Again, a continuation of a thread on an audio forum, which I can no longer add to ...
This is the next chapter of what occurred during my irregular visits to who I call N., a fellow audio enthusiast up the road ...
Got a call, he's been busy with life, so not much had changed - main thing in the interim was altering the mains feed to his 'stereogram' unit, a Ruark R7. Previously, various bits of electronics which provided noise filtering were in the path, and they definitely made a difference ... but, in an attempt to reorganise the items he managed to damage a major coil, from drilling. So, this gave him the excuse to do a major comparison of various strategies ... and ended up with nothing but an 'audiophile' power cord, as best option! You know the type of thing - very blingy, thick cable, flash connectors at either end - if looks meant everything, this would be a clear winner! 😊
Well, to his ears, it happened to work best - relatively low cost, an ebay thingy - well, when I arrived, the SQ was not there. But, there were some fairly obvious experiments to try - removing all other power cords in the room, adding some electrical damping by having a simple incandescent bulb also running, in parallel; and improving the mounting of the quite heavy mains connector at the cabinet end, so that vibrations against the case were damped. Finally, the front legs which were raised up by some cork material, were sat back on the floor again.
The combination of all this moved the sound to a pretty good place. And we stayed with this for the rest of the session. The biggest, clear remaining weakness was the CD player mechanism - just like for my DVD player, an ejecting and remounting cycle, many times would change the quality from a bit mediocre to highly pleasant; at its best there was nothing I could complain about.
Second round was the main rig, in the lounge. Running this was almost a throwaway, because zero had been done to tweak it, in the interim. And, it immediately made a good impression!! A CD I brought which could be tricky, was subjectively spot on; and this "good news" continued! Disk after disk went on, and the SQ continued to tick most boxes. Most telling, some albums of the band Rainbow, who I was barely aware of, a breakaway from Deep Purple, which N. had tried earlier on the radiogram, and which weren't coherently enough presented to allow me to connect to the tracks, now made the grade!
But, it couldn't last ... the "old enemy", build up of static reared its ugly head, and an album started to sound rather sorry for itself. Resetting helped, but now the ease with the listening had been lost - persevered for a bit, but then moved to vinyl, as last round. The 'analogue' qualities stood out; simple, single instrument moments were completely in the zone - some setup tweaking helped a bit more; it ended in a satisfying full listen to Carole King's Tapestry.
So, what lessons? Both setups were capable of giving top notch sound: the Ruark had a weak spot still in being too sensitive to the CD player's operation - solutions were either to go inside and work on isolating the power supplies, etc in that area, or, bring in a better CD transport, which he had and was used in the main rig ... something for another time. The main rig showed the ability to do excellently from cold; but, was suffering from that particularly annoying gremlin of "going off the rails" after a certain period of operation. This often is very frustrating to troubleshoot, because the cause can be something "so tiny and minor" - yet hard to pinpoint.
Overall, a good round. As nearly always, not all the ducks were in a perfect row; but they showed the potential in recordings which on most systems would be dismissed as not being, umm, worthy... 😁.
No comments:
Post a Comment