Dipping a toe into the world of Hi-Fi
05-16-2020, 12:54 PM (This post was last modified: 05-16-2020, 12:55 PM by Dartz.)
05-16-2020, 12:54 PM (This post was last modified: 05-16-2020, 12:55 PM by Dartz.)
It seems the world of Hi-fi can be summed up in one sentence.
It sounds great, until someone convinces you it could sound 'better'.
After peeling off the lid on this particular yoghurt pot, I can definitely understand - even if I have to acknowledge the weak-point in the system is always going to be me. After fifteen years of making things sound 'good' by gunning the volume on my headphones to max, now everything sounds a little like headphones with the volume at max. Oops.
It stated with the purchase of a new turntable a couple of years ago with one of my first paycheques. Nothing special - but a proper turntable with a balanced tonarm, moving magnet cartridge and a dozen other things that put it into the Hi-Fi regime. Not the stratosphere - but off the gground still better than one of those cheap reproductions with the chinese needles. It did make records sound better. Except for Death Magnetic which sounded substantially worse. It was basic, as basic as you can get while still a member of the club.
So, we find there's 'something' to it, but at the same time never quite got to the interesting depths. It played itself through a set of PC-grade Logitechs and a subwoofer that 'worked' and sounded fine and was reasonable portable to boot. And that was a good sounding thing with a good sounding record.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
This would've been it until the receipt of The Receiver and its speakers. It lived in a house where the company I work for was called to do work. It then lived in the company's stores for about a year (as a gift from the homeowner - no funny business before you ask), before we moved on and it was given to me, provided there was space available for it. It was only on bringing it home that the space intended for it proved unavailable.
The Receiver now lives in a 10m2 bedroom rather than the stone-walled living room where it'd been planned to home it. It is completely oversized for the room it is in.
The Receiver is a Marantz SR7400 - a 7.1 home-cinema surround sound amplifier from 2004 or so. It just barely predates HDMI so is almost useless these days for its original purpose where everything is HDMI. But, mechanically, it still works. The volume button takes an input as a suggestion and gives what it wants but other than that, it's fine. It dumps 100 watts per channel into up to 7 main speakers, and one single room-rattling subwoofer.
It arrived with only the two main floorstanding units - the Left and Right, and one of the rear speakers, with a few tails of their original cables. The others were lost to history. The rear speaker became the centre and, for a few days it became a stereo system. The speakers are Mordaunt-Short 904's (Not the i). They sound better than anything I've ever listened to before. They are proper hi-fi speakers. Basic ones - as basic as you can get while still a member of the club.
The setup played well with an Xbox, OK with a PC and exceptionally with the turntable.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
This lasted about three days. In the shed, lived the bones of an old 5.1 system from the same era as the Marantz- this thing a consumer system that lived in the living room until the multi-CD-DVD changer at the centre of it all let the smoke out. It included a subwoofer. It also came with a constellation of Satelite speakers that 'worked' - or had until the late 2000's.
They were wired to the Marantz. One of them burned up the first time the volume knob was touched. The two survivors worked perfectly. With the subwoofer now in place, the walls now rattled along with the beat. The volume control goes from -70 to +15. It's never been above -30. To do so risks structural damage to the cabinet where it all lives, or to the room itself.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
The turntable went away to a holiday-home, leaving a hole in the centre of it all. The PC began to suffer 'old computer syndrome'. The xbox still worked through it with the optical output - but chances to really stretch the system were few and far between. People complained about the volume. Hi-Fi does not work in shared spaces.
For a year or two, it spend its life barely ticking over. The receiver produces more heat, than sound.
But that all changed when the Coronavirus struck.
The two chief sources of noise complaints were stuck two hundred kilometres away. So was the turntable and all its accompanying records. To fill the hole, a standalone CD Player was found on eBay on an afternoon when I should have been working from home. A Sony CDP-790, from the age before the World Wide Web. The internet knew nothing of it, beyound one or two forum posts, and an old USENET post where someone had replaced the Op-Amps with tubes and basically rewired the whole audio side of it. Nobody had anything to say about it otherwise. Good or bad.
Nobody to say it was a bad decision, or validate that it was a good one. No online reassurance or condemnation. For the first time in a long time, there was nothing but my own opinion.
I like the 1980's display and how clicky and positive the buttons were - like it was really there. I liked how quiet it ran - no whirr from the disk and only a distinct 'click' as it switched tracks.
When fed the results of years of commuting with only a CD-player as an accompaniment, the outcome was mixed. CD's Iremembered as being loud and powerful on headphones sounded awful and mushy. The feIt remembered as being a bit quiet and at times uncomfortably inaudible over the babble of a crowded bus sounded so much better.
Of course, there were things the internet told me should sound awful which sounded fine - and vice-versa.
This inverted, when the volume turned up. Of course, it made sense. Compression raised the quiet to the point of being audible with the volume turned down - while anything mastered properly needed the power cranked up to the point where things got 'loud'. Especially with the sub-woofer burbling in the middle of it all.
It strange. Of all the things the system does - it makes it far more obvious where things aren't working. Where the compression on a spotify stream is kicking in, or where a mix has been clipped. That must be desperately frustrating - to make a good signal sound better it naturally makes bad signals sound worse.
There is, however a remix of The Door's debut on CD. Reviled by many for being pitched that bit too high compared to the records they grew up (Because, according to the liner notes, the original had been mistakenly pitched low by a defective tape recorder) - it sounded spectacular. In the darkness of night, with only 'The End' for company, it was a sort of apocalypse.
That's why people spend thousands on hardware. Just for that moment where it all clicks and its possible to be like 'Oh'.
I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
For a few days at least.
Here I am on eBay trying to find the original speakers off the thing - because I know it'll sound better if only I could find them and some cable. And not have the 0-feedback bot-bidders run 'em up to 70 pounds in the final hour. I'm already in severe danger of overpaying for the damned things, and why do so many UK sellers not ship to anywhere but the UK?
The real weakpoint of the system isn't the system. There's some prick ripping through blocks or bodies with a con-saw in the garden over. The neighbour has kids who dislike the Iron maiden. And the timber walls rattle and drum and bother the entire bloody house, not to mention the cabinet it lives in threatening to rattle itself apart.
Really, the worst part of this system is its location.
Some people spent €60,000 on a set of speakers. I'll have to spent significant multiples of that on a house to keep all this before we even think about speakers. Somewhere with thick walls, far away from neighbours and housemates who beg for it to be turned down because it's messing with their stream.
-----
Yes, I did post something like this a few days ago. Then woke up in the morning, re-read it and realised I really did get through the guts of a bottle of whiskey that night. Oops. It went away until I could turn through into something intelligible.
It sounds great, until someone convinces you it could sound 'better'.
After peeling off the lid on this particular yoghurt pot, I can definitely understand - even if I have to acknowledge the weak-point in the system is always going to be me. After fifteen years of making things sound 'good' by gunning the volume on my headphones to max, now everything sounds a little like headphones with the volume at max. Oops.
It stated with the purchase of a new turntable a couple of years ago with one of my first paycheques. Nothing special - but a proper turntable with a balanced tonarm, moving magnet cartridge and a dozen other things that put it into the Hi-Fi regime. Not the stratosphere - but off the gground still better than one of those cheap reproductions with the chinese needles. It did make records sound better. Except for Death Magnetic which sounded substantially worse. It was basic, as basic as you can get while still a member of the club.
So, we find there's 'something' to it, but at the same time never quite got to the interesting depths. It played itself through a set of PC-grade Logitechs and a subwoofer that 'worked' and sounded fine and was reasonable portable to boot. And that was a good sounding thing with a good sounding record.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
This would've been it until the receipt of The Receiver and its speakers. It lived in a house where the company I work for was called to do work. It then lived in the company's stores for about a year (as a gift from the homeowner - no funny business before you ask), before we moved on and it was given to me, provided there was space available for it. It was only on bringing it home that the space intended for it proved unavailable.
The Receiver now lives in a 10m2 bedroom rather than the stone-walled living room where it'd been planned to home it. It is completely oversized for the room it is in.
The Receiver is a Marantz SR7400 - a 7.1 home-cinema surround sound amplifier from 2004 or so. It just barely predates HDMI so is almost useless these days for its original purpose where everything is HDMI. But, mechanically, it still works. The volume button takes an input as a suggestion and gives what it wants but other than that, it's fine. It dumps 100 watts per channel into up to 7 main speakers, and one single room-rattling subwoofer.
It arrived with only the two main floorstanding units - the Left and Right, and one of the rear speakers, with a few tails of their original cables. The others were lost to history. The rear speaker became the centre and, for a few days it became a stereo system. The speakers are Mordaunt-Short 904's (Not the i). They sound better than anything I've ever listened to before. They are proper hi-fi speakers. Basic ones - as basic as you can get while still a member of the club.
The setup played well with an Xbox, OK with a PC and exceptionally with the turntable.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
This lasted about three days. In the shed, lived the bones of an old 5.1 system from the same era as the Marantz- this thing a consumer system that lived in the living room until the multi-CD-DVD changer at the centre of it all let the smoke out. It included a subwoofer. It also came with a constellation of Satelite speakers that 'worked' - or had until the late 2000's.
They were wired to the Marantz. One of them burned up the first time the volume knob was touched. The two survivors worked perfectly. With the subwoofer now in place, the walls now rattled along with the beat. The volume control goes from -70 to +15. It's never been above -30. To do so risks structural damage to the cabinet where it all lives, or to the room itself.
And I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
The turntable went away to a holiday-home, leaving a hole in the centre of it all. The PC began to suffer 'old computer syndrome'. The xbox still worked through it with the optical output - but chances to really stretch the system were few and far between. People complained about the volume. Hi-Fi does not work in shared spaces.
For a year or two, it spend its life barely ticking over. The receiver produces more heat, than sound.
But that all changed when the Coronavirus struck.
The two chief sources of noise complaints were stuck two hundred kilometres away. So was the turntable and all its accompanying records. To fill the hole, a standalone CD Player was found on eBay on an afternoon when I should have been working from home. A Sony CDP-790, from the age before the World Wide Web. The internet knew nothing of it, beyound one or two forum posts, and an old USENET post where someone had replaced the Op-Amps with tubes and basically rewired the whole audio side of it. Nobody had anything to say about it otherwise. Good or bad.
Nobody to say it was a bad decision, or validate that it was a good one. No online reassurance or condemnation. For the first time in a long time, there was nothing but my own opinion.
I like the 1980's display and how clicky and positive the buttons were - like it was really there. I liked how quiet it ran - no whirr from the disk and only a distinct 'click' as it switched tracks.
When fed the results of years of commuting with only a CD-player as an accompaniment, the outcome was mixed. CD's Iremembered as being loud and powerful on headphones sounded awful and mushy. The feIt remembered as being a bit quiet and at times uncomfortably inaudible over the babble of a crowded bus sounded so much better.
Of course, there were things the internet told me should sound awful which sounded fine - and vice-versa.
This inverted, when the volume turned up. Of course, it made sense. Compression raised the quiet to the point of being audible with the volume turned down - while anything mastered properly needed the power cranked up to the point where things got 'loud'. Especially with the sub-woofer burbling in the middle of it all.
It strange. Of all the things the system does - it makes it far more obvious where things aren't working. Where the compression on a spotify stream is kicking in, or where a mix has been clipped. That must be desperately frustrating - to make a good signal sound better it naturally makes bad signals sound worse.
There is, however a remix of The Door's debut on CD. Reviled by many for being pitched that bit too high compared to the records they grew up (Because, according to the liner notes, the original had been mistakenly pitched low by a defective tape recorder) - it sounded spectacular. In the darkness of night, with only 'The End' for company, it was a sort of apocalypse.
That's why people spend thousands on hardware. Just for that moment where it all clicks and its possible to be like 'Oh'.
I thought, 'Ooh that sounds good'. And it did and I was satisfied.
For a few days at least.
Here I am on eBay trying to find the original speakers off the thing - because I know it'll sound better if only I could find them and some cable. And not have the 0-feedback bot-bidders run 'em up to 70 pounds in the final hour. I'm already in severe danger of overpaying for the damned things, and why do so many UK sellers not ship to anywhere but the UK?
The real weakpoint of the system isn't the system. There's some prick ripping through blocks or bodies with a con-saw in the garden over. The neighbour has kids who dislike the Iron maiden. And the timber walls rattle and drum and bother the entire bloody house, not to mention the cabinet it lives in threatening to rattle itself apart.
Really, the worst part of this system is its location.
Some people spent €60,000 on a set of speakers. I'll have to spent significant multiples of that on a house to keep all this before we even think about speakers. Somewhere with thick walls, far away from neighbours and housemates who beg for it to be turned down because it's messing with their stream.
-----
Yes, I did post something like this a few days ago. Then woke up in the morning, re-read it and realised I really did get through the guts of a bottle of whiskey that night. Oops. It went away until I could turn through into something intelligible.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.