Radioeng2

These were a pair of OB's I made several years ago that I've loaded the Audio Nirvana in. These were my version of the JE Labs OB design. Instead of back supports, I took the same distance and added it to the width. Then I folded back at different angles each side and varied their width too. But the total wrap around distance is pretty much the same distance as the JE Lab's. I made too speaker cut out sizes so I could do a woofer and a HF driver. Each cutout area is made in such a way that I can quick change the insert for a different driver. Kind of similar to a camera quick change mount. Here is a set of the discs that I made where can kind of see the cut profile to make that possible. And then here is a later version of an insertable driver mount. Made in a smaller driver version, only capable of swallowing an 8" in the larger insert position....I've got Dayton Audio 6.5" drivers in those right now instead of the shown TB 1772. The sectional foldback part was just to see if I could do it and to get a gentle edge profile for the highs. No HF driver needed for mating with the TB's. When you start hearing all the attributes of OB...you just can't stop coming up with ideas and things to try.... ....and the wood flies!! Mark

Dan....If you think that the 4-Ten's are what you want, I would help you out with a deal. We can talk about that on email. I'm equipped to cut holes and am glad to help out those that can't, when it's practical to do so. That's pretty much what we're talking about here. I'm using them as of now and would probably have to build something again. But if they fit what you want to do, then I'd be glad to help out! And it'd be cool to have you in again if that worked out! The Audio Nirvana coax are newer and I've not bumped into any of the coax yet. I've got a pair of their 12's and friend has a pair of 10's. For what I've been doing, most of their line isn't exactly in line with what I need, as their Q is typically lower that what I'm looking for. Mark

Crap Mike...we had ten watts on tap! Whatta want? And that was 10 for each channel! No problem using the pictures of course Dan! Glad you liked OB enough to think about it. But I do wish it wasn't a unfinished build that I had to take and winds up here! I've been almost continually building some version of OB now for 4 or 5 years I think. And I still am! The OB thing has really worked for me. I'd gone from years of 'stats and locked into high power to wanting to play with more tubes and lots of speaker designs otherwise. Where my travels led was right back to a couple of the strong attributes from the electrostatics. Phase conherance. Line source. Dipole pattern. Boxless sound. But what I've also picked up is the efficiency to tun about any power I want. And much greater dynamics! Had a friend who's working on a really cool "box" speaker try one of those coax a few weeks ago. The 10" model. The efficiency dropped so much we thought it wasn't working for a minute when we first hooked it up. Then it didn't measure anything close to it's spec's. The resonance was a lot above spec. Then when inserted into the speaker it just didn't sound right. I'd thought about buying one of the version of it myself in the past and was really looking forward to hearing it. Looked very nice. But the performance was unsettling. And the company couldn't/wouldn't explain the crossover at all. I believe after the measuring and listening, that those went back and he's going a different direction. Oh..and the amp choice running the short full-range lines is about using a true current source amp instead of a voltage amp. It doesn't really care about the ohm load and runs a full range driver very spectacularly! Works differently with the low end and the high end both. Mark

I would assume that yours is based on the AudioKarma plans. Those were designed to be able to make the thing from just a single 4X8 sheet of ply or your choice. Those plans found here.... http://audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=337891 For a friend, I built one out of the Lowe's birch ply. I just let the edges show but finished a lot like yours. I did cheat and use a little extra for a base to cover wheels. It seemed to turn out ok. Pretty good record rack for a guy that has the room. And reasonable in price! Mark

When I have time, I need to read the whole thing! But, when they got to the part about the radio automation "shuffling" the play list, they couldn't be more wrong. No automation system I've ever been associated with ever had a "shuffle" mode! No professional station is turning their product over to shuffle of Windows Media Player! Actually, a live human being spends hours a day in most cases, carefully sweating over the details of what the "mix" of songs is going to be. They take into account the individual market research, that this article comes off so critical of, to flavor the mix to demands of the individual market and not just blanketly play the national sales leaders or national sales success story of the past for older formats. The programmers work very hard at every element played to try to make it fit the mold of that particular stations image. Whatever that is. These guys are very in touch with what their local callers ask for to! If you didn't have at least some stations play a "format" then you'd find yourself never liking a station for more than an occasional song. I'd never defend everything ever station has ever done programming wise. I'm only commenting on how I've seen it done for over 30 years. And I've happened to have been in the door of more stations than most other people that work daily in this business. I totally agree the "produced" music lacks something! That's why I listen to what I do at home! And it ain't that stuff! It's part of what makes live music and recordings of live music, so much more fun....the realness!! Mark PS...oh and the Google reference is out of date. They sold out of the business a while back. They were only involved for a couple of short years thinking they could somehow sell station time in combo with their internet ads.

Thanks for asking! Not totally sure yet. My wife doesn't have time off coming to use. I do, but can't hardly get away. Trying to get some time away this week and spent so much time taking care of stuff today that'd it have just about as well to have been at work! Going to try real hard to get there to CF! Too much fun to miss! Talking audio with the guys and listening is what I enjoy! Have a new batch of music about 3/4th's cooked up as a matter of fact. Need just a few more cuts that have that grab of being worth listening to... Maybe just for you, I can find some kind of Preius drivin' music... Thanks for shoutin'.... Mark

I've got a couple of friends with Thiels. Plus had the chance to go and tour the Thiel plant in Lexington a couple of years ago...which is highly recommended BTW!!! Thiels need power and quality upstream! They recommend amps that double in power for each halving of impedance. As in numbers like 200w into 8, 400 in 4 ohms etc. Some powerful amps get close to doubling for the first halving, but most don't even for that first step let alone the next one. A big Krell will for one... They are very revealing of what you're feeding them with. If you use typical, sterile consumer electronics, then you'll think that Thiels are slightly harsh and...well...sterile. If you find a overly warm tube pre to drive a so-so amp, then you'll think they are warm at times but can harden on some music. They will just show you what your feeding them. I've heard what happened when we pulled the average input terminals and put good a Cardas terminal on...you could hear a difference. Upgrading the crossover caps, the same, it was obvious. Changing speaker cables, you can tell the difference. They will reveal preamp tube changes too if there is a difference there. I've heard a upgraded Mac SS amp sound good on them. A large Manley tube amp sounds really good. A hotrodded Dynaco MkIII wouldn't run them until the bass (something like below 100hz) was unloaded to a sub, then the Dynaco monoblocks sounded quite good. The smaller 1.5 and 1.6's don't push up to high levels and stay clean unless you unload the lowest bass. The bigger ones do pretty good full range. All (like all speakers) are at there best well away from the back wall and carefully setup for equal distance to the listening spot. Pull 'em apart further and further until the center image goes away then come back a bit. If the electronics are up to it, they'll image like a champ and the drivers blend together very seamlessly. Have fun with 'em!! Mark

I've never heard that model of EV, but I'd think the LF would have a good chance to excede the La Scala's that I've heard. Neither will dig down to the lowest frequencies though. I'd think the mid's and high's would be similar. Not that the EV crossover is shabby, but the crossover in the Klipsch is built from a bit better parts. The tweeter protecter is a bit of an advantage that direction if your into block parties. On value...I've seen a few EV's go cheap with blown out woofers and so forth while often nicer wood in the La Scala holds their value up pretty good. Maybe...$350-400 for a beat up version and double that or a bit more, if all is nice. That'd be my guess... Good luck with 'em and report in if you go for it! Mark

I know a fair amount on the EV Sentry IV. Even have a pair of their external crossovers along with a pair of those mid horns. They are fully horn loaded design on all three sections, and are very efficient. 2 woofers, 12" in the big cabinet. The mid horn is a SM-120. I think the driver on it was usually a 1823M (which as strange as this sounds was built as a siren horn driver). The tweeter a ST350A, a very respected design and was made over several generations. The crossover points were 400hz I think on the low end and 3.5K on the top end. There also should be what was called a tweeter protector, a model STR, with them. These were a pretty common PA system at one time. You can rock a pretty good outside area or a club with them. Most cabinets are pretty rough these days, due to being often hauled around for bands a lot. The drivers are all pretty servicable and available, the crossover servicable too. I have a copy on the original service manual and if you can find the right place, is still posted on the EV website. I happen to know about the IV's as I have a pair of the Sentry III's, which came after the IV's and are more of a home model and use the same mid and HF arrangement. They don't come along too often, though I'm thinking about parting with mine since I have so many different speakers around. And it would help domestically if I lower the count some.... Mark

Nikoli Tesla: Man Out Of Time by Margaret Cheney. The tales are so interesting...especially when you have an interest in electronics! I was so inspired from reading about his extreme inventiveness. And learned a whole new side to Edison and the beginning of electrical distribution and even the story behind the electric chair and why it was even invented! Mark

That is a problem to figure out! I just did some organizing and cut down some on the number of seperated CD's. I did have a seperate section for several different labels. I still have my Reference Recordings CD's seperate but several that were all Jazz, I just went ahead and put them in with the rest of the Jazz in alphabetical order by artist. But I still have Rock/Pop in a section, Country in a section and Jazz in a section. But I also added a segment to both LP's and CD's...Dead People! This is in 'honor' of one of the guys that says he only listens to dead people...meaning way older music like from the 40's and 50's. So I put the older stuff in a section and actually made a label for the LP shelf that said "Dead People". Here is what my music storage looks like. The shot cuts off one identical CD rack to the right of the right most one. 45's in the top rows above the LP's. Jazz in the shorter DIY CD rack. The right rack and the one not shown I picked up recently at Best Buy. Should have probably build a entire new set myself, but didn't want to take the time. Mark

Hi Frankie! Yup, I sure missed out not being able to make it and hated it something awful! I sure missed seeing all you guys! Events just transpired to prevent going. Sometimes life gets in the way of the fun stuff. We'd done a long anticipated Alaskan cruise (), had extra expenses this year and so on. Down to the last minute, I was still hoping to be able to slip over for a day...or two...but even that wasn't able to happen. Sounded like it was the usual good times! I've been playing audio plenty. I'm just about to complete the beauty stage of a full-range driver speaker project, a Western Electric based pre-amp project and gathering parts for another tube amplifier build. I hosted a Zu Audio show at my house just a couple of weeks ago too. That was a really good get together and heck of a lot of fun. Anytime you can get a bunch of audiophools together, we seem to manage to have fun in some kind of nerdy way!! And I will hope to be able to make it over to CF next year and catch up with you and all the guys! Those kind of deals are such fun and being able to make friends at those events is really neat! Thanks for the shout out!! Be good and watch out for those speeding Prius!! Mark

Actually, I'm not sure you'd call them LP's at all, but you get the idea! Have you ever heard the "playing the stacks of wax" thing? I've heard that a million times and never gave too much thought to it, though I knew it had to do with the process. These video's show a bunch of really interesting stuff about the manufacturing process they used at this point in time! Really interesting to a technology geek like me!! Part 1 -RCA Victor records manufacturing process 1942 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwe-Mt99Dw&feature=related Part 2 - RCA Victor records manufacturing process 1042 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxhiUgK5gzs&feature=related Hope somebody else enjoys this as much as I did! Mark

Why not jump off the digi format of the month club and the constant converting and worrying if it will convert. Just store it as the total real music. I wouldn't dream today of anything but Wave files. I want ALL the music!! Drive space is cheap. I can even load up my wifes Ipod with Waves. You can set here every night, going from forum to forum watching people wrangle around with the format issue and reburning, relabeling and so on...and on....and on.... Just jump off and do it right! I wantta listen to the music! Mark

I started to think I have maybe approaching a thousand LP's, but then I remember that last summer I ran into a huge record shop closeout while home on vacation in KC. I bought a hundred exactly at a $1 each and it's stack wasn't that big versus what's on the shelfs. So I must surely top a 1000 then. Several years ago, I burned most of my smooth jazz onto hard drive and that was right at 600 different CD's. I must have had another 100 I didn't do and I'm sure I've added a couple hundred more since. My wife always says, "don't 'cha have enough yet?" And I'd say I have as many more in other genre's and then a bunch of specific broadcast collection ones that have a individual singles instead of whole album releases. Might be approaching a 2000 total. And I've also got a pretty big batch of 45's. Mostly 80's pop. Maybe 500 or so. They sure are fun to once and a while go through! A prize I've hung onto for a long time is the original pressings for broadcast of the LP's sent to stations to air the King Biscuit Flower Hour. If you don't remember that show, it was a several hour live recorded show that usually aired on a weekend night on rock stations. Must have a couple dozen or so of which one of my favorites is Jethro Tull. Sometimes wonder what the wife will do with all this stuff some day!! Mark

It should also be pointed out how awful most of the typical vinyl was, especially for the last number of years. They took to recycling the vinyl with junk in it. It got thinner and thinner. You could take many records out of the rapper and just have all kinds of clicks and pops to it. Come to think of it, maybe those years were the 70's version of today's iPod crap!! However, if you ever hear the good stuff, well recorded older releases, a lot of it was excellent. Go back into the 60's and before, and it is noticably better quality on average if seems to me. Gosh, put on some of the stuff coming out by the time I was buying in the 70's and it wasn't just the record quality physically, but some of the audio was really thin and terrible too. I still have everything I ever got. One of the worst I have is a REO Speedwagon for being horrible. The pinkish cover with the hotel maid on the front. Good music, just terrible mastering or something! Listening to it'll cause you to have flash backs to friends cars with 6X9's setting on top of the back deck behind the back seat. Driven to ear bleed levels with Kraco power!! If your hung up on hearing clicks and pops and can't focus on the real music, then it can be a problem. But as Steve says, clean it, have a good stylus thats aligned properly on a good table, and when you spin good stuff you can just groove with the music. I've heard many a side when the only time you could hear a pop or click at all was in the pause between cuts. When your doing a get together and looking for fun music and tending to jump around, its usually a relief feeling when good vinyl goes on and some hard sounding CD gets done. I do listen to much more dits and dahs, but thats because of the amount of music I don't have available on those black discs!! Mark

Didn't know you liked 2 Live Crew Steve -- I'm thinking it's more likely that Steve is a closet Pussycat Dolls fan!!

Agreed. I prefer to go with the strengths regardless of age. I've also learned that being newer doesn't automatically make it better either.

Steve, I think that we have to be careful about assigning the masses views onto audio systems. Like that "tubes are about soft clipping and that's all we would listen to them for" kind of thing. Your comment about slow rise and fall times with analog sounds to me like that. Analog audio, when well done is very good and very accurate. While you can certainly say that vinyl is imperfect (all electronic pb could be said to be), it's still closer to real than digital and we hear it that way. Digital is digitally precise, just tough to get as naturally acceptable to the ear. When you take some very well recorded music and listen to it at a higher level and just let yourself be immersed in the sound. Then switch from CD to the same thing on vinyl. You can very quickly feel the ability to relax into the analog playback and tell how more naturally "right" it is. Wynton Marsalis, The Death of Jazz cut from his Majesty of the Blues release is a really good recording that we've used many a time and illustrates this, oh so well! (trivia note...the next cut is a sermon by none other than Obama's shame on America preacher!!) The Death of Jazz is one of the best recorded cuts and extremely musical at the same time I've ever heard. And you can find it on both formats and you don't need an extreme analog rig to hear how the quality thing plays out!

I agree with your comment about tt drive having effect on music in subtle ways. This discussion also makes me think about tape playback, how you can hear tape hiss, but quickly in you mind tune it out and instead focus on the music. Then you may not be even aware of it until the silence between cuts. Or in vinyl how the noise artifacts play on a different plane than the music and then how you can seperate it from the music. Have you noticed these things too?? Mark

I don't know if we have the resolution to see that deep too well, Steve. There are test procedures in the labs that can show things, but I'm not that capable or knowledgable. But even when you can see some level of difference, it's hard to assign whats more responsible to do altering enough to be audible. For instance, if you run a dual trace scope with one trace showing original audio and the other displaying FM broadcast modulated audio, you see an HUGE difference. Enough so, that it's hard to believe they sound as close to the same as they do. So that doesn't tell you as to what is to blame for the difference you can hear. In that case, bandwidth being limited to 15K is certainly part of the visual difference and noticably audible too. But as far as breaking it down to little fine differences instead of gross differences, it would be hard to say intermod products, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis error, L-R generator error...etc... I have a audio band spectrum analyzer. As to whether you can do a lapse time of display which would tell one form of things, I don't know. Haven't had time to play with it much. It will do some X-Y things, which you might be able to do some difference displays that would tell some things. Gross errors are easier to get a handle on. Little fine differences get so much tougher.

Good question Elg. To back up a little first. When we look for why digital sounds different than analog there has to be reasons that probably are several multiple parts. I'm suggesting that just one of those is related to the issue of why research says people can distinguish some difference, when speakers can produce sound way above the hearing range. Since the wider bandwidth, higher data rates sound closer to analog, by about everybody acknowledgement, then it's not just that digital sounds worse because it is digitally encoded. Some of the differences between them are the larger steps in level between 16 and 20 or 24. Surely the linearity of the lower levels of that 16 bit are one of the biggest culprits. Another being that the filter can be done differently in the wider bandwidth formats along with better filtering by the sampling rate changes in 16 bit. And then the bandwidth of that frequency area above where we supposedly can hear. It seems to be a possibility that while we don't hear the upper frequencies...that maybe it's things up there that wind up back into the audible range. This is really closely related issue to why a single tone or just two tones in an intermod test, don't reveal all that our ears can hear. Just think of all the notes present in one smack of a cymbal. There is the main crash note. Several very strong notes actually that would make that up. The distance from the center to the edge. The overall diameter. The distance from the strike point to the edge which would actually shimmer back and forth. Then the strong notes that resonate against themselves and produce other beat notes. I would expect harmonics of many many multiples of the strongest notes. Wouldn't surprise me if a, let's say main area around 8K, would have harmonics to the tenth multiple or 80K. So if you could freeze on a audio spectrum analyzer a window of maybe 5 seconds, I'd bet on dozens of carriers that make up the main crash, the shimmering, floating beats that follow it along with all the naturally occurring harmonics and beats of them. How could you seperate the naturally occurring, the microphone diaphragm artificial distortions, the recording medium, the playback electronic created products, the relatively high level of distortions created by the driver or even in the ear itself? Pretty tough, but you can change things somewhat in between, like using headphones versus a conventional speaker. Yes, the originally created beats that fall low in frequency would be there to be recorded. As a matter of definition, harmonics as I used them, are multiples up, as distinguished from subharmonics going down. Beat notes refers to the difference between two notes, as in 2000hz and 2500hz having a beat note of 500hz. This would be, as you mention, the audible original event sound that would be recordable even in the 16 bit digital environment. I differ from Bill, a little bit at least, in that I believe mics do pickup in many cases to above the normal hearing range. They graph and spec to the hearing range, but even though it would be drooping, the response continues somewhat. Certainly some mic technologies differ in their ability from each other. As I was trying to say in the earlier post, we tend to ignore details down in level at some point down from main levels. Let's arbitrarily say we think of information down 45-50db to be masked by the higher levels. This is a fundamental part of bit rate reduction decisions for instance. In the case of the mic, what if it is a higher harmonic down 20-30-40db from the hearing range that is the only focus of the graphs. Doesn't mean that this information isn't going onto tape, into the record groove and left off the 16 bit digital. But there has to be some higher frequency stuff that makes it on analog and is not on the digital. The studies as to what actually is on records shows this. So there will be potential for those harmonics to play against other harmonics and against the lower information too. I guess I come into this thinking in part from how you study a transmitter site for intermod products and the multiples and beats that result. It's the reason behind the blanking area around a transmitter site where large signals can overcome the receiver front end and just happen, even though not desirable. In much the same light, I'd wonder if some of the otherwise undesirable distortions in the process don't wind up helping in that they work to replace some of the things that the technology doesn't correctly capture. Like using a tone control to correct for a system that's not flat, it's a distortion to correct it but still possibly desirable absent the original information. So again, this is all a far down phenomena, if it exists at all past my imagination, but there has to be some level of various small things that make up the difference that Steve is asking of. Maybe I'm making it harder than it needs to be.

I think it's an interesting question Steve. Don't know about faster or slower. Digital represents the waveform with it's stairstep pattern, so I don' t know that it could make it faster. And if there was a much difference then you'd think that going back and forth to digital would show it's self up as inaccurate. But digital always seems to be correct....just not quite as real. Whatever real is... I agree that the highs of digital are a flaw and that the newer results are better. The increase smoothness of the different approach to the filtering has helped. And certainly the faster bit rate and wider bandwidth has made it more "analog". But remember that as long as your physically setup well on a TT, that the bandwidth is very good and goes up way beyond the 16 bit bw limitation. Maybe the higher harmonics of naturally recorded music produce beat notes and actually add to the realism of sounds when present. The 16 bit digital, with its cut off, would lack those. And I'm a big believer in the down deep details really adding to the realism of music. We hear this with the subtle changes in a system that shouldn't make much difference, but can make you sit up and notice when you alter some aspect. The many db down sounds get greatly altered with 16 bit as the steps of the digital get way down. The encoding will assign it either one level or the other, and its not entirely accurate. This is audibly better with 24 bit. This is pretty evident in how the end of a note sounds...the decay details. And then the jitter is an influence. Science says that jitter rates shouldn't have to be so incredibly low, but listeners can hear something wrong down to much lower levels than predicted. As I've said many times, the jitter is a big deal for digital data streams. The closest analog analogy is the TT sensativity to the type of platter drive mechanism. The direct drive versus the belt drive. The type of belt even which seems to influence the musical playback. These are kind of cousins to the jitter thing. In analog, it's kind of a solidness to the pitch where in digital its micro tiny timing of each littlest parts of the sound stage and notes. Sometimes I think about how my co-workers still try to describe audio flaws with an analog vocabulary. Then there is the digital terms. But I'm now thinking that there is a third view of the musical event which is the little tiny details that seperate the played back event from the live event. We can tell it in an instant usually, but fail to have the words to be descriptive as to what it is. When we get beyond the more gross distortions, then this is where circuit topology, metal to metal connections, capacitor materials and so forth start to divorce our experience from reality. Mark

Bill, this one is for you...since you've ripped and like the computer playback result. Also...check out the comments section. Good stuff down in it too. http://www.avguide.com/blog/do-hard-disk-drives-sound-better-cd-0 Touches on a bunch of the issues of CD's and digital playback, error correction, jitter, the flawed USB and SPDIF interfaces and so on! Unless you're 100% vinyl, then these issues are involved in your system and music playback. Mark