will be the difference. I'm betting what you will see is random noise introduced in the redigitising. Just about all notebooks use the stupid things with their plug packs. I cannot fathom why since the plug size is exactly the same as an IEC (plus thay can break while it's damned near impossible to damage an IEC unintentionally).

True - I made a mistake in my initial research. Since the reports of the NAD PP-3 A2D are not stellar, I'll be going the TT->preamp->soundcard route True for the latter case but increasingly untrue for the former - have a good read of the articles I linked to and explore the Loudness War database. Hard clipping with an LP just isn't possible, even if they compress right to the edge of it - with pop CDs, hard clipping has become the norm for recent releases.

Thanks Al The problem is that so many CD's are compressed and noise reduced until they are far worse than the LP versions. See the following on how dynamic compression is crippling CD releases for the sake of trying to create an impression over 20 second previews The Death of Dynamic Range What Happened to Dynamic Range Dynamic Range FAQ It's so bad that I'm now contemplating buying some LPs from O/S where I already have the friggin' CD versions just so I can remaster my own CDs from the LP

OK, you can get some crappy turntables with USB connectors for easy conversion but I'm interested in using my decent mid-80's TT setup to record parts of my LP collection to CD. I was looking at getting a Fostex CR500 CD recorder and mating that up with a reasonable phono pre-amp but I have stumbled across the NAP PP-3 and the Cambridge Audio 640P phono preamps, both of which have built in A/D converters with USB output. Has anyone used either of these for this purpose?

Has anyone here ordered vinyl from Barnes & Noble? I was wondering how they package it

Reply to an old post but....... The problem is not the hardware; it's the software as in my previous posts linking to the dynamic compression articles. There was a die hard vinyl fan on aus.hifi who had extensively tested DACs, transports, players etc who adamantly preferred vinyl for musicality. A few years ago, he bought a Sony ES MiniDisc player/recorder (remember those?) to record some of his favorite albums for casual listening. He was astonished to find that HE COULD NOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE between the MiniDisc recodings and the original LPs. He was using the PCM recording mode rather than one of the ATRAC compression but MiniDisc LPCM is idential in resolution to Redbook CD. So the problem is that mastering engineers over process the recordings (and this can include too much noise reduction as well as over compression). Not that the Redbook format is fundamentally flawed.

CD doesn't need any "fixing". It's the @#$!$@$% recording companies that need fixing. Early CD releases were often dynamically superior to later rereleases. The Death of Dynamic Range What Happened to Dynamic Range Dynamic Range FAQ

So you have to use Insert Link? Then they should get rid of the image tag button (Insert Image). Whoops! Thanks for the fix

Not the best pics and not exactly in situ (Rick needed some pics for an article so I used sheets to give a neutral background) 1[/img] 2[/img] What did I do wrong?

WTF can't they release CD versions with EXACTLY THE SAME MASTERING ????

Thanks Al. Music wise? Lots of jazz, some pop and a bit of old time rock 'n roll. Format wise? Mostly CD at home and AAC from a usb stick in the car. System wise? Home system hasn't changed much except that Rick FINALLY finished my Neptunes !!!!! Being the local Equinox agent, I'm not totally impartial but I can't fault these even in my less than optimal room. Of course, I'd been badgering him to build me this model ever since I heard the Jupiter.... The dynamic compression thing really pisses me off. One of my friends has been sampling from hybrid SACDs and has often found the PCM tracks to be heavily compressed vs the DSD ones. He has even reburnt a sampled DSD track on to a CD-R and found that when played on his system, he cannot readily distinguish between this and the DSD track while the difference between the DSD track and the original PCM track was obvious. No wonder so many people deride 44.1kHz PCM - the stupid recording companies are dumbing down the format for the sake of 20 second music samples at stores.

Technically, CDs should sound better than vinyl but the following articles show why they almost always don't. The processes used to screw up CD masters just won't work with vinyl so the limitations of the old medium helps preserve the recording quality from the nobs twiddling the knobs. The Death of Dynamic Range What Happened to Dynamic Range Dynamic Range FAQ And a great related article on what happens to these recordings when the radio stations get hold of them Radio Ready: The Truth

Fantastic news. They really are too nice to bin unless they're totally toasted.

Can you get any info from Crestmore http://www.crestmore.com.au/ either for schematics or buying the original parts? It'd be a shame to junk such a nice piece of gear

Glen1, I think you must have read the posts by Trevor Wilson (zaphod... @ SNA). Knowing some of the entities involved with the 580 (formerly the 550 mkIII), I will be REALLY (albeit pleasantly) surprised if anything comes out of it. Lonewolf, what you say mirrors what I have also heard 2ndhand from people who were once very closely associated with Peter. It's very sad but the decisions he made after his divorce pretty much rule out the possibiility of reviving the brand in anything like its former state.

With that size room and budget, you are far better off getting a really good sub as any speakers large enough to give you decent bass would also require more power than any receiver that falls within your budget. In fact, I'd look at bookshelf speakers all around and use the receiver to redirect all bass to the sub - then you can minimise the cost of the receiver too.

I can't see it happening unless someone buys the name from Peter Stein. Even then, there would be no guarantee that the product line would be maintained. AFAIK those last 850s were built up from spares that Peter had from before the big bust up. I saw some parts on eBay (transformers and caps) being sold as odd bits by Redgum Audio which really bodes poorly

What Richard has suggest is almost identical to what you are proposing to do, Mitcon. The only difference is that he is suggesting using an integrated amp with HT bypass. The advantage of this over your approach (just power amp) is for 2 channel listening where you can have the sources connected to the integrated amp rather than going through the AVR where you will almost certainly get a cleaner signal path. It doesn't sound like this is a priority for you, though (benefit of reading the thread properly??) so it would be added cost for no benefit (over just a power amp). You can use an integrated amp that doesn't have HT bypass - all you need to do is to always set the volume to a particular level when using the AVR. This is pretty much what I do and it broadens your choice of integrated amps a lot (or choice of preamps if you use a separate power amp, like me). Can you please tell us what speakers you are running as some speakers just plain struggle at high power outputs due to dynamic compression, regardless of how powerful the amp driving them is.

Hmmm. Your mains must be horribly inefficient. A 150Hz crossover is far higher than I would prefer (I like 80-100Hz). I'd try borrowing a Rotel power amp or something of that nature for a test before splashing out on a power amp. It may just be the speakers dynamically compressing rather than the receiver running out of steam.