So close you can smell it ...

Another satisfying session last night with the audio friend down the road, who I mentioned in an earlier post. He has taken on board my approaches to conjuring convincing sound, very much so - worrying about the most minute details at every stage. We had determined that his volume control, a motorised Alps unit, was definitely on the nose in the previous visit; so in the interim he had gone through a major exercise of trying to replace the resistive element and wiper segments with genuine Alps bits, keeping the old motor - a full replacement was ridiculously expensive! Extremely fiddly, tiny clutch mechanisms within, a problem arose ... will have another go down the track, but in the interim running with simple fixed resistor voltage divider setup that I suggested.

Along with newly adding isolation transformers and standard mains filtering parts to the rig he was very upbeat about what it was achieving ... and, the scale of the presentation was of a high order; the playback at times couldn't be obviously faulted: the bite and drive of a local R&B band recording was much improved from the previous visit. One of my favourite test albums, the original Led Zep I CD, was able to throw up cavernous soundscapes, making what is usually heard from this on audiophile systems quite farcical ... but, there was still an issue with the cleanness of the treble - the old bugbear!!

Trying to sort this out many variations were tried on the spot - the system is now at the point where the slightest alteration is immediately obvious, and the quality went up and down correspondingly. No clear conclusions as to what needed to be done to finally resolve this were reached, but there was plenty of optimism as to what was still possible to extract from the components, as is.

At times mighty close to "invisibility" of the speakers - a true mono recording makes it easy to pick this behaviour, the image of the event remains in front of your head at all times, is never perceived as originating from the drivers - this was tantilisingly near on occasion. My feeling is that he likely will manage knocking over enough of the last issues sufficiently very soon, and achieve true "conjuring" at least for a transient period ...