This subject is basically fantasy football. I was never any good at it. I would always say okay you pick your team players, I pick my stadium, with $3B tax credits, waivers, lease buy-back. The real fantasy is thinking its anything to do with winning games. With this one the real fantasy is thinking its losing harmonic information. There is some lost, mostly though it is ultra-sonic. Which we already know no one can understand how that matters. So? Get some supertweeters, hear for yourself! Back to Fantasy Island. The real problem is like Ralph said, harmonics being added. Every component does this. Every single one. Speakers, cables, amps, DACs, interconnects, power cords, floors, racks, walls, on and on. They all vibrate like crazy. I never really understood just how much this is the case until the last year, as one after another layer of added harmonic resonance was removed and my system became as a result clearer and more natural. The real problem in having a violin, or harmonica, or drum or whatever sound like what it is, it is not the missing harmonics but the ones all these components add. So when I went to cones a lot of them were gone, but they were mostly shifted to a narrow band- ringing. This imparted a hardness to the sound that in some systems can be mistaken for detail. As things get better and better however it becomes more clear this is not right. Springs remove the ringing but leave harmonic resonance. Added harmonics. Altered tone. Instruments that no longer sound as they should. Remove these, with just the right amount of damping, wow what a difference! Less harmonics, not more. Same with speaker cables. Same with interconnects. Amps? Why would amps be any different? In reality, I mean. In fantasy land anything goes. Fantasy or reality. The choice is yours. |
Ones digital cable could be why some have negative comments about SS, and likely class D. I have owned quite a few AB SS amps, as well as class D (and a handful of tube amps & preamps. My current class D which I have owned for close to 2 years is the EVS1200 from Ric Schultz: Tweakaudio.com Since I first got it I was using an optical cable. I wasn’t crazy about the sound and thought I needed to replace my Audio Alchemy DDP-1 + PS 5, but I don’t have that kind of $$$ sitting around, and so, I needed a plan B. About a month ago, I got the bug to try coax (FINALLY). Being budget minded, I bought 1.0m Pangea Premier SE ($49.95 from Audio Advisors) and started a thread. Someone recommended to get 1.5m, which I did, and though it was harmonically richer, I wasn’t sold on it. I replaced the 1.5m Pangea Premier SE with the 1.5m Pangea XL, the presentation is much more intimate. I find my body grooving to the music: PRAT. Now, some 50 hours of play time later, I am blown away (especially for $150!). So far, every redbook CD I played I am much much closer to the actual recording: singers and instruments are extremely palpable and when recorded, bass, drums, and piano are very authoritative. https://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=PGDCPXL&variation=1.5 |
Can also be lost in the type of amp used, when phase shift happens to the 2nd 3rd 4th harmonic structure of the fundamental, mids and highs notes above in this case Class-D >1khz. As can be seen (red trace) there is 75 degrees!!!!!!! of phase shift at 10khz cause by the switching noise "output filter" in this Class-D amp, and still 40degrees!!!! at 1.5khz. https://ibb.co/cCL1M8k Most of the magnitude of this phase shift can be remedied by, as Technics did with the SE-R1 to move the switching frequency (and it’s output filter) from 600-700khz to 3 x higher, 1.5mhz instead, and so the phase shift would also be moved 3 x higher up the frequency response scale far more out of the audio band more like good linear amps are. And the reason why so many linear hiend amps sound so much more natural in the upper mids/highs because as they don’t have these sort of phase shifts well down! into the audio band. As they aren’t trying to "filter out" "Class-D switching frequencies" on their outputs, and their frequency responses go out to more than 100khz with hardly any of this sort of harmonic structure distorting phase shift down into the audio band. Cheers George |
