Longer speaker cables or interconnects

Cd318,

I did try removing it once to experiment but I still got the feedback. Putting it completely down did the trick. Maybe with the new space this will be a non-issue.

BUT...sometimes I think in at least some of those recordings, the engineer is messin’ with us audiophiles. As an example, when I play the overture to Tommy by The Who, about when the French horn kicks in, my dog goes running to that speaker and starts howling like a wolf. Then she hears something in the other speaker and goes running over there and howls some more. And on it goes, back and forth, left to right, right to left, driving her nuts. It’s the only time she makes that sound. My guess is since we humans can only hear to about 15K - in reality more like 8K - but dogs can hear to about 45K... you get the picture.

The dust cover is always down during parties. Guests can be really obnoxious, and I’ve had to have been very curt and rude with them to not only keep their hands off but to stay back.

As for the scene, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Only with hindsight did I realize how special those times were. I went to the Max’s 50 year reunion a couple years back. It was held in some tacky classic rock club in midtown Manhattan that felt like what you would imagine a Hard Rock Cafe off the NJ Thruway in Parsippany would be. But a lot of the old crowd turned out for it: members of the Dolls, of Bowie’s bands, Tod Rundgren, The Fugs etc.

There was also CBGB right down the street from me, on The Bowery, the Mudd Club, Area (another Warhol hangout), Sin-e, The Knitting Factory (Jeff Buckley hung out at the latter two). All are now gone.

I’ve had the system up to 95db. Almost no distortion.

unreceivedogma,


Here we were in the UK thinking how incredibly exciting it was that Punk was going to change the world, and it was ours - homegrown. Only later we found out about places like Max's and it's connection with the Velvets/Warhol, New York Dolls/Malcolm McLaren all leading to the Sex Pistols.

We later got to see Debbie Harry/ Blondie and the Ramones on TV for ourselves and then hear all about CBGB's. Now all those NY bands have passed into legend.

In the end it did all change the world if only to make it cool to be young, even more than the 60s had done.

The great thing now is that if you have the attitude you're never too old to rock. Or as a certain Mr Young might say, 'Keep On Rockin' in the Free World'.

Great stuff, thanks.

Keep the long speaker cables and short interconnects. Amps have a low, low output impedance and output high level signals which are not affected by interference (well, unless the amp has a design issue).

Over and out :)

According to some literature when I researched this topic, the total resistance of the wire should be less than 5% of the nominal impedance of the speakers. Of course, the speaker impedance can dip well below the "nominal" value at certain frequencies so the safer bet is more like 2-3% depending on the impedance curve. Furthermore, the amplifiers with multiple speaker impedance taps, e.g., 8, 4, 2 ohms, etc., tend to have a different damping factor (output impedance) for each tap. So sometimes it might be worth to experiment with the different taps, especially when running long cables, to decide which sounds better. For example, my MC2200 manual lists the following damping factor values:
DF 16 for 1 ohm
DF 50 for 2 ohm
DF 30 for 4 ohm
DF 16 for 8 ohm

In my set up where I need to run very long speaker cables (true bi-wire 12awg), I get an overall better SQ when I use the 4 ohm tab for my 6 ohm speakers but at the expense of a narrower/deeper soundstage when compared to the 8 ohm tap. Interestingly, the 2 ohm tap has a slightly fuller sound but it compresses the soundstage even more considerably. My 2 cents FWIW. 

I have my equipment in a different room from my speakers to eliminate some turntable feedback issues. Have used 25 foot lengths of speaker cable with very fine results. Not expensive cables either, MITerminator 2. Excellent bass and slam on my Revel Performa 206's!

Kalili,

My speakers are 16 ohm and 101dB efficiency. My Dyna MK III have 4, 8, and 16 taps but the Futtermans do not. When I had the 604Cs rebuilt by Gabriel Sound, I had the option of keeping them at 16 or switching them to 8. Jon Specter, my engineer, said to absolutely keep them at 16.

It looks like I will be staying with my current configuration: long speaker cables, short interconnects.

Paulrandall,

Putting the table in a different room is an intriguingly OCD idea (let’s face it, to have this hobby, we all have to have a little OCD), but as there is only one room on this floor, not an option unless I put it out the window. It might be a little tricky changing LPs from three stories up. And then what happens on a windy day?

But that brings up something else I was recently considering.

Before, I had the table sitting on top of a record cabinet that I had bolted to the 16 inch thick brick wall in my nyc loft. I was going to bolt it to the 24 inch thick (non functioning) chimney in this space. However, my masonry guy used a five foot L-shaped steel plate to stabilize masonry on another building of ours and I got the idea of having him bolt an L-shaped steel plate to the chimney that was large enough to rest the table on. The steel is very thick. Question is: what would that sound like?

I don’t use VPI’s springs between the chassis and the base btw: I use little rubber balls.

cd318:

The Velvets and the Fugs both came out of an underground East Village / Brooklyn scene that was closely tied to the beat poetry of Jack Kerouac and to the lesser known but maybe more important poet Allan Ginsburg. Ginsberg hung out at Max’s along with Tuli Kupferburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuli_Kupferberg. of the Fugs, who used some of the lyrics of “Howl” http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm for a song on either the first or second Fugs album. See also Tuli’s scene as a machine-gun-toting soldier policing the streets of Manhattan in Dusan Makavejev’s W.R. Mysteries if the Organism
https://youtu.be/JvA1bKLQtbM
and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.R.:_Mysteries_of_the_Organismhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.R.:_Mysteries_of_the_Organism
imagine trying to shoot that scene in Post 9/11 Manhattan today.

I always thought that the Fugs were more punk than the Velvets.

There was also The Last Poets (invented the poetry slam) out of Spanish Harlem, tied to The Young Lords (The Nuyorican version of The Black Panthers). That led to the founding of The Nuyorican Poets Cafe on 6th Street between A and B in The East Village - known to Nuyoricans as Losaida - where poetry slamming took off. I lived in a flat upstairs from them when they got started around 1975. My wife and I got married there two decades later. I’m still friends with some of the founders (I’m part Nuyorican myself) but the Cafe is now a suburban hipster (imo hipsters are faux hippie/punks) shadow of it’s former self.

Last but not least, there was The Loft Party by David Mancuso https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loft_(New_York_City)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loft_(New_York_City)

I was doing a similar loft party from the late 70s onward, and stumbled into a Mancuso party through a friend three years after I had started. A concept I thought was mine, somebody had invented it already! He was using Klipsch and McIntosh, I was using Dyna Stereo 70 and Altec 604C. And booze and weed were allowed at mine.

Amazing, how not only these youthful scenes are gone, but Ginsburg, Reed, Mancuso, Piniero, Kupferburg, all passed away.

Raindance,

The tubes in both the Dyna and the Futterman would pick up ham radio from the passing taxis like crazy until Jon figured out a way to shield them.

cd318:

https://youtu.be/QN1BrD73lSs

back then, the nyc art scene was either decidedly anti capitalist or at least had an ironic relationship to it.

Decidedly different from today’s post Koons/Schnabel era.

@unreceivedogma, thanks for the links. Here in the UK many used to call New York the capital of the world. I don't remember anyone ever arguing against it.

For me, on top of everything else it was the home of Marvel Comics. It was where Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others created some of the greatest works of fiction the world has ever seen. 

The 80s ushered in a new kind of zeitgeist. All of a sudden the need to belong communally, the need for companionship, the need to give and receive love got fractured and superseded by a need to make money.

Still there are always those who don't totally buy into the bean counting culture. They understand other commodities are even more important.

It's also great to see Mancuso's influence still at large. They even had clubs in London playing music through a pair of Tannoy Westminsters.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/spiritland-brilliant-corners-london-audiophile-bars