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In Reply to: Making It On Your Own posted by Peter Qvortrup on May 3, 2007 at 03:58:31:
That's quite a claim Peter. There is no such thing as a perfect device. And so, each design has to be tuned or should I say can be tuned to a certain type of sound with the ingredients. This can be done with any circuit. Some very simple circuits can be tuned to quite a high degree of fidelity. Simple looking circuits on paper may not be the easiest for the little guys to navigate (little guys being electrons).So you have your audio circuit and power supply design and you throw the best parts at it to make it the best thing you can make. Note the qualifiers in that this is "your circuit" so no better or worse than anyone elses who has put in similar groundwork and "your best parts" which are the things you think sound best in your circuit. That only qualifies things for your taste. If that isn't to someone elses taste, then your best isn't the best for someone else.
You therefore cannot claim that your product cannot be bested by someone else's design. Some people hereabouts may have been developing their design for far longer than you. But because they are a DIYer, you claim they cannot achieve what you do. Are you sure you are saying that?
Follow Ups:
Dear Stephen,If you read the Audio Hell article on our web site you will see that we actually describe what we strive for in our search for the best sound, it is our mission statement if you like, to me this is not a matter of personal taste, your choice of music is, not the way it should come off the software.
It is therefore one thing to be tuning a design or circuit, but unless one has a philosophical framework with which to judge whether one is moving forward or not, it is more likely that one would move around in a circle, but regardless of that, what I am taking about is far more fundamental that superficially "tweaking" a circuit (any circuit) to suit whatever system it happens to be used in.
To expand the envelope one needs fundamental research and the one thing about fundamental research is that it takes time and therefore money and even the most dedicated hobbyist no matter how long he/she has been playing with this hobby is unlikely to have the time, let alone the money to come anywhere near being able to investigate for example say; permeable materials, let me give you some background to this one subject.
Take the design of an ideal moving coil or input transformer for example, the standard type 18Lams while good are not ideal if one is seeking the lowest possible loss, best bandwidth and therefore best magnetic coupling between core and windings, so you design a core shape which has a different shape to achieve this, but to make it you need to buy 50 kilograms of 0.1 mm thick 84% nickel material and pay £ 10,000.00 or so for a tool to stamp it into laminations of the shape required (off course AFTER you have had some lamination samples made by laser cutting to make sure the core shape actually does what the maths tell you), the lams are then heat treated to whatever process give the material the best and most linear low level behaviour (this itself may require several attempts to be certain the potential of the material is optimised), meantime you thave bought 10 kilograms (this is the minimum quantity most metal processors will deal with) of 4 - 6 different gauges of polyurethane coated silver wire, so you can make full function prototypes to test for sound, only then can you wind a couple of transformers.
Now multiply this scenario a few times, to make for example the basis for the new GAKU-ON amplifiers, whose fully transformer coupled ultra simple circuit requires 3 different transformers (input with step up, driver and output) all of which have to be matched to each other to ensure matching behaviour, which requires us to make as many as 20 of each transformer to make one pair of amplifiers.
Are you seriously telling me that this is within reach of any DIY'er??
Your expression "similar ground work" would apply here, because THERE is NO similarity between changing a few parts in a simple circuit and what I am talking about here, is there?
Now take the above, expand the concept and apply it to making capacitors for example, and you can add further layers of work and cost.
So whilst you are quite right to state that there is no such thing as a perfect device (although some tubes do come close), and that some simple circuits may not sound as good as others, what governs seeking absolutes resides on a different level.
Like I said in my response to 01A, there are great things that can be done by building and modifying your system yourself and in many cases what you can make is both better and cheaper than many offerings available in finished form, I wholly support this notion, which is why I make all but our very most specialised parts available to anyone who want to pay for them, but one needs to understand that there are realms which cannot be reached this way.
Since you are in the UK, drop by anytime you are near Hove.
Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup
Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I have in the past read the audio hell article and it is, for the most part, the way I audition and develop my own gear. However my point may have been slightly lost. Yours has been stated clearer. I don't doubt you think the way of your development to be the best and beyond a general hobbyist and for the given example, that probably is true. Where we part is the absoluteness of your statement that your way is "the best" way and that therefore a hobbyist doesn't have access to say ... a transformer winder with the same passion for his magnetics as you do. Might not be the exact same recipe but another, that has been through just as rigorous development as yours.All your development means is that your item meets the math (and I suppose audio criteria) you set out. As we all know, anything you make is a compromise. That's life. You might be taking a low compromise route but it is there. It has to be. you are developing a SET circuit. That doesn't mean someone else can't have their own goal and reach it in a different way. Their goal might have a higher bar :-)
What you seem to be saying is something very similar to what say Audio Consulting say in their mantra. If you think you have the ultimate solution, good for you but I find it difficult to accept you have beyond anything anyone else can do. Now the average hobbyist, fair enough but there are some pretty extreme people out there.
As you can see, I have a real issue with absolute statements because in this game, there are none.
Thanks for the invite. Was down that way seeing my dentist last weekend :-)
cheers,
Stephen
Dear Stephen,It really is not a matter of what I think, the way I approach the subject of music reproduction is that the job of the equipment is to reproduce what is embedded in the software with the least possible interference, for good or bad what is on the software is "absolute" as far as I am concerned and if we want to access as much of the message that it contains, then we have no choice but to design equipment which extracts this information properly and that means finding the relevant technologies to do so.
The sound of a given recording is therefore not a matter of "taste" (you may not even like the music), it is a matter of getting to the core of the sound of the recording, that, and only that, is what we strive for, because at the end of the day the equipment that achieves this is the most accurate and so far I have not been disappointed, as each step closer to this goal has exposed unexpected improvements in most recordings.
I agree with you that at the end of the day, it is an unachievable goal, but it has to be the end goal regardless, because what else is there to aim your efforts at??
Unlike mountain climbing, where there are, or at least may be, several routes to the top, in audio there is only one road to the top in each discipline and the quest is to find which one and then combine it with the same in each part of the system, take speaker magnet systems for example,
At the bottom of the "sound pile" are,
Cheap ferrites, then
Better ferrites, then
Neodymium or samarium cobalt, then
AlNiCo and last but not least,
Field Coils with copper windings, only improved upon by,
Field coils with silver wireTo prove the validity in the above, it can be shown to repeat itself with moving coil cartridges' magnet systems, where a field coil wound with silver wire is clearly superior to any other magnet system, provided it is fed by a clean source of DC.
Similar hierarchies exists in every other area of audio, what is lacking is a general understanding of why this is so and a general agreement that this is so and then a way of proving it technically (in most cases it is actually quite easy to hear), so whilst everything is a compromise, there are compromises and then there are "compromises" where a lack of understanding hampers the end result or where the emphasis has been weighted towards cost, either to allow for low price or a great advertising budget, both of which are effective sales tools to the uninitiated and especially the illinformed and selfserving press!
If we are talking absolutes, then cost is not a consideration and cost is after all the final bar to achieving this illusive goal, is it not.
I don't think this end goal is beyond anyone with the intellect, determination, commitment, time and money but especially the openmindedness required to disregard conventions for long enough to realise that travelling uncharted roads can yield great and unexpected results, although it will always remain the domain of the few.
I realise fully that for most people to deal with this level of uncompromising zeal is at best uncomfortable, but without it little real progress is ever made.
Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup
Hi Peter,
If cost is one thing that stops people achieving the absolute in your terms how does John Britten DIY a world beating motor cycle in his garage in his spare time with only basic tools? He manufactured every part of the bike, winning the world 500cc. The other manufactures have mulitimillon dollar budgets and hundreds of staff to make the best in the world.This is something that is measurable.
There are many ways to skin a cat. Both Gordon Rankin and Allen Wright , as some say ,make the best amplifiers in the world. You will not find them troubled with interstage transformers.
Lastly does a Rolex watch tell the time better than a Timex?
Does a Mont Blonc pen write better than a Bic?
A lot of manufactures are in bussiness making the best.
Reminds me that I must buy my wife a $10,000 Louis Vitton hand bag I am sure that it will hold her purse better.
All the best.
Dear 01A,Reading up on John Britten on his own web site, I believe he had a little help in his venture from people who were knowledgeable in areas where he was not, having said that he is a good example of how commitment and dedication can create greatness.
But being mainly mechanical and also dependent as much on the quality of the rider as on the design, motorbikes are not audio, so there are few relevant similarities.
I find it interesting that you bring up watches, one of the arguments that has traditionally been used by the very people who promote transistor amplifiers and digital technology is the fact that a digital watch is a far more accurate time keeper than any mechanical watch, and digital technology is therefore superior overall, sort of a strange argument to use for someone who himself believe in and DIY's the opposing technologies.
As you said it yourself, "Again this is not a audiofool pissing site but a DIY site", so I shall refrain from commenting on the rest of your post.
Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup
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