pragmasi
Responses from pragmasi
| Is there such a thing as too much power? If you're speccing an amplifier you need to go for the amount of power that you'll actually use plus a small amount of headroom. That doesn't sound very helpful but in order to optimise your system properly you need to understand the gain structur... | |
| Is there such a thing as too much power? This thread is worth a read (you can get the gist from the first two posts). By following the instructions you can work out how much power you need. If you look at the poll results you can see that >70% indicated 25W or less with nearly 40% n... | |
| Stuck at home? Make a kit!! DIY is great, I started a long time ago because I didn’t trust Hi-Fi marketing BS so I thought I’d learn and make my own decisions. I think kits are the best jumping in point to learning as at least you’ll end up with something decent in the end.S... | |
| Oscilloscopes - what specs to look for? Most of what I was going to say has already been said here, mostly by @georgehifi. I do a lot of audio electronics, I use a QA401 for measurements (it's truly incredible value for money when you compare it to the other stuff out there) and an unca... | |
| How long is too long for interconnects? If you have balanced (XLR) interconnects then no problem at all. If you have coax (RCA) connectors then it depends how much noise they pick up from the environment (hum etc), and the ability of the pre to drive a capacitive load. Best advice is pr... | |
| Sonic effects of 20+ year old crossover capacitors? Looking at the brochure provided by @bryhifi the caps look like polypropylene or similar. If you want to get to them you’ll need to remove the woofer and/or the driver above it which looks like a passive radiator (if it is then it won’t have any w... | |
| Sonic effects of 20+ year old crossover capacitors? I'd visually inspect them. I assume that a quality speaker this will have polypropylene capacitors which should be fine, electrolytics would be pretty much at the end of their life by now (if there are any electrolytics they'll be in a metal can a... | |
| Volume level chain The Bryston runs of +-15V rails so will be fine with the full output from the DAC which you can set to 'direct out' bypassing the volume control entirely. | |
| Volume level chain Generally I'd avoid attenuating the digital signal and keep the laptop and DAC at 100%. If you're trying to balance the level between preamp inputs so that the DAC channel isn't too much louder than another component then I'd use the volume contro... | |
| Adjusting speaker positioning. What, if anything, to expect? Interesting idea to use an out of phase track, I've never done that but it's worth a try. But you don't need to buy a special cd, you just swap the wires over on one of the speakers to invert the phase. When the speakers are perfectly out of phase... | |
| Audio Education Sometimes the difficult thing with learning is finding a starting point to build from based on your own education / experience / knowledge... it’s easy to jump in too deep too early and get put off by the parts you don’t understand. I’d suggest th... | |
| Can your system be optimized to sound better for classical or non-classical? Classical is the most demanding genre for a Hi-Fi because of its dynamic range and wide frequency spectrum. During quiet passages you want a jet black background without a hint of hiss but you need the power in reserve for the louder sections. Gen... | |
| Coupling Capacitor upgrade? Which one first? I didn't like the scratchy noise while I moving volume pot when I removed the dac output caps.Sounds like you have DC at the pot... is the amplifier AC coupling downstream of the pot? A small DC offset in the low level signal will most likely resu... | |
| Coupling Capacitor upgrade? Which one first? I agree with all of @georgehifi 's comments so won't repeat them. The only thing I can think of that could affect the sound is if the roll off is close to the audio frequencies. Seeing as all the MKS2 caps come with the same pin pitch, you could t... | |
| Which should cover the distance...XLRs or speaker cables? As you have balanced interconnects then definitely short speaker cable and longer XLR interconnects. The capacitance of the speaker cable will have a greater effect on sound quality than the effects of having a longer balanced cable. |