mulveling
Responses from mulveling
| The longest you have owned any gear? I'm definitely not going to win the "oldest in-use component" prize here lol. In my current main system: Tannoy Canterbury GR speakers, 5 years. Out of all the gear I still have that I might actually sincerely use again: my SOTA Star turntable (no... | |
| Could this be one reason tubes (and perhaps records) sound better? In fact my high school Calculus teacher (easily the smartest high school teacher I’ve ever seen) in the early 1990s referenced a study with the same findings: adding a small amount of static noise improves human detection of low-level signals. The... | |
| Will Step Up Transformer Improve the Sound Quality? I love my SUT's and have a small collection of 6, but certain cartridges pose a challenging electrical match for a SUT when your MM stage is fixed at 47K loading. One example is the Benz Ruby / Gullwing / LPS. These have an output of only 0.34 mV ... | |
| Upgrading phono stage Yep I agree with @rmdmoore about the MC cartridge too. The Blue 2M is really great for the money but with a dedicated phono stage and (properly matched) low/medium output MC cartridge (shoot for something in the range of 0.3mv - 0.8 mV) you will b... | |
| Upgrading phono stage It's been a while since I heard a Rogue built-in stage, and I know they've supposedly improved it in v3, but back in the day the gap from their entry level built-in (e.g. old Cronus) to their top Ares stand-alone stage was massive. The Rogue 99 Ma... | |
| Why do you need so much power? @kijanki The old "only sounds 2x louder" thing is very subjective, and there are 2 versions of it: +6dB (8 Watts to 32 Watts) and +10dB (8 Watts to 80). All these rules of thumb, including 1dB being the smallest "perceptible" unit, are targeted fo... | |
| Why do you need so much power? @smrex13 The Tannoys are really quite efficient; the 89, 91, 93, and 96dB models I’ve heard of theirs all seem true to their rating when compared to other brands. You’ll especially notice this if you have a tube preamp without a dead-quiet noise f... | |
| Why do you need so much power? I’ve hit clipping on 93 dB/Watt Tannoys (Kensington SE) with 25 tube Watts / ch, though only on certain material at higher volumes. And that’s hard clipping; soft clipping sets in well before that, so more overhead than you think you need is often... | |
| Upgrading phono stage The Rogue Ares Magnum is a great sounding stage (and far better than any of their built-ins), but for only $1100 the Hagerman Trumpet MC actually beats it. I'd recommend stretching for that; it's possibly the last phono stage you'll ever need or w... | |
| Need a sut for Hana ml 60dB is certainly not too much gain for a 0.4mV cartridge. That nets an output of 0.4 V, which should certainly not be overloading anything within the phono stage or downstream of it. Something else must be going on if it seems too noisy. Any SUT ... | |
| Phono stage or pre Amp? which is most important. Last time I heard a budget Pro-Ject phono stage, I thought it was pretty bad. In fact I think the model you have is even lower than what I heard (though it was several years ago). I’d suspect even that budget AT cartridge can do much better; that ... | |
| Upgrade Clearaudio Performance DC or move up to Ovation? I like the Ovation, but yeah -- it’s going to be hard to say that a focus on cartridge, phono stage, and/or isolation wouldn’t net you more gains per $ for now (though Hana ML should be a pretty solid match already). You also already made a GREAT ... | |
| Cartridge forgiving of "non-audiophile" recordings and pressings You can only get worse sound from "better" gear if you're listening to a recording that's literally more signal than noise, or if your system is imbalanced/mismatched in some way to e.g. cause excessive brightness/fatigue with less than stellar re... | |
| Cartridge forgiving of "non-audiophile" recordings and pressings Wow, a 2nd post of millercarbon that I agree with this week. Systems that purportedly make audiophile recordings sound "amazing" while making mediocre recordings sound worse -- these are actually very unbalanced systems that can only handle very s... | |
| Looking for a phono stage with pleasing coloration Hagerman Trumpet MC is your guy. Beautiful warm open sound quality without going too overboard. In my system it competes with the $14K VAC Renaissance SE in musicality where nothing else can. And it only costs $1K new. It also has excellent loadin... |