Wired for sound (again)

I finally managed to get a new amplifier an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I've been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I'm pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I'd even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn't quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call 'wellie' (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn't prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o'clock position, and 9 o'clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I'm very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from 'Knives to the Treble' by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. "Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!" It wasn't overdone, just very, very deep.

Smoky music

I've been having a problem with intermittent distortion from my amplifier (a Talk Electronics Storm 2) for a while. Early in the New Year, I thought I'd cracked it. But the problem with intermittent issues is that you change something, listen for a while, and think it's fixed. You congratulate yourself on your ninja-level hi-fi problem diagnosing and repairing technique. Then a couple of days later, the problem is back, and you are forced to commit seppuku with a sharpened banana plug. Well, maybe not the last part...

The problem seemed to be confined to the left channel, so while my brother was visiting this weekend, we made a concerted effort to track the problem down. At first, we thought that swapping the speaker cables over transferred the problem to the right speaker, but with more experimentation, we worked out that it must be the amplifier itself. Opening up the case of the amp revealed the problem all too clearly, as you can see from the picture above.

Usually, it's nearly impossible to find faults in circuit boards just by looking at them, but the strong smell of burning and wide distribution of thick black soot was easy to spot, even for a non-expert. It seems that one or more capacitors have blown in a rather terminal way.

My poor amp. Talk doesn't make this model any more, but I'm going to send them an email and some photos anyway to see if there's any chance a repair would be a) possible and b) economically feasible. If not, I'm having to shop for a new or second-hand amplifier. If any hi-fi enthusiasts out there can recommend a decent quality integrated amp for about the £200-300 mark (preferably with a phono stage), I'm open to suggestions!

Back to vinyl heaven again

Some time ago, my brother lent me a spare turntable he had hanging around (a Project) so that we could play Mr. Bsag's collection of vinyl and my rather smaller stash. However, we soon found out that at some point during its long storage, the turntable platter itself had developed a huge warp. This was so severe that it would scrape on the base of the turntable on each revolution, causing some problems with speed stability. Not to mention the fact that the warp resulted in warbling, wowing sound. I did manage to put my warped records out of phase with the warps in the platter to give an approximately level surface, but that didn't work with flat records. Quite how a very heavy, solid cast-iron platter ended up getting warped, we couldn't imagine, but there it was. We reckoned that our chances of unwarping it were negligible.

Still, all was not lost: in my hi-fi-mad family, there are practically always spare bits of kit hanging around in lofts or other storage spaces. My Dad happened to have an Acoustic Research EB101 turntable in his loft, which my Mum was only too happy to have removed from the loft, so I took that home from my visit this weekend.

I set it up yesterday after a bit of faffing around, so we are enjoying the sweet, analogue sound of vinyl again. The first problem was that my Dad had forgotten that he'd left a custom power plug on it (which fitted in a multi-socket he used to use), but that was an easy fix by swapping over the plug from the old turntable. The second snag was that the stylus didn't actually reach the surface of the record. You don't have to be a hi-fi buff to realise that you're not going to end up with any music if the needle doesn't touch the record. The problem was that the rest for the arm wasn't properly height adjusted so that even when fully lowered, it didn't release the arm. I had to call Dad to ask if there was some secret shipping screw which needed to be released, but in the end I found a little grub screw which did the job. I also couldn't find the recommended downforce weight for the cartridge which was included (a Glanz), so I just swapped over the Ortofon OM10 I had on on the Project turntable.

The new (to me) turntable sounds pretty good. I listened to a album of Mr. Bsag's that I hadn't heard before -- 'Psychedelic Shack' by The Temptations. It's a terrific album, and absolutely the right thing to listen to on vinyl. I think I'm going to have to hit the second-hand vinyl shops again...

W.A.F.

Sometimes, being a female geek is good fun: some of the problems and pre-occupations of the majority of male geeks simply do not apply. I was reminded of this when I was browsing the SlimDevices forum and came across a brilliant thread where people post photos of their SqueezeBox nestled in among the rest of their hi-fi equipment. Looking at (and listening to) other people's systems fascinates me almost as much as listening to my own system, so I was glued. Anyway, one of the contributors asked another why his speakers (designed for stand mounting) were sitting on the floor, and was told that he hadn't been able to find stands with a high enough W.A.F. Those of you who are hi-fi buffs or display their geekery in other gadgety fields will know that W.A.F. stands for Wife Acceptance Factor.

To quote Wordspy:

wife acceptance factor n. In an object, especially an electronic device, that normally appeals only to men, the qualities or features added to or modified in the object to make it acceptable to women.

And there's a further explanation:

The reality is that most traditional hi-fi equipment has been designed to appeal to male tastes, and consequently, more typically resembles scientific tools and industrial test equipment than your average home furniture.

You see, that's a problem that I just don't have. Not only do I not have a wife (or a problem with H.A.F.), I positively love equipment supposedly designed to appeal to men. Show me something that looks like an oscilloscope or is fashioned out of a huge, hand-machined lump of aircraft-grade aluminium, and I'll get the urge to pay someone lots of money for it. Of course hi-fi equipment should primarily sound good before anything else, but the W.A.F. refers to the appearance of an object, how expensive it is, or how difficult and inconvenient it is to use. All of which (apparently) women object to.

W.A.F. (or the mis-perception of it) is probably responsible for all those gadget manufacturers who think that if they make their gadget pink (or cover it with diamanté), 90% of the female population will be falling over themselves to buy it. They are wrong. Instead, I suspect that the majority of W.A.F. related conflicts arise because women who are not interested in hi-fi don't want their husbands spending half of their income on ruinously expensive stuff (and what the stuff is hardly matters in that context), or their living room to be filled with large lumps of metal and cables.

Me? I love big lumps of metal.

Logitech X-230 speakers

As you've probably all noticed, when I review books, music or films on this blog, I link to the items at Amazon using an affiliate link. This means that if anyone uses the link to click through to Amazon and makes a purchase, I get a tiny cut of the sale. It's not vastly profitable by any means: I choose to get 'paid' in Amazon gift vouchers because that has a lower minimum threshold for payout (£10), but even so, it takes a good year before I accumulate enough to get given a gift certificate. This isn't a problem, of course, because it's money for nothing as far as I'm concerned, so any sum is a delight. I see it as 'fun money' to spend on something completely frivolous.

This time when my gift voucher came in, I decided to go for something other than my usual choice of books or CDs. When I work in the office at home, I often like to listen to music, but that means hearing my iTunes library filtered through the speakers on my laptop. If I say that a couple of empty baked bean cans with a bit of taut string joining them would sound clean and crisp in comparison, it gives you some idea of their audio qualities. They are truly awful, and for me, it drains all enjoyment out of listening to my music. I could use headphones, but I like to move around, and risk dragging the laptop off the table. So when I spotted an ultra-cheap set of Logitech X-230 speakers on Amazon, I decided that I'd found something voucher-worthy.

Amazingly, the speakers (a pair of satellites with two drivers each and a sub-woofer) are only £23.99 on Amazon, so I was a bit skeptical that they would be any good. However, they got great reviews from customers, and since the area on the graph of audio quality to the left of the laptop speakers is almost microscopic, I felt that it was unlikely they'd be worse than what I've got now.

For such a cheap product, they have pretty good build quality. All the units are a smart black, and have some nice touches. There's a very fine, almost invisible fabric mesh over the satellites to prevent inquisitive cats shoving their noses into delicate drivers, and the speakers come mostly pre-wired (admittedly, this might be a problem if you needed a longer run of cable than that provided). All you need to do is plonk the satellites on the table, plug a 9 pin D-sub cable into the sub-woofer, plug the mini-jack into the headphone port of the laptop, then plug the whole lot to the mains. The sub has a volume control on the back to set the relative volume of the sub-woofer (which you probably need to set only once), and the right-hand speaker has a master volume control, headphone socket and power button.

I checked all the connections, fired up iTunes and sat back to admire the sound, only to feel my face falling with disappointment as a horrible, distorted sound with blarty, flabby base came out of the speakers. Urk. Could it be that Amazon reviewers all have tin ears? Thankfully, I remembered just in time that -- in a feeble attempt to improve the audio quality of the built-in speakers -- I'd set a pre-set on the graphic equaliser in iTunes. Turning that off revealed a lovely, crisp, balanced sound, just as I'd hoped. The speakers really are impressive. The sub-woofer is a bit over the top, so unless you want to loosen a few fillings, it's best to set the sub-woofer volume to a fairly low setting. The satellites are clear and reasonably detailed, and coped with a wide range of music from acoustic world music to grungy electronica. The sub-woofer provides a nice weight at the bottom end without being too flabby, and the satellites generate a remarkably wide and clean stereo image, considering how small they are.

Of course, they're not Martin Logans, so the sound isn't as detailed, integrated or spacious as you'd get with a pair of high end speakers. But then these cost a grand total of £24, not two orders of magnitude more. They'll do very nicely, I think.

Turntable

My brother recently lent me his old turntable, which he had given to his fiancé before he had made her a custom, home-made one. It's an old but still very serviceable Project 1.2, which needed a new cartridge. Unfortunately, the tone arm rest doesn't have a retaining clip over it any more, and when it was being transported, the tone arm — complete with bare stylus — jumped out of the rest and gouged a furrow in the base of the turntable. Needless to say, this isn't to be recommended, and the stylus looked like a tiny, blackened stump after the accident.

I bought an Ortofon OM10 cartridge (complete with the obligatory 'but she's a girl...' moment, where the assistant looked startled and panicked when I asked if there was a paper tracking alignment gauge included in the box), and spent some time this morning setting it up. Turntables are pernickety beasts.

{Read more...}

Listening

I had a wonderful extra and unexpected Christmas present this year. My Dad bought a new pair of speakers just after Christmas — some lovely Sonus Faber Cremona Auditors — and offered me his old Mission 753s at very low "mates rates" to replace my ageing B&W 601s. The B&W speakers are still pretty good, but they sound a little weedy in our new — much larger — living room.

After a bit of a struggle, we just managed to fit the speakers in the back of our tiny car, so I've had some fun setting them up and trying them out with familiar bits of music this afternoon. Of course, I've listened to them many times at my parents' house, but all sorts of variables (like the model of CD player and amplifier used, the types of cables, the shape of the room) affect the sound you get out at the other end. I'm happy to say that — despite having a much less fancy amp and CD player than my Dad — the speakers still sound great. The solidity of the stereo image is amazing, and the overall sound is much tighter, better integrated, and more detailed. It also has more of what I like to call oomph; difficult to define, but very easy to recognise.

{Read more...}

Page 1 of 1 pages