Hi all,
It's great to get some brilliant designers involved in this thread (ain't sucking up ... I call 'em as I see 'em).
I'm loving this discussion and hope that it will bring light to the general philosophy of how we achieve the goal of a realistic and SATISFYING musical illusion in our homes. I hope this is everyone's goal. Yes, I'm 5 small steps ahead of Doug in this area and miles behind you guys, and that's part of the fun in watching this thread unfold.
Indeed, the automobile metaphor was incomplete at best, but you need to kick off a conversation with a provocative statement. Like all designs, it is the entire system context that is important, as Nick, Jim, Ralph, Raul, and Jose all pointed out.
Jose brought up some great points, but I'm still puzzling through the difference between what Arthur Salvatore would call "noise floor" and "sound floor". My Artemis is not the quietest piece of gear out there (noise floor - it is quiet but not the quietest) and yet it has the uncanny ability to extract musically significant nuance from recordings (sound floor). Other great designs accomplish this differently
I too have read from more than one individual that a phono cartridge is not balanced, but rather floating single ended. Victor Khomenko's (BAT) writings over on Asylum are one source, and I've heard Jim comment about this on several occasions.
If I recall correctly, when you "balance" a phono cartridge (using a center tapped transformer, for example), you don't get the normal 6dB common mode rejection, because you are "halving" the signal in order to balance it. My explanation may not be perfectly clear on this.
I too have to wonder about the necessity of obsessing over small fractions of a dB in RIAA accuracy when in room speaker response varies by such huge amounts. I would agree with Jim however about left vs. right channel balance as far as treatment of the delicate stereo signal and its implications for imaging and such.
Now, I certainly understand that distortions build through the signal chain or through the gain stages in a single component for that matter - that if you were forced to choose in reducing distortions within an active amplification stage, that larger gains would be had by "improving" the earliest gain stage.
Surely you want to address all issues if you can, but the point here relates to the impact cleaning up the signal as early as possible. How much is too much, and when should we shift our focus away from trying to get the RIAA eq. to vanishingly low levels? I suppose the only way to validate this would be to construct an experiment and introduce larger and larger RIAA errors in several different systems.
Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier
It's great to get some brilliant designers involved in this thread (ain't sucking up ... I call 'em as I see 'em).
Whoah, Thom! Look what you started here.
I'm loving this discussion and hope that it will bring light to the general philosophy of how we achieve the goal of a realistic and SATISFYING musical illusion in our homes. I hope this is everyone's goal. Yes, I'm 5 small steps ahead of Doug in this area and miles behind you guys, and that's part of the fun in watching this thread unfold.
Indeed, the automobile metaphor was incomplete at best, but you need to kick off a conversation with a provocative statement. Like all designs, it is the entire system context that is important, as Nick, Jim, Ralph, Raul, and Jose all pointed out.
Jose brought up some great points, but I'm still puzzling through the difference between what Arthur Salvatore would call "noise floor" and "sound floor". My Artemis is not the quietest piece of gear out there (noise floor - it is quiet but not the quietest) and yet it has the uncanny ability to extract musically significant nuance from recordings (sound floor). Other great designs accomplish this differently
I too have read from more than one individual that a phono cartridge is not balanced, but rather floating single ended. Victor Khomenko's (BAT) writings over on Asylum are one source, and I've heard Jim comment about this on several occasions.
If I recall correctly, when you "balance" a phono cartridge (using a center tapped transformer, for example), you don't get the normal 6dB common mode rejection, because you are "halving" the signal in order to balance it. My explanation may not be perfectly clear on this.
I too have to wonder about the necessity of obsessing over small fractions of a dB in RIAA accuracy when in room speaker response varies by such huge amounts. I would agree with Jim however about left vs. right channel balance as far as treatment of the delicate stereo signal and its implications for imaging and such.
Now, I certainly understand that distortions build through the signal chain or through the gain stages in a single component for that matter - that if you were forced to choose in reducing distortions within an active amplification stage, that larger gains would be had by "improving" the earliest gain stage.
Surely you want to address all issues if you can, but the point here relates to the impact cleaning up the signal as early as possible. How much is too much, and when should we shift our focus away from trying to get the RIAA eq. to vanishingly low levels? I suppose the only way to validate this would be to construct an experiment and introduce larger and larger RIAA errors in several different systems.
Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier