Thanks for the post @davida. Although ham and audio equipment are similar in that we are striving for the best signal-to-noise ratio, my argument is not meant to imply HAM radio equipment should sound as good as audio equipment. Although very similar in principle, one is audio and the other is RF.
What baffles me is how audio equipment is said to operate better with break-in, in this instance ‘sound’, but HAM radio equipment could care less. Many stages in an amp or DAC must be undergoing changes (allegedly) during burn-in, and an improvement in sound is apparently one of the takeaways. Why is then, that burn-in in HAM equipment has no noticeable improvements.
You might think the S/R might improve, or the sensitivity or the noise floor, but none of this changes. Because the hardware between the two hobbies is so similar with the exception of the operating frequencies, it makes me question if the golden ears are only hearing what they want to hear or what has influenced their mindset.
I have a McIntosh amp and preamp. I have had it for quite a while but I don’t remember the sound changing as I put time into it. In April I upgraded my PerfectWave DAC to a DirectStream Sr. and all the parts inside the case were new. I do not recall hearing any change in the way the DAC sounded from April until now.
I am a real skeptic given the background I come from and I have real difficulty buying into the ‘audiophool’ part of this hobby. There are still elitists on this forum who think if you take a Redbook CD and upsample it to DSD256 it sounds better. I think that’s called making a silk purse out of a sows ear.
My PS Audio DS dac while sounding great right out of the box…the quality of
sound opened up and matured over a few weeks of play time…From what I
have garnered is that electrolytics, and other parts…even the dielectrics found
in cabling settle in with time…
Rob tell us a little about your listening space…furnishings near or on the sides of
your speakers…these will either detract significantly at the least diminish the otherwise
possibility of hearing these things…’
In my case after seeing a lot of pictures from shows and even Focal’s speaker placement
recommendations…my current placement for speakers 8’ from wall behind them, 4’ from
walls beside them…My listening position is 15’ from the front plane of my Aria 948s.
Talk about detail spatial retrieval …never ceases to amaze me…
The slightest changes made to my system is immediately noticeable good or bad.
My gear PS Audio P15 power plant, Parasound JC5 amp, Wyred4Sound STP Stage 2
preamp, Oppo 205 feeding PS Audio DS dac via spdif DH Labs cable. Nordost Red
Dawn xlr ics and speaker cables, Pangea AC9se MkII and Pangea AC14SE MkII
power cables…
While not as sophistcated or refined as many others here on the forum…still amazing
still surprises me with great sound…
But @mark-d it’s not just me. There are people like me all over the audio community. I just have a tendency to be a little more vocal, but only after a while.
I have a very small living space, maybe 12 x 14 with carpets, fabric furniture and few sound absorbing accessories on the wall.
My speakers are pulled out from the wall about 10" as this is all the space I have. Speakers toe in the focal point is my couch which is about 9 ft away from each speaker.
The living room has an “L” shaped sectional. I have a 12" woofer hidden under and end table and pointed to an outside wall away from the listening area
No disrespect intended. Where it is my opinion, I do my best to frame that first, facts usually speak for themselves, but overall, I try to be a gentleman. If I step over, please don’t hesitate to reel me in
There are many of us who believe we can hear various pieces of equipment improve over time with new gear. You appear to not suffer from this. Consider yourself fortunate, be grateful, and perhaps find a different place to talk about your hobby. Perhaps.
I am always very sad when I think I can hear and appreciate the difference with some new expensive doo-dad. But if I am convinced, it’s my money and my reputation. You can sit back, enjoy knowing the real truth.
But your real truth might not be mine. I’d save a lot of money if I believed as you do. And nothing I can say will likely change your mind, and nothing you can say will likely change my mind.
So respectfully, I would ask you to consider giving it a rest and enjoy your world view as I enjoy mine.
I’m ok with that @mark-d
Somewhere in on of my posts I said, if I spent $10,000 on a 1 meter interconnect, a switch would automatically turn on in my brain that says this sounds better. You would not be able to convince me otherwise.
Hey Rob…nice rack you have there more elegant than mine…
Would you believe I have a cedar chest just like yours…serve as
my ottoman as well.
While each person’s room has space limitation challenges there are
a couple of things that might help if it is okay with your wife…
Relocation of furniture and absorptive material out of your listening space,
could this be doable? Lifting your speakers off of the floor a few inches will help
imaging a lot…separates the speaker from floor helps the mids and highs open up.
Speakers need breathing room to give you the sound stage you read of here…
Could there be another room to relocate your audio system for a better listening
environment? My .0002 feeling is that your room is keeping you from a better
acoustical experience…
Even with wide open 15’ x 25’ L shaped room there are things I would like to
relocate but don’t know where to place them…
And no; truly you don’t need ultra high kilo buck gear to enjoy some of the things
that my system gives …
Then again, and although your room isn’t that big indeed, please accept the suggestion to experiment with your listening room set up. If only temporary. Just read Paul’s ‘the loudspeaker’, follow the guidelines and see if this does anything for you.
I can only say it helped me a lot and I hope it may do for you as well. If not, I’m al fine and wish you all the happiness in the world.
Well @aangen I jumped on this thread to give my two cents why PSA might not be in the same league, and I happened to fault the Noise Harvester. I follow this board religiously and know how you and many others feel about things. It was not my intention to come in and change everyone to my way of thinking.
As you know from previous conversations, we mutate and evolve. Where the conversation has gone astray, I let myself get caught up in it but I have never lost site of the OP and have gone back to that many times so far.
On a side note, I would like to acknowledge how gentlemanly nearly all of you are, and despite the controversy I inject, everyone remains very cool and level headed. Maybe that’s what makes the PSA forums so enjoyable and the reason I hang around (or one of the reasons)
Thanks for posting. You have a nice system.
I do understand your limitation with speaker placement, as I recently had to have one set of speakers located similar to what you have here. The entire imaging of my speakers shrunk down to being almost non-existent from what I am normally used to with the speakers 6’ out from the wall behind them. Reflections from the wall and tv (the tv was even closer to the speakers in my case) were also causing sound quality issues. This speaker placement in your room might be the only location available to you, but is a major contributing factor in holding back your system from being able to hear differences from cables and other tweaks that others enjoy.
I have attached a photo of the clean-looking but not good sounding setup I lived with for a while, followed by an older photo of where the speakers sound much better away from the walls.
Don’t be sad! I follow you all over the board and you are a happy camper! You know what? I’m a happy camper too. What more could we ask for? You are not foreign to me
Ah…don’t forget there are wabbits involved in testing aangen’s
gear…wabbits in room while music is playing …system passes
wabbit inspection…no wabbits uh oh…what did Al do to mess it up…
So if you invite Al and his wabbits to your listening room …they could
diagnose it easy peasy…just have some cawots available for the wabbits.
It’s been a long time since I tried pulling my Noise Harvesters out to see if that made any audible difference. I did think I heard one when they were new and I like the feedback the blinking lights give me–the blinking varies with time of day and what equipment is being used. I remember when they first came out I showed the ad to a friend who knows a lot more about these things than I do. He has a PhD in physics from MIT and, at the time, his job was designing the electronics for transoceanic fiber optic cables for Ma Bell and her successors (I once got a private tour of his lab on the Holmdel campus). His reaction was something like, “Oh, a parallel filter. Yeah, we use those.” Not an endorsement of the specific product, of course, but not nothin’ either.
