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I received new horn speakers for my system, a pair of 112 dB sensitive Orphean horns that replaced my 107 dB sensitive Oris horns. This was an interesting combination with my Ayre CD player compared to my Teres turntable. The Ayre provided clean open, detailed music. When I mean open, I mean unrestricted in dynamics and distortion. Not just open, but Open, I mean OPEN!You hear what the disc sounds like. It was so good I used the CD player as a reference for finding base vibration problems on the Teres turntable. These horns have electrostatic transparency combined with wide dynamic range and low distortion throughout the range. It makes the source component defects quite apparent. And the CD player was sounding better in many ways than the turntable.
I had to try several combinations of base support ideas to get the full frequency range of the turntable to come clean in the presence of driving this horn. And the CD player led the way for that trial and error process. It is a very well balanced player, especially suited for horn speakers which tend to add too much to the music on their own. The Orphean horns are very good at not adding much to it, and not sounding "horny", though.
In the end, I tossed out Mapleshade brass points, some of their rubber and cork dampeners, and a couple of other ideas. I ended up with some cheap low profile small aluminum points (make unknown - they are really old) on pressboard pieces placed on a plywood/cement board (glued together as one board) on top of rubber and cork dampeners on top of a Target wall mount. It took all that to make the "suspension" work well and sound vibrationless and not "deadened" either. But the Ayre player proved to be great. So why do people find this player "boring"? I still don't get it. It sounds "correct" to me.
Kurt
Follow Ups:
/nt
I listen to the way the CD player plays through the horns. When everything is hooked up right, the CD is good sounding and it is almost impervious to sonic vibrations coming from the horns.Unfortunately, there's a side effect of these amazing horns. They don't compress any crescendos significantly in terms of dynamic range, and they don't distort in those crescendos appreciably, either. The CD player doesn't care about that issue, it carries on without much affect. So CD sounds undistorted and without vibration feedback effects.
The turntable is subject to the airborn vibrations coming from the sound of the horns. It's a positive feedback loop. With direct radiator speakers or less dynamic speakers, there is actually less impact of this feedback loop than with horns. This is because the compression of crescendos with DR's reduces the gain of the overall feedback loop and you don't get as serious a problem with the vibration control. With horns, the lack of compression in addition to the lowered amount of distorted sound caused it to be very noticeable the problems associated with the vibration feedback control, or the suspension.
With that understanding, it is best to listen to the way the CD player behaves, consider that lack of squealing, clanking, thumping, and shrieking to be "correct". This is then the reference. A good CD player like the Ayre with horns shows how controlled and "correct" this player actually is. There is no artificial "slam", no fake "PRaT", just an open sound with great transparency, for a digital device. So I can then take this and listen to similar recordings on the turntable to tune it to sound as much like the CD player as possible, eliminating the bad vibrations. But after doing this, it will exceed the CD player in sound, because it sounds like there's just more coming from it.
In the process, I also found I can "deaden" the turntable too much with excess dampening. It is heard as an increase in distortion of notes in the time domain, a smearing effect. Now some might call this the "PRaT" killing effect. I don't care what you call it, it is not ideal to trade off time smearing distortion for resonance control of the vibrations. This is why it is hard to engineer a turntable suspension system for something that has no suspension to begin with. My Teres is suspensionless, and something has to be addressed about that. Mass, mass, and more mass did not work as planned. Those highly recommended Mapleshade brass cones did not work well - they made the midrange clang although the bass cleaned up fine.
I now understand the value of engineered suspensions used in turntables like the SME 30. Those do nearly all that work for you, and little has to be done when you find a spot to place it. You pay for that engineering, but they are probably worth it. With low distortion horns, it is tough to deal with if you don't have it, IMO.
Kurt
< < Those highly recommended Mapleshade brass cones did not work well - they made the midrange clang although the bass cleaned up fine. > >Give the stainless steel cones from Avalon a whirl. I haven't tried them in that particular situation, but I've had much better results with them than from brass.
And if you really want to get tweaky, try cutting out some small circles from the "beer coasters" you can get at the local bar and putting them between the top of the cone and the bottom of the turntable base. Sometimes this composite will give just the right amount of damping without killing the "life".
Of course, I could just be deluded...
> Give the stainless steel cones from Avalon a whirl. I haven't tried them in that particular situation, but I've had much better results with them than from brass. <Okay, I will consider that.
> And if you really want to get tweaky, try cutting out some small circles from the "beer coasters" you can get at the local bar and putting them between the top of the cone and the bottom of the turntable base. Sometimes this composite will give just the right amount of damping without killing the "life". <
That's interesting, and something I was searching for - that last touch of damping. What I did instead last night was add a couple of sorbothane pucks that squeezed between the base of the TT and the plywood/cement board that also is in there with the points. Add too many sorbothane pucks and it sounds too dead, add too few and its still has too many resonances. Two was about correct, at ends of the TT. With 60 lbs. of TT, it squishes pretty easily.
> Of course, I could just be deluded... <
Deluded? Why? I trust your ears to be excellent and capable of more than I can hear. I just can't hear enough nor care enough about the minute changes you get by hearing things like differences in a solder joint through my tinnitus. I think it's my attitude more than anything. I won't bother with CD tweaks, for instance, because it's too little gained for too much time, effort, and cost. I will OTOH, tweak up a sensitive TT because I spent so much on the thing and it better sound in tip top condition.
Kurt
I'm with you - I really enjoy my CX-7e.I recently read an opinion that the CX-7 has "no bottom weight" among other horrific flaws. I find this view to be not credible. Don't take my word for it, look at the measurements in Stereophile (now if someone wants to claim that the $40K Zanden has "no bottom weight" . . .). I think I've only read a couple of posts critical of the CX-7. I don't care. I trust my ears a LOT more than I trust theirs! YMMV.
> I recently read an opinion that the CX-7 has "no bottom weight" among other horrific flaws. <I actually think the bottom end is one of the CX-7e's strengths. It does not "slam" the notes, it PLAYS the low notes and all the harmonics with low distortion and great articulation. It plumbs the bottom depths and you hear real fundamentals, not a distorted mess.
I have been through this before in prior posts - slam is a form of distortion that some people think is good, or they just prefer that. Real bass notes are round and you hear a "rolling" action as it attacks and decays in a hall. It should not just impact you with a bunch of higher frequency energy (distortion where much of that reported slam really is) and then fade quickly away. A real bass drum sounds more like "BOOOOoooooommmm" than "BLAM!"
Kurt
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