atmasphere
Responses from atmasphere
| Best small, desktop speakers, $500 or under (new or used) From what I understand, upgrading the crossover makes a marked difference to their sound quality?Yes- replacing the non-polar electrolytic in the crossover with a film cap, which is easy to do. The Optimus Pro LX-4 looks interesting too. I'll loo... | |
| Tubed Monos for Focal Aria 948s Ah. Well if you ever do get a tube amp, try both the 4 and 8 ohm taps and see which works best over a variety of material. | |
| SET the best? @luisma31 Yes.The loudness cues to which I was referring are the higher ordered harmonics- the 5th and above. The human ear uses these harmonics to sense sound pressure. But it also assigns a tonality to any distortion- the higher orders cause b... | |
| Technics or Thorens, need suggestions The SP 10 is 0.015%. If you think you can hear the difference then you need to take Michael Fremer's place on the staff of Stereophile. @mijostyn Certainly you don't hear that in terms of pitch. But as the machine speeds up and slows down, it ca... | |
| Best small, desktop speakers, $500 or under (new or used) If you can find a set of Radio Shack Minimus 7s, they work great for this sort of thing. There are some nice mods you can do them to wake them up. The early ones are apparently the ones to look out for. If sunbleached the woofer will be white inst... | |
| Balanced But Not Fully Balanced My question though: Is it typically a tip-off that a component is NOT fully balanced if the XLR input or output connectors for left and right channel are close to one another on one side of the component (say both on othe right side, rear facep... | |
| Are integrated amps technically better than separates? Would you fill in some of the details of what you know about power cords? You've told us that a power cord that's not up to the job is going to hurt the sound, but what are the basic requirements for an adequate power cord? One that will not ... | |
| Installed bulk foil resistors in phono amp But how high can you go? You can’t keep increasing the value hoping for more and more rejection! Maybe the designer deemed 1k enough.@noromance That's right. With a 12AX7 10K still gives you plenty of bandwidth. In guitar amps that value is a lot... | |
| Tubed Monos for Focal Aria 948s @zyphryx A transformer-coupled tube amp without a four ohm tap??No worries- a set of ZEROs (www.zeroimpedance.com) can fix that. If the speaker is bi-wirable you can try putting the ZEROs just on the woofer section. | |
| Are tubes really “warm”? I always thought the warm sound associated with tubes came from distortion and HF roll off. The 2nd and 3rd harmonics are responsible for 'warmth', but tubes can have plenty of bandwidth- the old Harmon Kardon Citation 2 had bandwidth to 100KHz an... | |
| Rupert Neve's RNHP & beyerdynamic Amiron (not great) Neve made some highly regarded mixer consoles over the last few decades, but that does not mean the circuit couldn't be better- nothing is perfect in this world, which also means that something else can be better, and that price or reputation migh... | |
| Determining the Source of Noise when TT is On When I disconnect the left cable from the back of the phono pre-amp the noise stops.If this is the case, swap this cable with the one for the right channel. Does the problem move? If yes, the electronics are off the hook- and investigating the cab... | |
| Matching fully balanced with unbalanced. Sure. But its likely that the amp, even though equipped with an XLR connection, isn't actually processing the signal fully. If the equipment supports the balanced standard (and in high end audio most of it does not) you will run into a buzz proble... | |
| 6SN7GTB replacement If a modern 6SN7GT like the Chinese Shuguang, yes, you can as even though they are marked as GTs, they are spec'ed more like GTBs and we've been using them that way for over 20 years with no worries. Don't do that with any of the boutique Chinese ... | |
| Preamplifier with a class AB power amplifier So- does the amp or the preamp need this gain stage? It can be used in both. This circuit was used a lot in many early 1970s solid state power amps as the input voltage amplifier. Obviously this circuit does not need or use a bipolar power supply.... |