Wednesday 25 November 2015

A More Ambitious Upgrade - Part 9

All quiet on the western front  ... okay, a decent delay without much being done here - life gets in the way at times, and my fiddling on the NADs has taken a back step while other things were handled ...

What is very clear is that filtering of mains interference is crucial in this system - my simple experiments minimising these particular factors has lifted the standard to very close to "conjuring" quality; the latest touch is allowing very nice, tonally sweet recovery of ambience and depth in very old, shellac derived recordings. The potential of this combo of audio gear has shown itself to be such that engineering some proper, long term usable filtering circuitry on the mains side will be worthwhile ... so, I'm currently investigating some of my older tweaking projects, and any good info on the net, gathering all that's necessary in ideas for making a cost effective solution happen.

The system is now good enough to do some recordings, with the new mic, to demonstrate progress made - I'll post these on YouTube for easy perusal - and also upload full quality versions on say, Dropbox.

One thing "new", for my own understanding of the relationship of the factors in making a combination have sufficient quality, from the experiments so far - a system which has had a good amount of intelligent thought put into the topology of the key circuitry, like the NAD units, will present recordings far better on cold start up than 'cheap' components - immediately after pressing Play on a morning switch on, we have a very likeable sound that projects quite a 'big' sense of the musical event; there is very little obvious unpleasantness, or lack of 'musicality', in well made recordings. Very low cost units, like TVs and PC monitors definitely aren't capable of this, they need extended warm up to reach an adequate stability of all the parts.

A reference recording I use for evaluating competence is Franck/Faure, The Medici String Quartet - Nimbus NI 5114 - Ambisonic recording, the piano sounds like it's half a mile away, very low levels of the primary sounds of the string instruments with relatively high levels of reverberation information. This is a nightmare for a conventional digital playback system, will typically be very dreary and flat in the listening, "boring" sound of the worst order. Only a fully sorted out system will resolve the fine detail, and reveal the musical structures correctly - and this is clearly showing the weaknesses of the NAD combo at this point: the acoustic of the recording is complex but subtle, and that fine detail is too entangled with the remaining low level distortion - the playback of this recording is not "working" yet.




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