mulveling
Responses from mulveling
| Koetsu cartridges. They must be something special. Koetsu cartridges deliver a warm, rich and “saturated” sound without sounding murky or slow sounding which is not an easy trick to pull off. That’s a perfect description @larryi I used to think they were stupid, overpriced little boxy rocks. ... | |
| Bent Audioquest Robin Hood banana plugs 2nd ozzy - I would just buy replacement set of bananas and do it myself. No soldering required; it’s a screw down connector. The pressure plus a conductive copper paste (already on there - DON’T clean it off) is what they call the "cold-weld syste... | |
| Analogue front end. You want more weight, scale and dynamics.Where do you start upgrading? Yeah, assuming that the cartridge is reasonably good, as counter-intuitive as it is, cartridge is the least important element in turntable set up. I have the impression that many people get it wrong and prematurely upgrade cartridges. Similar thi... | |
| Using digital 75/50 ohm cables for analog No problems - the "75 ohms" (or 50 BNC, or 110 AES) only applies to much higher frequencies than audio spectrum, for digital signals. You'll get debate on whether other non-coaxial geometries are more optimal for phono-level or line-level audio si... | |
| Do vacuum tube test values reflect sound quality? You can notice (bad measurements == bad sound) when something’s really wrong: Severely mismatched triodes and/or tubes (north of ~ 25 - 30%) Extremely weak or below nominal results (transconductance) Consistently noisy tubes (microphonics and... | |
| ICs with slim RCA Barrels? Lots of vintage gear, like tube amps and tape decks, have obnoxiously close RCA inputs. In these cases, I found Audioquest's older RCA plug design - ala Diamondback, King Cobra, Jaguar, Panther, Cheetah, Leopard - work great, and are very good qua... | |
| Headphones for sound control Sure, go for it (headphones). I think you would be remiss to not explore planar-dynamics and electrostats - though planars are generally harder to drive, and electrostats even require their own special dedicated amplifiers (that you can't use for ... | |
| Oh no, say it ain't so. Yep, this is the clickbait junk we've come to expect from headphonesty. Sometimes they have a slightly interesting topic worthy of more discussion (e.g. KEF driver issues), but this one - nope. Who cares? Some of us enjoy music AND gear. That's wh... | |
| 12au7 tube? Are you aware of who the OEM is for Ray tubes btw? Not to blow their cover but it’s fairly easy to search and find on the internet. Think large manufacturer who batches their top % of tested tubes and puts a different label on it.. Perhaps the h... | |
| F-XLR to M-RCA recommendations @OP - there is zero point in using balanced connectors unless the connection is balanced to balanced. Balanced circuits are designed to cancel common mode noise, but to do this they only work if the source and receiving component have balanced in... | |
| F-XLR to M-RCA recommendations Yeah, the adapter’s pin configuration is going to be extremely important to get right. Sorry I didn’t mention that at first! Here’s what Cardas says about their adaptors on their site: The standard for female XLR to female RCA adapters is for pi... | |
| How many times can u visit a hifi store before it annoys the store if u plan on a purchase One day I was in his store looking for a particular record. I asked his sales guy if they had the record in stock, only to be told to get out unless I was planning on buying something that visit. I immediately asked for the owner, whom I knew wel... | |
| Would you put the same 12AX7 tubes for both onboard phono and line amp of an integrated? No, you don’t need to match. Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Many of us who have been doing tubes for a while, actually prefer to mix different makes of tubes across our available slots. The positive attributes of each tube brand are of... | |
| Upscale Audio is up front with customers The cabinetry was done at Tannoy but they were shipped to China for finishing as it could be done cheaper and better there. @nonoise Interesting! Thanks for that info. I can’t complain about the results, either way. But it’s wild to imagine tha... | |
| Upscale Audio is up front with customers I’m curious as to when Kevin stopped being a Tannoy dealer. I don’t know the full story, probably few do, but there were rumors Tannoy was sort of "poached" from him. IIRC it was shortly after Upscale split out "Harmonia Distribution" for that ... |