Agear- let's be fair and highlight that the Alef gear starts at 60k an amp. That was in comparison to Wavac. Not exactly an Audiogon bargain hunters dream. ...believe in Room Acoustics and have a Rives L1 designed room- no component outside of speakers has made a larger improvement. Untrapped bass masks a lot of problems imo and that is another reason my amp journey may differ from others. Agreed. The room is your speaker. For me, stratifying things would go as follows: Room>power>speakers>amps>source>pre-amp>wire. I`m a true believer in the benefit of balanced AC power transformers. I`ve used the BPT3.5 SIG Plus for 4 years and as I`ve written elsewhere it provides an across the board improvement(yes,dynamics included) that is substantial.It`s permanent part of my system. I saw that you own the BPT. Nice unit. My speaker designer owns one and it has a positive influence on his system. Where I most agree with phil is the area of tonality,timbre and holistic attributes and their vital importance in presenting music 'natural' and convincingly. Much of the direction in the High End seems toward hyper detail and ultra clean low distortion. The result of this(strictly my humble opinion) is the sound becomes artificially lean, dry, sterile, 2-diminsional etc. The full body tone and harmonics are stripped away ( the complete note i.e.substain and decay is compromised)and the music will lose emotional involvement and sound canned. I agree wholeheartedly. The real question is what is the source of that phenomenon? Low distortion levels don't necessarily equal lean sound. If we all had 1/2" master tape, we probably we not be having this argument. Monkeying with the room and power can give you a more analog sound in my experience. Tubes also embellish poor source material whether it be CDs or Vinyl. That is a bonus IMO and why in real world applications, tube based amplification does make sense. There is less lunatic fringe, OCD audiophile behavior going on. As for Phil and his philosophy, I agree with much of his sentiments and I enjoy his acidic writings. For example, here is a blurb on room acoustics from the Asylum: I've never seen a mainstream living space I couldn't get satisfying sound from. This is the point. We've become so intolerant of compromised sound that we've made hi-fi arcane, irrelevant, anti-social and a perceived pathology in circles where once it was enjoyed.
It's our choice. Wormhole hobby or a musically-driven resurgent interest? I take a little bass spike and lower-treble glare at high SPL that I can't fully tune out of my room via normal furnishings, to drive for the latter. The first-time guest who once admonished me for having a coffee table in the living room with my stereo, and asked for its removal so could "hear properly" didn't get offered the glass of Pappy Van Winkle's 23 year old, nor invited back.
Phil and Well, I can't argue with a man who wants his own domain. But whether that's where the primary sound has to go, is another thing.
> > I would like a dedicated listening room that I can acoustically treat and furnish with only one purpose, the best quality sound and comfort of listening. < <
Over the last few decades I've visited many dedicated listening rooms, acoustically treated, optimized for listening. I never had any fun hearing music in any of them, and I couldn't see any evidence the owners did either. The problem is, no one hears music in an optimized space. Put pop, jazz, rock, blues, etc. aside for the moment. As a kid I had regular opportunity to hear Eugene Ormandy's Phildelphia Orchestra in the Academy of Music, a truly mediocre acoustic space. And yet my emotional connection to the music was no greater when I later was able to hear Seiji Ozawa's Boston Symphony in the peerless Symphony Hall. But having been in Symphony Hall dozens of times for concerts, I notice that recordings made there have never sound *less* like Symphony Hall than when played back in an acoustically-treated, dedicated listening room. Room tuning folks are quacks, if judged by the results. They know everything about how a room measures and nothing about how it sounds. It's like investment bankers or venture capitalists who know everything about money but nothing about the economy.
The very best sounding room I have ever heard a hi-fi installed in was in a century-old Victorian house in Arlington, Massachusetts. It had a large living room proportioned within maybe 10% of Symphony Hall's, with large bay windows on two walls, a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelving and cabinetry, and an outsized fireplace. The ceiling was smooth plaster with radiused corners and a full mahogany soffet perimeter. Absolutely nothing was done to "optimize" the room acoustically. It was, however, so good, nothing sounded bad. The owner would challenge us to bring over our worst trade-ins to find something that sounded bad. I'm now almost the age he was when he taunted us to defeat his room. Even a pair of horrific Cerwin Vegas powered by grating Phase Linear 400 and Southwest Technical Products preamp fed by dry-as-sandpaper Stanton cartridge in a pathetic Garrard Zero 100 sounded OK in that room. Even a 1979 boombox couldn't be denied. I've never heard even a acoustician-designed, computer-modeled, custom-built room sound remotely close to being as good as that room. But I've had some that I lived in come closer than I hoped upon first inspection, especially in open plan houses.
If someone builds their man-cave for whatever and they put a decent stereo in it, fine with me. But their *only* hi-fi? Well, if they ask my advice, I recommend against it. Think of the music you could buy. The time you could get back. Satisfaction in the acoustically-treated dedicated listening space is elusive, and more often than not, it seems to me synthetic -- a declared victory because, well, the money's already been spent.
People have fun in livelier settings and music is generally a shared experience when heard live. It used to be that way in homes too. Of course, you used to turn on the radio and hear Dean Martin, Sinatra, The Beatles, Motown and Philly soul on the same station. If hi-fi is going to be relevant again, it has to have something for everyone and that means removing the conditions that draw it inward to a solitary interest. Besides, what's the point of keeping the art of a McIntosh faceplate to yourself?
Phil
There is a lot to agree with in there particularly in regards to orchestral music. A bitch to get right in our audiodomes. I have also heard my share of mis-engineered rooms that sound like a mortuary. You can hear a pin drop but are left feeling a little dead inside. On the other hand, what I am "hearing" now is a much better and involving facsimile. Like Andy Murray said after the Wimbledon final: "I am getting closer." Question for Phil: do you have any addendums to add to your room philosophy in light of recent experience with Keith and panels, etc? |
Agear,
I love that blurb by phil, I can relate to his point.He just simply loves music and the emotional connection that can be communicated with the right choice of components and enviroment. I guess people like us are what could be called sonic naturalist(for lack of a better term).Seeking organic truthfulness and purity of sound with as little hifi artifact as possible.
Agear you`ve put a lot of research,effort and time in constructing a dedicated listening room. I hope all this work pays many dividends for you. I `ve heard some treated rooms,some executed more sucessfully than others. At what point in this endeavor will you realize an end stage where you feel enough treatment is utilized without it becoming counter productive(potentially)?
Regards, |
>>What I noticed with the Sophias in reference to the M60s is that they were a little sweeter, had a little more density to the midrange tone, and a little more sense of coherency or cut from the same cloth sound (at least from upper bass to treble); however, the latter seemed, upon further listening, to be a coloration imparted on all music and ultimately became a bit of a distraction.<<
All of this is consistent with what you should expect from competent SET v. push-pull -- even OTL. However, I cannot reconcile your statements. At least within the terms you chose to use, I don't know how "coherency" can be judged a coloration. It can take awhile to get used to, after years or decades of hearing push-pull crossover notch grunge, subtle as it is, as normal. But I'm guessing that whatever you heard as a coloration was something else about the Sophia. I don't regard the Sophia 845s as objective as the Audions, but they get closer than most competing 845 SET amps. The Sophia design is a more in-your-face presentation, and that's not just a function of acoustic energy. It's more aggressive.
>>There was also something going on in the upper midrange / lower treble that showed up on some tracks.<<
That something was likely the 845A tube's signature upper midrange glare, which the B tube mitigates, as does (to a lesser extent) the 845A Cryo. I know why amp makers ship with the 845A (it's dirt-cheap and consistent) but I don't know why any of them insist that's how their amp sounds best -- it doesn't. Not anyone's. I can't listen to the Sophia happily either with the stock tube. There is also some further tunability in the Sophias via the input, driver and rectifier tubes. It's not as simple a circuit as Audion's. The downside is less palpable intimacy and finesse. The upside is you have more tubes to roll for custom contouring!
>>The Atma M60s had significantly more drive, a larger soundstage, more air on top & weight on bottom, though none of the aforementioned was perceived as lacking while listening to the Sophias.<<
Ralph's M60 is a muscular amp and it has deep bass performance more precisely defined and textured than almost any SET amp. Can't comment on the soundstage differences since when I've heard both of those amps, soundstage was as large as I could want, appropriate to the music and the room. That none of these comparative shortcomings were perceived when listening to the Sophias shows vividly how subjective evaluation is. A/B comparison can make both contenders sound "wrong."
>>I have heard that the Sophias have a lower noise floor than the Audions?<<
They have in the past, though to me the difference was not actionable. Audion has recently changed their power transformer shielding and made some other internal wire routing changes, in part based on results from some work that Bob Hovland did on my Black Shadows. These amps are now as quiet as Sophia's, which were the quietest 845s on the the market, previously. You can also run the Audions very quietly by virtue of their high input sensitivity. If you have ample gain in your preamp, you can run the input level controls quite low and use more of the gain in a quiet preamp. In any case, this nosie floor difference between the two brands' 845 amps is now effectively moot.
>>Although noise didnt significantly factor into my evaluation of the Sophia, I wouldnt want it to be too much higher. Can this be a distraction with the Audions?<<
I'd need to know you much better to say. I've been listening to tubes my whole life, and vinyl too. What's a little power amp noise after all that? Power amps are quiet compared to recordings and sources. There's noise in the world, including at any live performance of music. Compared to my guitar amps, my hifi amps are silent. I didn't consider noise a problem with my Audion power amps before and they're over 10db quieter since Hovland had a go at them, so I never think about it. on the other hand, I know people who love the sound of a tube amp but because of scant spurious noise, they listen to solid state they enjoy less. People are funny.
Phil |
>>From what I surmise from some of his writings, room acoustics, power conditioning, and wire are a waste of time.<<
This is not nearly a correct summation of what I think about these topics.
Power condition is difficult to prescribe. That is, the precise results in any given home and system are not strictly predictable. I use voltage correction, isolation, and on my sources, balanced power. All these have been helpful to me. I generally recommend large balanced power isolation transformers as the most cost-effective power "conditioning." But I've also heard installations where no conditioning sounded unmistakably better than any alternative. I can recommend balanced power unconditionally, but I can't predict exactly what method power conditioning will be best for you.
I've never written that cabling is not valuable. I have written that I have not found much correlation between cable price and contribution to sound quality. I've also written that I view cables as having distinct sound signatures -- that they are effectively "fixed parametric equalizers" -- and there are more important aspects to pay attention to if money isn't unlimited. The role of cables is affected by context. I prefer soncially neutral cabling that is also practical to use. That excludes most of the cable on the market.
On acoustics, I've written that room treatments tend to underperform though in some rooms, an acoustic dysfunction may be so egregious that correcting for that is indispensible. A friend has a room that without elementary treatment, it's first-order dysfunction simply builds cumulatively, like a figurative sonic Hadron Collider. Fixing that is worthwhile regardless. But most treated rooms end up overdamped and unnatural. My personal preference is to eschew dedicated listening rooms, keep the hifis out in the open living areas of my home and mitigate with room furnishings and placement. The rooms are to live in first, to optimize for sound second. Here's the thing: No matter the room, I can always hear the signature(s) of the gear through the prevailing acoustics, and that defines the actionable elements to what I'm hearing. But the room as an acoustic environment becomes just that -- environmental -- and easily forgotten. Put another way, no room has ever gotten in the way of me enjoying music, but much gear has proven too deleteriously distracting be enjoyed.
Phil |
>>Question for Phil: do you have any addendums to add to your room philosophy in light of recent experience with Keith and panels, etc?<<
Keith has a severe first order acoustic dysfunction in a nearly square space. We couldn't take down his ceiling panels but Defs mitigate floor and ceiling effects much more than the speakers he owned when he had the room treated. So put that aside. But it was easy to remove his reflection-points damping panels. In that space, removing the damping panels had the effect I expected, but worse --- the room goes "runaway" -- a sonic Three Mile Island in the making. It also eats bass below 100Hz or so, like a grizzly romping through a salmon farm. The Def4 sub eq helps there. I've never chosen to live in a space that mandated a virtually square acoustic domain for listening. If I had a first order problem like that, I'd minimally treat it too.
But I don't. I have normal US sheetrock-on-frame aberrations: some rising bass response, a little slap echo, some excitable sheetrock glare when I run Duane Allman or Hound Dog Tayler a little hot. But the tonal integrity of the system and room is solid, and imaging is as good as it gets in a 14' x 21' space -- smaller than Keith's uni-room -- where I can't place the Defs far from the boundaries. Interestingly, aside from the differences in our respective rooms' sub 100Hz bass profiles, an iOS device-measured FFT analysis profiles surprisingly similar signatures.
My 2nd system is in a 12' x 22' space, on the narrow wall, but like the 1st, it is not fully bounded in an open plan house. That room presents different anomalies, none of which are practical nor actionable to treat. And anyway, that is a relatively near-field setup.
So net is, in rectangular rooms, I won't do anything acoustically that can't be mitigated by normal furnishings. If I had the severity of Keith's primary problem, I'd do the least needed to correct the 1st order acoustic dysfunction and live with the rest. Keith's room doesn't sound as bass-deficient nor as soft on the top end as it measures, and mine doesn't sound as bass-emphasized as it measures. What others do is up to them, but again, I don't advocate dedicated listening rooms. And I haven't heard one yet in 40 years of being exposed to them, that sounds natural enough to justify the work or the livability compromises. The best domestic room I ever heard remains that beautiful space in an Arlington house, so whenever I consider a move to a new domicile, I just look for as many attributes of that space as I can get. Anyway, there are guitars that need buying and playing, too.
Phil |
