Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The March of Time


I'm no longer young in body but I am still youthful in spirit. I grew up in an era when televisions transitioned from black and white to color, from consoles to portables, from tubes to transistors, from transistors to integrated circuits, from CRTs to LEDs, and all during this evolution in technology was another revolution going on in my body.

When a mere child, sounds fascinated me catching my attention from whatever direction they came. Others I played with seemed undaunted and unimpressed by such simple noises, and I found that odd. For example, I was amazed by the numerous sonic details I could hear coming from a grandfather clock, mostly in the top octaves. Tiny creaks, simple clicks, and of course the primary tick-tock. Automobile engines revealed their own symphony when my grandfather popped the hood and I listened to the mechanisms for the first time.  Sounds always captivated me.

I lived rural and on a lightly traveled street, unpaved for the majority of my stay there. Quiet came easily, especially when the sun went down. Crickets, frogs, and owls ruled the night with their rhythmic voices, lulling anyone to sleep through an open window. Without air conditioning and other appliances to interfere, one hears the house talking with its moans and groans, creaks and sighs, and those sudden pops of metal contorting back into a cooler state.  No doubt, as a child I used my ears and to their full potential.

As television grew common, this technology appeared in living rooms across the country. They were big, hot, of limited quality, and most of all inherently noisy. Whenever I walked past a store selling them, a high-pitched whine emanated from the open door. It was eerie and I did not understand its purpose until much later in my life. If I wanted to watch television, and I did, I had to ignore the ear-piercing whine they emitted, putting up with whatever detrimental effects this noise may have.

Funny that when I was watching television, I no longer noticed the subtle noises I had enjoyed before its arrival. No longer did I hear the creatures of the night now that the high-pitched noise was louder than their songs. I had to learn to ignore the things I grew to value, those wonderful sounds of my early youth.

The device in a television causing this high-pitched whining noise is a piece of hardware known as flyback transformer and without going into detail as to its function, know that some televisions had noisier ones than others. Some were blaring and others, well, you get the idea. Every television had one. Then came along computers.


The noise now migrated from the picture tube to the CRT monitor and there was no escaping it. Banks, retail stores, every aspect of life willingly embraced the computer and so did the presence of this flyback noise. Soon, there was no escaping it, and almost no relief.

I worked for Bell Labs, the inventors among other things of the transistor and the UNIX operating system. This company in its glory days embraced such change and soon my days were filled with conscious efforts to find relief from this high-pitched squeal. I recall entering my office one day and hearing my officemate's monitor blaring away, his hearing unable to detect its incessant whine. Pointing to his monitor, I asked him, "Can you hear that?" to which his reply was, "Hear what?" Oh well, he did play a really nice harpsichord.

As the numbers of computer monitors grew exponentially, so did my tolerance to their upper-octave acoustic distress. One day I remember saying to myself from that place where truth emerges in us all, "I can't wait until I get older and my hearing begins to fail." Such was my burden that the only hope of escape was for age to take its inevitable toll.

And then one day ten years or so later, what I had asked for on that day in my mid 30s came to be. I walked into an office from where I knew one of the loudest noises came and there was no noise...none, zip, zero, nada. I leaned over to the offending monitor to check to see if it was on and indeed it was. For a moment I was jubilant...but just for a moment. For with this thing for which I asked came the realization that the tiny tinkles, the subtle swishes, the whisks of brushes on the drums would be but a memory, something I did not really want to forget.

As an audiophile, I was at a juncture of wishful-sinful, one where to get relief, I had to give up the one thing that gave me pleasure. It was a sad moment and one that turned into regret and remorse. You see, the noise flyback transformers make is a consistent 15,750 Hz whine and I knew that my hearing threshold had now dropped well below that point. At one audiophile meeting in 1980, my hearing was measured at 18,300 Hz; on this sad day, I realized I lost 3,000 Hz, more than 15% of my total hearing. That was in 1990 and such is the price for longevity.

The point of this tale is this: Value your youthful ears. Take care of them and listen to everything you can recalling clearly what it all sounds like up there in the top octaves, for one day if you live long enough, all of these tiny intricate sounds will fade, like your favorite shirt washed too many times. Don’t do stupid things like sit next to speaker stacks at rock concerts or deliberately expose yourself to very loud sounds of any kind because each of these slowly impacts your ability to detect what you love - sound.

If you want to hear what you now hear when you are old, take care of your ears. Think about longevity and not instant gratification. My well-nurtured ears have faded and according to a rough listening test, my hearing limit now only reaches to just over 13,000 Hz, a depressing figure from what it once was. Memories are all I have now of what a breaking glass really sounds like, how ear-piercing baby cries can be, how intriguing tiny sounds are, with a 30% loss of my top octave. Such sounds are now reconstructed as best as I can recall from the sonic images I impressed in my mind.



 


Value your ears for time will take from any audiophile what s/he values most - music. Listen to everything you can and scrutinize each performance for its loving details. Catch all nuances and lock them into your memory for sadly one day these will be all you have. There is a reason we all instinctively to this; trust your instincts.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:
Copyright © 2015 by Philip Rastocny. All rights reserved.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Mature Ears

I remember hearing my first good stereo, the one that got me hooked on the high end. I was in high school dealing with hormones, a body growing lanky and long, social pressures, and intellectual stimulation; in other words, I was growing up.  Between times of chaos, passion, and confusion, I found time to make friends and explore other people's views.  One of my friends was the editor of our school newspaper and he invited me to help him with something. His name was Bob and he needed to find something a new teacher left for him in his office.

On our trip down to the catacombs of the school basement, where the instructor's offices hid, we wound our way by boilers, stacks of boxes, and steam pipes en route to this new instructor's digs. Of course, being the newest teacher meant that your office was the furthest from anywhere and indeed it seemed like this one was at the end of a mine.

We finally found his office, a small desk without a door in the back corner of who knows where behind a wall of boxes holding who knows what, and there we began to search for Bob's things. But of all the things I found, none of which helped Bob, was an old tube stereo receiver and speakers.  Next to that was a collection of vinyl records and an outboard turntable.  What struck me about this teacher was that he brought music into his world, even at work, and his being different is what I instantly admired.

I recall asking Bob about this stereo and him demonstrating it. Flipping on the switch and waiting until the tubes glowed brightly, I paused in reflection to understand just how unusual this situation was.  In a while, a low, barely audible hum emerged from the speakers and Bob put on a record.  As the needle touched down and the familiar pops and ticks came from the small brown speaker boxes, what happened next changed my life forever.

Music, unlike anything I had ever heard before, sprang forth from what appeared to be everywhere and with a clarity until that moment I had not thought possible.  I had my own record player at home as did all of my friends, but this was like watching an opera at the Met in New York City compared to one of our high school productions. It was strikingly different. At that moment, my ears and brain knew that the reproduction of sound in a more accurate way was indeed possible. I was mesmerized.

I recall commenting to Bob that this was the best stereo I had ever heard to which he instantly replied, "If you like this, you should hear my dad's." Well, I never heard Bob's father's stereo but that moment changed me somehow and set me off in a direction and on a course that I am still on today.  As time passed, I too heard things sound different from speaker to speaker, later from amplifier to amplifier, speaker wires to speaker wires, and interconnect cables to interconnect cables. What I found myself doing was listening more intently to what I heard rather than just being pacified with what I saw and thus appeared my own personal rabbit hole.


 My first contact with a good sounding stereo was in 1965 and I'm sure that you all remember your first similar experience. I suspect that you too remember the moment you felt a switch turn on inside of you that was fascinated by the variations in quality, each time assessing value and calculating how long it would take for you to accumulate that particular piece of gear into your own collection. From my encounter with my rabbit hole, my goal was not only to learn more skills used in my career, but also to flex my mental muscles  straining to understand what I liked the sound of the best. This was the age of maturing my ears; a never ending process ongoing still today.

Time marches on and one day you're out on your own with your MP3 player and earbuds. You stumble across something that sounds good to you and then something else that sounds better. Before long, you too have trained your ears to hear what you like, be it bass, treble, of midrange, but you collect that kind of gear to allow your own ears to listen to what it wants to understand. This is good.

One day, you will hear that one thing, that silly nuance, that drives you nuts and from that time you try to find how to incorporate that sound into your own system.  That is your rabbit hole; this is where I suspect you are all now.

Like any other thing worth pursuing, it begs the question, "How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?" This answer is truly individual and separates the high-enders from the mid-fi folks.

Which club do you belong to? How mature are your own ears? Just how far down your rabbit hole are you willing to go, Alice?



Food for thought.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:

Copyright © 2015 by Philip Rastocny. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Saturday Night Fever

Saturday night is near...it's our first date...what to do, what to do, what to do... This is a daunting question, one that takes you to the stretches and limits of your imagination.  "Should I opt for excitement or quiet entertainment?"  or "What can we do that we will both enjoy?" are questions you may think of when deciding.  Another somewhat stupefying thought routinely contemplated could be, "Will we both have a good time?"  If you are not an audiophile, you will always swim amidst such uncertainties.  And then your car dies or a blizzard hits and all of your hopes are dashed.  Whatever was planned is now gone...unless you were planning to shovel snow on your date, but I doubt if there will be a second date if that is what you had in mind.  Now, you are stuck at home...alone.

But if you are an audiophile, there is always consolation to such a disaster in your ears and, unlike a first date, they never let you down. Think of how much pleasure your system consistently gives you and how much you look forward to "flipping on the switch."  Think of that time you drove home almost in a panic after scoring that much sought after album at a used record store or flea market.  Think of the anticipation you have, nervous to the extent of trembling, when hearing it for the first time.  Saturday nights can be consistently pretty amazing, even when you cannot go out...that is, if you are an audiophile.

Unlike video games or Netflix, an audiophile's system is - to him or her - almost orgasmic.  There were times we listened to something that made the hair on the back of our necks stand up - in a good way. The new conductor's interpretation of a an old favorite could bring tears to your eyes as could a new singer of an old classic.  I remember hearing Norah Jones' "Come Away with Me" for the first time in of all places the rig in my RV and almost breaking out in a cold sweat.  "Who is this?" is all I could ask my nephew who stopped off to buy it in some small town in rural Idaho (is this an oxymoron?  Is there anywhere in Idaho that is not rural?).  The only thing I remember is slowing down immediately to lower the road noise and better hear that angelic voice while wiping the tears from my eyes.

Audiophiles can have such experiences every Saturday night regardless of the weather, your car's condition, or if unlucky in scoring those cherished tickets to that long-awaited performance.  Audiophiles can always count on their rigs to deliver hours upon hours of jaw dropping emotions, crescendos of inspiration, and moments of clarity.  An audiophile's rig can become an extension of themselves, and not only on Saturday nights.

Think about all of the times you were so moved by what you heard that inspired you to do more...or to try something different...or to find peace and bliss.  Think of how you regularly escaped from the pressures of your job, the depression of news headlines, and similar personal tragedies by simply hearing your favorite track.  Tubes glowing and everything is warmed up, ready for who knows what will emerge from those amazing speakers, now that's Saturday Night Fever!


If you feel much the same way when thinking about the loss of you stereo, if you cringe when someone grabs one of your record albums not knowing if finger prints might appear on its edges, if you look forward to sitting down with your feet propped up sipping some libation in front of your rig after a hard day, you are undoubtedly an audiophile.  Saturday Night Fever for an audiophile can be a bit different from what John Travolta portrayed.


Thank God for that!

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:

Friday, June 15, 2012

Photographs and Memories

Most normal people carry photographs of their loved ones in their wallets.  I've seen several grandmothers proudly flip through the folds of purses admiring memories and oogling over young faces passing the time until their shopping cart could be emptied.  Other normal folks carry pictures of their spouses, pets, and friends for similar reasons.

Someone once asked me what my wife looked like and the only recent picture of her was in my phone.  Scrolling through the recent pictures, she noticed several images of my turntable, shots of speaker modifications, amplifiers torn down, and images of wall treatments, all more recent than the photo of my wife.  After digging around a few (over 10) seconds, she finally saw the photo of her goofing off at the beach.

"So I know you are really into stereos..." she began with a perplexed look on her face like I thought more of my rig than my wife. Then she asked the kicker question, "Do all audiophiles carry pictures of their stereos in their wallets?"

Good question.  So I pose it to you: do you have at least one picture of your stereo or piece of equipment in your wallet? Or how about your cell phone? Or even an image brought up by your screen saver?

Com on, be honest. No one but me will know and I'm not telling.  I understand the emotional and even sometimes spiritual attachment you have for your gear and I can relate whole heartily.  I think of it as a sign or a right of passage.  To truly love the hobby you are involved with demands more than passive participation; it also requires emotion bordering on love - yes LOVE!

I admit it, I love my rig and I love what it does right.  I love how dynamic it is and how effortlessly it takes you into the recording booth or mixing studio.  It's almost orgasmic when I hear a special passage and I take pride in knowing that my long search for the Audio Grail is well on its way.

I guess I am weird, but I'm not dysfunctional.  I can say NO MORE LISTENING when it's time to go to bed.  I don't belong to AA (Audiophiles Anonymous) because of my addiction and I don't have to tuck it in or buy things for it on its birthday (well, maybe in Mozart's birthday when I...what was the number for AA?).

So unless you have a picture of your gear in your wallet, you're not a true Audiophile.  Unless you can show me while we talk about what you plan to buy next from your cell phone, get a real life!  You're faking being an audiophile and you need to work on your reputation. Here's something I drool over...


So in conclusion, as the Olympics get closer and closer, think of the BEST piece of gear you could add to your system and in the spirit of AA, take pictures and carry around data sheets in your pocket.  Put an extra piece of tape on your geek glasses and step out into the world proudly viewing that coveted preamp while waiting in line at the grocery store.  Who knows, maybe the person behind you is doing the same?

Greatest pickup line: Wanna see my stereo?

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Olympics

The Olympics are just a few weeks away and advertisements are already appearing everywhere you look and listen.  It is something to see a finely-tuned human being run, jump, swim, and toss things and today's amazing science behind how to get more from same biological material that has been around since our species' beginning.  Undoubtedly, records will tumble in several events proving that such science has merit in this arena.  Most of this science is based on two simple things: efficiency and technique.

There are many ways to dive from a diving board but only one that looks graceful for any given choice of stunt.  A continuous fluid motion seemingly effortless demonstrates the difference between gold and silver, one small detail that sets silver from bronze.  Although purely subjective, one knows when one sees a gold-worthy performance over a mediocre attempt.  One knows when an individual pushes the envelope and creates something amazing and worthy of notice.  And so it is with high-end audio.


Think of the gold-worthy Olympians in the audiophile arena, those who have set records in areas and names that broke through that mediocre barrier into breathtaking performances.  Think of leaders in each event, be it speakers, electronics, interconnects, or noise filtering.  Think of the beauty involved in their presentation to complete the entire subjective package.  And too, think of the imitations - the knock offs or the copy cats - that once gold is achieved, others rush to copy.  The science behind such gold-award achievements in audio is different, but yet the same.

While we cannot change the laws of physics, human beings still find ways to break records.  It was believed once that any human being could not run one mile in less than four minutes. Experts testified to the reasons as to why this was impossible and people believed what they said, so the magic number of 4 minutes held fast for decades.  But then stepped in a young Englishman named Roger Bannister who did not listen to the so-called experts and on May 6, 1954, ran one mile in 3 min 59.4 sec.  It was proven that the experts were wrong and a few weeks later, Roger's record was surpassed.  Today, if you cannot run a mile in under four minutes, you are just an average runner and need not apply to an Olympic team.

So what techniques and efficiencies have appeared in audiophile gold-medal winners?  Innovations that work!  Many attempts at designs and configurations come and go, each claiming to have the new records, to set the new standard, to push the envelope. But the truth of the matter is that few do this and as a result there are tons of entries each year showing up at various electronics shows around the planet.  At these contests, gold medals are given out by subjective judges who may or may not hear actual improvements in the field, but are obligated to present these awards based solely on the relative position of all gear appearing at that show.

Does this mean that OLED technology HDTVs set new standards in video reproduction? Does it mean that transistor sound has finally trumped tubes? Are there no new speaker designs worthy of consideration? No, not even close.  The problem is that few techniques and technologies consistently reappear even between the same manufacturer from eyar to year.  The answer to the audio grail is elusive still and none are truly worthy of the gold medal by the definition of the prize.

Does gear sound better than before? Yes, in many cases it does.  Does it sound real? Well, that's where we are all headed, right? Can you get realistic sounding music in a car? Compared to earbuds, it can sound better. Compared to a home high-end system, no way.

So here is a short list of what seems to work since their techniques appear consistantly in thoroughbred designs.  Here is what I rate as gold-medal worthiness:
  1. Minimalist designs (e.g., no tone controls)
  2. Toroidal power transformers
  3. Outboard power supplies
  4. Carefully designed single-point ground circuit boards
  5. Stiff well-regulated power supplies
  6. Precious metals
  7. Magnetic shielding and board layout to consider inter-magnetic coupling
  8. Application of transmission line theory to interconnects (e.g., balanced connectors and cables)
  9. Phase-linear and amplitude-linear circuit designs
  10. Mechanical and electrical resonance elimination (tiptoes, tube dampers, etc.)
  11. Same electrical-phase mains power for all equipment
  12. Lower reverse leakage capacitors
  13. Lower noise resistors
  14. Flat-wire inductors
  15. Ribbon speakers
I'm sure you have your own biases and probably disagree with at least one item on this list. But these 15 gold-medal winners keep showing up in generation after generation of only the best designs so they must be doing something right.  Even though imperfect, they consistently lead the pack in pushing the high-end forward. See if I'm right: look under the hood and find out what folks are using inside your equipment.  What consistently appears must be what should appear on this list.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Super Tweeter

I've been coaxing more and more from a pair of old Bozak B-302a speakers. They started out sounding interesting but I remember the sound of a friend's Concert Grands back in 1972 and could not get them out of my mind. He built many models, all smaller than this refrigerator-sized speaker, and the B-302a was one of his best selling models. It had a 12" woofer, a 6.5" midrange, and two 2" tweeters. First-order crossover networks (-6dB/octave) were used throughout the entire line.

Rudy Bozak tried his best to push the state of the art forward but his designs suffered from infancy in technology. Many things were done very, very right and others - well not so much. Thiele-Small did not come along until the 1980s so he was just basically winging a lot of things. The biggest issue was high frequency response, that above 8KHz. He also did not flush mount drivers so his understanding of first reflections was missing. But he did understand low-mass cones and to some degree dispersion.

I thought about trying to keep the original design and after looking at it for a few days decided only to keep the original box for the woofer and move everything else out to a satellite. If I decided later to changer the woofer box, the satellite would already be finished. So the mid and tweets were removed from the original box as was the crossover network (moved to the back panel allowing easy access for tweaking) giving the most volume to the woofers as possible. I also bought another pair of woofers and four more tweeters so I had a total of eight tweeters, two midranges, and four woofers to work with.

The 2" tweeters, although an attempt at high frequency extension by using aluminum center caps, just had too much mass to be considered state-of-the-art today. They did work well up to about 7-8KHz and started to die pretty sharply after that (see Before SPL graph). I used an asymmetrical truncated pyramid box and stuffed the tweeters in a vertical array yielding the best horizontal dispersion pattern. To improve the vertical dispersion, I also arced the array and added a large chunk of Bondo body filler to the baffle board thus providing a low-reflection surface and smooth transition.


Although quite good sounding in their limited range, the lack of HF response was disappointing. I temporarily added a super tweeter (ST) I had lying around by resting it on top of the cabinet.  From its limited contribution, I knew that this was the correct direction to go. Searching for a ST that would be efficient ans still sound like music proved to be a challenge. The 1-watt sensitivity on this system was about 96dB/W/m so finding something with a sensitivity above that was a long process. Finally, a friend recommended considering the Audax TW025A28, a gold dome that if nothing else would be aesthetically pleasing.
Testing this ST by sitting it on top of the satellite again provided significant HF content at a sensitivity that approached the Bozak 2" tweeters.  Instead of adding a new location, I removed one of the existing 2" tweeters (second from the top). This provided a smooth transition while maintaining good direct radiation. BUT I had to build a new faceplate since the round one was too big to fit into the slot.  I fashioned one from some thin oak paneling and the rest is history.


So what does it sound like? My wife is the best test to such changes since she is an artist, not an engineer. Her reaction was an immediate thumbs up tossing phrases like "amazing" and "it's like listening to a whole new speaker" since she was truly unaware of what was measured to be missing.  She listens to them louder than before, another sign that she is listening to the details rather than merely tolerating the sound. Speaking of measurements, here are the before and after RTA results.

Before

After

Now given these are RTA measurements taken with my cell phone and an app called RTA Pro, the overall accuracy is in question, especially below 200Hz and above 10KHz, but the relative changes can be considered reasonably representative of what happened and also reflect our subjective impressions. The top octave is there as noted by the marked increase in HF content above 6KHz and interesting there is an additional smoothness in the 500Hz-2KHz region unexplained at this time. The 4KHz peak is still there but not as pronounced (wide) as before, possibly because of the addition of the top octave.

So what does this mean to the high end? Adding super tweeters adds enjoyment (duh!) but the physical location of these drivers determines how well the system will sound. Adding the ST and resting it on top to "test" its effects did not permit the driver to perform to its full potential. Putting it in the proper place made a world of difference in the tonal balance.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:
Copyright © 2015 by Philip Rastocny. All rights reserved.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Push me

As you grow up, one thing boys do to other boys is to push them. Walking down the school corridor or along the sidewalk of your neighborhood, pushing and reception of pushes from others is common, especially to gain power and superiority over the one being pushed.

I was a fly weight my whole life so I was usually the one receiving the pushes. At 104 pounds and 5' 6" in high school, I and others of similar stature were an easy target for bigger males like the defensive line of our football team. It wasn't that I minded being pushed all that much since it is a bizarre male way of showing bonding, it's just that sometimes my books went flying or I crashed into the lockers sometimes careening off of someone else when I was inattentive; a blind side in the most fundamental sense of the phrase.

When I would be caught off guard, my body would bend and distort in weird manners resembling a limp noodle but when I saw it coming, I tensed up and controlled the oncoming assault.  But when tensing up, I would fly through the air like a fully inflated football and launch further than if I had not. Hmmm...something to think about. So when my body was loose, it could absorb a push but if I were tense, I would sail through the air with the greatest of ease. Thank you, bullies, for giving me this brief lesson in physics.

What I observed in this push-and-shove routine was Netwon's three laws of classic motion. But what the heck does this have to do with the high end? Phil has truly lost it this time.  Just push him out of the way and let's get down the hall. 

Think about this for a moment. What is a speaker - any speaker - doing to create sound? They all push against the air! Just like being shoved in the hallway so are the drivers pushing against the air.  And the material used to make the drivers stiff determines how efficiently they push against that air.

Woofers are big like the center on our football team. They have a lot of surface area and are made less rigid than other drivers.  As the frequency goes up, so does driver rigidity and like a defensive back, the midrange is smaller but also faster. The tweeters are the lightest of all and can be thought of as a woman gymnast who bounces effortlessly through the air during the floor exercise. There is the right combination of weight and rigidity that makes each perform optimally. If one too heavy or too light, they end up like me either flailing my arms as I get blind sided, move like a limp noodle, or take off like a rocket.

There are other contributing factors in drivers but this is the most fundamental. If woofers are big and the mass is many times that of a tweeter, it takes a good electrical design to control the pushing and shoving of them.  It takes good wires and good cables to push and shove the internal electronics and it takes a good power supply to provide constant energy at all frequencies and demand rates. It takes a quality cabinet so that the pushing and shoving inside of the box does not color the drivers that are pushing against the air.

So high-end audio is all about pushing and shoving and doing so in the cleanest way possible; not too much and not too little. Over pushing any part of the audio spectrum introduces non-linearities (aka distortions). This linear pushing is distorted anywhere along the chain and the amount of distortion is a function of the weakest link in that chain.

So to keep the distortions to a minimum, one must introduce the fewest components possible (the KISS principle). All high-end gear uses the least amount of "stuff" possible to get the job done. In other words, less is more. No high-end preamplifier has tone controls and no high end amplifier has a switch to select speakers A or B or both.

Less is more. Go ahead, push me.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include:

Friday, June 1, 2012

Turntable Sandbox Instructions: Complete

Here is a link to free step-by-step instructions on how to build a solid base for your turntable, far sturdier than any equipment rack.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny


I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QFIAC3G

My other titles include: