System that sounds so real it is easy to mistaken it is not live


My current stereo system consists of Oracle turntable with SME IV tonearm, Dynavector XV cartridge feeding Manley Steelhead and two Snappers monoblocks  running 15" Tannoy Super Gold Monitors. Half of vinyl records are 45 RMP and were purchased new from Blue Note, AP, MoFI, IMPEX and some others. While some records play better than others none of them make my system sound as good as a live band I happened to see yesterday right on a street. The musicians played at the front of outdoor restaurant. There was a bass guitar, a drummer, a keyboard and a singer. The electric bass guitar was connected to some portable floor speaker and drums were not amplified. The sound of this live music, the sharpness and punch of it, the sound of real drums, the cymbals, the deepness, thunder-like sound of bass guitar coming from probably $500 dollars speaker was simply mind blowing. There is a lot of audiophile gear out there. Some sound better than others. Have you ever listened to a stereo system that produced a sound that would make you believe it was a real live music or live band performance at front of you?

 

esputnix

@rauliruegas , see, you already had it all figured out! The subwoofers not only add bass but they clean up the midrange! It is important for people to know that. You certainly have a system capable of life like performance. 

@lewm , I went back to Sowter and they will make custom transformers. I drove the Acoustats with 100:1 transformers from 125 Hz up and it worked well. Right now I am crossing out of the stats at 100 Hz. I also am thinking about getting RAAL ribbon tweeters too cover 12 kHz up. I wonder if the bass transformer would handle that range or should I have 100 or 150:1 transformers made. The Plitron is too small. 

@rauliruegas Thanks for the history behind your fantastic speakers.  Since you mentioned Ed Meitner and Museatex I will put in a shameless plug for my amp and DAC, since nowadays no one really is aware of them.  I have the old Museatex Meitner MTR 101 monoblock amps and Meilor Museatex DAC subsequently modded by John Wright who use to work with Meitner.

Dear @jetter  : Good to know you own Mweitner designs, he was and is a very well regarded designer/manufacturer and I think that almost any audiophile read or knows some body that speaks about EMM Labs CD many years ago.

As a company Meitner still exist and doing fine.

Here some information of Meitner:

 

https://www.emmlabs.com/legacy.php

 

R.

Mijo, You wrote, with reference to our SL speakers: "I went back to Sowter and they will make custom transformers. I drove the Acoustats with 100:1 transformers from 125 Hz up and it worked well. Right now I am crossing out of the stats at 100 Hz. I also am thinking about getting RAAL ribbon tweeters too cover 12 kHz up. I wonder if the bass transformer would handle that range or should I have 100 or 150:1 transformers made. The Plitron is too small."

My questions are with reference to your last two sentences.  What range are you talking about that you wonder whether the bass transformer could handle it?  If you are thinking about, say, 100Hz to 12kHz, I would say no.  One reason for my opinion is that when I measured the OEM bass transformer, it rolls itself off at or around 2kHz, probably due to self-inductance.  Another reason is that you need to keep in mind the effect of the ESL step-up on impedance seen by the amplifier is the converse of using a SUT with a phono cartridge.  The impedance seen by the driving amplifier is the intrinsic Z of the screen with no transformer divided by the square of the turns ratio.  So as you go up in frequency, a 1:250 turns ratio is going to result in a very low impedance for the amplifier, except as the self-inductance of the transformer seemed to dominate when I measured Z with the bass transformer alone driving the speaker.  Anyway, I would not be hopeful that this is a good idea.

And what makes you say the Plitron audio transformer is too "small"?  Have you ever seen the audio step-up transformers used by Martin-Logan and some other companies?  They ARE tiny, but SL use substantial transformers, and the Plitron 1:75 full range step up appears to be about the size, at least, of the OEM SL toroidal transformer they use for treble. Or is it the turns ratio (1:75) that you think is too small? To that I would only say that 1:90 of my Australian sourced transformer is excellent.  1:75 in terms of voltage is not that different, and because of the effect of the turns ratio on impedance (see above), Z at higher frequencies will be a bit higher than what I observe with a 1:90 ratio.  So it might be a trade-off with no untoward effects on perceived efficiency.  Anyone, like Intact Audio, who actually knows transformers is welcome to correct me on these generalizations.