To bass quality:
I am in the process of thinking about the way to make "wise" modifications of my room acoustics and in this contex thinking about bass traps.
My speakers have sealed enclosures and the bass is high pass filterd by a big capacitor, which is a not very common way to build a bass. I use additional bass deemphasis at 20hz to get some more "room"-information. Even at high levels the membrane movement can hardly be seen. Only a slight vibration is noticale, what I find remarkable for an 8" Bass. The sound of the bass is good but uneven distributet in the room. That is why I like to use bass traps to linearize the room response.

Does anybody has experiences with bass traps or an opinion on this?

What does the last photo show (that one with the cables)? From the text I would say this should be the Black Mamba cables under construction. It seems to be a triax cable with an oversized tube around it. According to the text, the Mambas should have some "helix" structure. Can't see that in this picture.

My latest powercord related experience was with my new amplifier. There was something bothering me about the sound and I couldn't figure out what. Than I removed the "high end" multiple sockel outlet and pluged the cable directly into the wall outlet. That was the sollution!

As far as I know corsaire buys theire power supplies from seasonic.

I think a "zero" was missing

Hi Georg,

nice to hear that there are other people knowing this label!


Hi Juan,

thanks that you ask. It is doing well. At the moment I am in the process of fitting the system to the amp. The amp reveals things I never noticed before and not all of them are nice But I think I will get a good sound after all.

Greetings
Adrian

Hi,

I want to make you aware of the smal label "RaumKlang" from east germany. It makes recordings with a one point microphone, which is a stereomic build in a ball. The recordings are practically untouched, because everything is setup during the recording and the posibilitites of mixing are rather small with "only" a stereo signal. The result is a fantastic, natural sound with the best impression of space I know. But not only the sound is great, also the music is. At least if your are into old music and classic.

Have a look:

http://www.asinamusic.com/index.php?file=shop&section=24

My personal recommendations:
Ioculatores Songs and dances (Medieval Music) Must have!
FRANK PETER spielt FAURÉ und RAVEL (Piano Music)
Leistner Weiser Dix "Regenmacher" (Jazztrio)
Winterreise, Schubert (voice + hurdy-gurdy)
Dresdner Kammerchor: Weihnachten (Christmas Songs)

Greetings Adrian

I want to let you know the End of the Story. I drove a second time to the McIntosh dealer, with my DAC, my USB-Interface and my Jungson poweramp. In a direct comparison between the McIntosh and the Jungson it was clear, that each amp had its advantages and disadvantages. In sum I thought it was a tie. And a tie was not worth spending money on the indeed nice tube amp. So I took the road all your advices directed me to. I bought a transistor amplifier. It is not one of the certain models you suggested but something I was looking for a long time. An AudioNET Amp 1 V2. Measurement perfomance is like worldrekord and it has 200W@8ohm. Enough for my room I decided. If not, it can be bridged to become a true balanced 600W@8Ohm amp. But at the moment I do not feel the need for it. It was a big step in neutrality, detail, clarity and so on. None the less, the Jungson is not so far away BUT only for the first impression. The longer I enjoy the "meassurement perfection" the more it get obvious how much better the new amp is. Thanks A LOT for pointing me in the right direction!

Greetings Adrian

Thank you Eric for your tip!

Yesterday I was at the Eternal Arts Laboratorium and had a nice listening session with its owner. Besides he was very friendly and helpfull, we had a quite interesting talk and I could listen to a very nice set up. The power amp was a McIntosh MC 275 (which I am thinking about to buy). It was equipped with its original tubes from McIntosh. Source was an Eternal Arts CD player with tube output stage and a PCM 1792A DAC. The same as in my North Star DAC, so the sound was somehow familiar to me. At first we used the internal digital volume control. About the quality of the control I can not say much but that I almost was listening at full output level, because the output voltage of the player was only about 1V. Speakers were Eternal Arts fullrange dipoles with Eton AMT. The bass was also a dipole design. The sound was well balanced with a good illusion of depth. Especially the high frequency resolution was very good. Subtle information were revealed without serving them on a silver plate. They were just there, somtimes far back behind the speakers, with greatest implicitness, with a casual character that made it sound very realistic. The bass was charateristic for a dipole bass, at least as I know it. Subtle, deep, very precise but without much pressure in the stomach. This kind of bass is fascinating but not the one I would grow old with. I prefer the punch of a closed enclosure or a passive radiator design. Nontheless, there was nothing I did not like about what I heard. To point the finger on which influence was made by the McIntosh amp, I asked for a change of speakers. There was a pair if Hobby Hifi wild cards in the listening room and as they were designed by the same designer as my speakers, I choose these. 80db/w is not much and so the output of the CD player was not enough, to fully drive the speakers to a high enough listening level. Hence we added the Eternal Art tube pre amp to the system. Without preamp the sound was quite good, especially if you consider these speakers cost about 300€ a pair (diy)! The sound was more what I m used to listen too. A 2 way design with hornreflex and a dome tweeter. After adding the pre amp, the speakers really began to shine. They formed a three dimensional soundstage with plenty of detail, air, colors and full bodied instruments without sounding thick, slow or grained. This was outstanding until the volume was raised too much and the very small speaker were at its dynamical end. A very odd setup in terms of prices. The speaker costs only 1/100 of the electronics and still sound great in this setup.
To further isolate the sound of the amp, we choose another CD-player. I do not remener the brand but it was not worth reminding this name anyway. The sound stilll was goot and if you would not have heard the magic from before, you would maybe just think, ok with these small and cheap speakers more is not possible.
Since the McIntosh never got in the way and was contributing and a part of the really great sound, i am now really considering to buy it. Still there are some second thoughts about the power, which by math should drive my speakers to 100db or 94 db with 6db bass de emphasis. I am not a loud listener and also do not think to buy an amp for life. So, if I got bored of it, selling a classic is always possible. On the other hand, it is a tube amp and it was repaired at least once. So realiability isn't best with this sort of equipment, which gives me some headaches.
Hope you could enjoy my writing a little and if you would write some comments, I 'll be very glad to read them.
Thank You!
Adrian

Thanks a lot Juan for your effort! I will will read it with pleasure.

Thanks a lot Mani! And sorry for misspelling your name...The Magtech were, since I heard about them, always on my list. They a are little more expensive than what I have planed but still it looks like a very solid and timeless amp. Plus the "master" himself will build it.

That I cannot open the homepage, seems to be a strange error of (possibly) my webhost. Good to know it is still there.

Thanks Juan. This seems to be a very nice amp. I think the power it has, is more what I should look for. I have 82dB/W speaker with a quite constant 6ohm impedance. Because the bass is a closed cabinet design I need additional headroom of at least 6db for low frequency de-emphasis. So even 100W@8Ohm is probably not enough. The moons are bridgeable too and then they deliver 400W@8ohm. But that would be 6500€. To much at the moment and to close to even better amplifiers in the 10k€ range. The spectron delivers enough power even as a stereo amp. This is a big plus.
Do you know if there are detailed measurements of this amp (alike in stereophile)? I couldn't find anything except the producers specs.

Next saturday I will listen to a McIntosh MC 275 AC with Telefunken Tubes. I know this is not enough power and there is a transformer in the signal chain but this amp (and tubes) has something aluring...I realy should not spend my money on that but I am looking forward very much to hear it.

I got aware of the "not enough power" problem as Mani introduced his Magtech Amplifier. Strange thing: The very informative homepage of Mr. Sanders is not accessible anymore...

@ Mani: If you are around, it would be nice if you could tell me; Where do you see the Magtechs in terms of sound quality in comparison to what you have now?

Hi All,

long time passed since my last post, so at first: Best greetings to all the people here 

I am in the market for a new power amp. My nice sounding class a Jungson JA-99 needs to be replaced. It meassures and sounds not as good as I would like it to be (look here: http://www.jungson.com/files/reviews/ja99c_uk_review.pdf). At most, the low bandwidth bothers me. It is restrikted to 16kHz and hence there realy is some air missing.

My boundary conditions for a new amp are:
Price about 3k€
At least 100W@8ohm
Good Specs (High Bandwith, Low Distortions and so on...)
No DIY

Does anyone have some suggestions?

At the "paper" I find this one very interesting:
http://www.simaudio.com/moon330A.htm

What is your opinion?

Thank you!!!
Adrian

Thanks Peter. I will wait until I get back my graphics card, which had to be repaired, and then make a freash installation of W7. Fromt that clean point, I will get the new activation code and try again.
Greetings
Adrian

Hi there,
in the cover art where the information about weather PA is enganged (*~*) or not (_~_) is shown, it always shows (_~_) no matter what I do. I have tried to fix it, reading the manual but I cannot get it running.

I use -30dbs volume with peak extension and arcpred.

As far as I understand it is also important to have a large latency which is determined by the buffersize (in my case 256) Q1 and xQ1. The manual says that a buffer size 4096 * Q1= 30 * xQ1= 1 will work. This situation should be equal to 256 * 30 * 16. But unfortunatly with this settings I do not get any sound at all, although playback starts (Coverarts still shows _~_). The highest latency I can get is 256 * 22 * 2.

Later in the manual a latency with 4096 * 14 * 1 is advised, using a SFS of 2. This would be equal to 256 * 14 * 16 but at this values I get no sound. As I said, the highest latency I can get is 256 * 22 * 2. Shouldn't it be possible to even lower SFS and then it should work? Well, it doesn't to a point of SFS=0.2.

Another reason it doesn't work could be a faulty activation. As I was one the beta testers (and apparently not a good one, otherwise I should have noticed), something could have been messed up. I think this could be the issue, because after some time XX just quits. Formaly it is activated and no undemo sign is shown at the core appointment pull down menue. Do I have to reactivate XX with paypal or is a fresh installation of Windows 7 in order? Should I anyway get a new activation key?

Any idea?

A change in the the treble is also well noticable. It is more accurate, in a good way "sharper". I am not paying much attention to cymbals but for example the bass drums "klack" is more pronounced. Guitar strings seems finer with more information about what the fingers are doing. The room is better defined, bigger, which is due to the higher precision of playback in the whole frequency band.