"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

Spend the money you would have spent on mags on LP/CD (your choice), or build
your own

Nick is right on the button. Buy the Maplins catalogue for starters. Then
Morgan Jones 'Valve amplifiers' 3rd ed. or similar DIY text and off you go.

=== Andy Evans ===
Visit our Website:- http://www.artsandmedia.com
Audio, music and health pages and interesting links.

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

"Wally" wrote in message
...
Oliver Keating wrote:

Anyway my 2 cents is this:

Speakers should get 60% of the total budget.
Amp should get up to 40% of the total budget
CD player - £100 absolute maximum (even for a very high end system)

Two points:

Please point me at a £100 CD player that sounds better than my DAC.

Given that 60% + 40% = 100%, I can reliably inform you that your £100 CD
player budget will have to be conjured up from thin air.

Your not one of these people who get very upset if all of the %ages don't
add up to 100?

Amp is up to 40%, so in the limit of a very expensive sound system, you
would spend 40% on the Amp


--
Wally
www.art-gallery.myby.co.uk
On webcam: Black Cat In Coal Cellar

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

"Wally" wrote in message
...
Oliver Keating wrote:

Anyway my 2 cents is this:

Speakers should get 60% of the total budget.
Amp should get up to 40% of the total budget
CD player - £100 absolute maximum (even for a very high end system)

Two points:

Please point me at a £100 CD player that sounds better than my DAC.

Given that 60% + 40% = 100%, I can reliably inform you that your £100 CD
player budget will have to be conjured up from thin air.

Your not one of these people who get very upset if all of the %ages don't
add up to 100?

Amp is up to 40%, so in the limit of a very expensive sound system, you
would spend 40% on the Amp


--
Wally
www.art-gallery.myby.co.uk
On webcam: Black Cat In Coal Cellar

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

"Oliver Keating" wrote in message
...

"chris" wrote in message
...

No, what they heard in the test is valid.
Sorry, its just good engineering to fix, bad engineering in the first
place.
As to the question is a cable worth £350 ? Well only your ears, brain
and wallet can make that value judgment.
I personaly would look for a much less expensive option (good dacs are
less than that).

In the end though, should you connect your CD player to your Amp using an
analogue or digital connection (I always assumed digital).

How many amps have digital inputs? I doubt any of your 70s kit does ;). For
a short run, I can't see why decently shielded cables shouldn't be up to
scratch with digital. If you look inside an amp, it's not full of coaxial
shielded cables IME, but the signal is running down a couple of circuit
board tracks.

And if it is the latter, is there any point buying an expensive CD player?

IMO it depends.

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

"Oliver Keating" wrote in message
...

"chris" wrote in message
...

No, what they heard in the test is valid.
Sorry, its just good engineering to fix, bad engineering in the first
place.
As to the question is a cable worth £350 ? Well only your ears, brain
and wallet can make that value judgment.
I personaly would look for a much less expensive option (good dacs are
less than that).

In the end though, should you connect your CD player to your Amp using an
analogue or digital connection (I always assumed digital).

How many amps have digital inputs? I doubt any of your 70s kit does ;). For
a short run, I can't see why decently shielded cables shouldn't be up to
scratch with digital. If you look inside an amp, it's not full of coaxial
shielded cables IME, but the signal is running down a couple of circuit
board tracks.

And if it is the latter, is there any point buying an expensive CD player?

IMO it depends.

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

In article , Oliver Keating oliver.keating
@NOSPAMPLEASE.ic.ac.uk writes

"Alex Butcher" wrote in message
k...
On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 10:06:58 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote:

In article , Oliver Keating
wrote:

[snip]

Which brings me onto CD players. I always thought that amplifier and
speakers mattered the most, but What HiFi reckons CD players are
important, and worthing spending loads of money on. Now, if you have a
CD player in a half decent Hi-Fi setup then you use a digital
interconnect, so really, all the CD player is having to do is read the
raw data off the CD and feed it to the Amp, and the cleverness of its
own DAC is neither here nor there.

The above apparently assumes you have a DAC inside the amp, and that
this is better than the one in the CD player. I doubt that either
assumption is correct in most cases for stereo audio systems. The
situation with the multichannel amps/receivers for AV may be different,
though. These may have digital inputs to allow the unit to process the
digital stream from something like a DVD player. However these aren't
(currently at least) the norm for serious stereo audio use.

This raises an interesting point; a while ago, I was planning on building
a modest home cinema/hi-fi rig and my plan was to treat it much the same
as I treat building computers; good quality central components
(motherboard, PSU, DAC/Amplifier) and Human IO devices (monitor, keyboard,
mouse, speakers) and spend what I can afford on the rest (CPU, memory,
video card, CD transports). The logic behind that is that I
don't want to spend large amounts of money on components that rapidly
become obsolete, but instead spend it on components that will be the last
to be upgraded and for which good quality/stability is necessary.

When I explained this to the guy behind the counter in Richer Sounds he
seemed a bit surprised but intrigued by my strategy. What does the
collective wisdom of u.r.a think?

Except of course the audio world is nothing like the computer world. I would
(controversially say), that really there is no development in audio left.

I have a couple of speakers that are ~25 years old which I love, and a
couple more (uprights) that are over 30 years old. I had to replace the
cones as the old ones were made of paper and were beginning to come apart.
Ditto amplifiers. I am very suspicious of "upgrades", if you get some really
good equipment from the 70s you can build a high end Hifi at about one tenth
the cost of buying similar quality stuff new. Of course, the manufacturers
don't want you to know this. Of course, the main development has been CD
over the years (although some will argue vinyl is better).

I walk in to shops that have a complete HiFi setup for £1,000 and I am
appalled at how crap it sounds compared to my kit :)

Anyway my 2 cents is this:

Speakers should get 60% of the total budget.
Amp should get up to 40% of the total budget
CD player - £100 absolute maximum (even for a very high end system)


Same here. To amuse visitors who brag about their new hi-fi and or home
cinema I play them a tape or two on a Studer recorder from 1979 and just
watch them be amazed when they hear just how good old and realistic
analogue recordings were, replayed over old electrostatics and Spendor
monitors were!..

Driven by old Quad amps!......
--
Tony Sayer

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

In article , Oliver Keating oliver.keating
@NOSPAMPLEASE.ic.ac.uk writes

"Alex Butcher" wrote in message
k...
On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 10:06:58 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote:

In article , Oliver Keating
wrote:

[snip]

Which brings me onto CD players. I always thought that amplifier and
speakers mattered the most, but What HiFi reckons CD players are
important, and worthing spending loads of money on. Now, if you have a
CD player in a half decent Hi-Fi setup then you use a digital
interconnect, so really, all the CD player is having to do is read the
raw data off the CD and feed it to the Amp, and the cleverness of its
own DAC is neither here nor there.

The above apparently assumes you have a DAC inside the amp, and that
this is better than the one in the CD player. I doubt that either
assumption is correct in most cases for stereo audio systems. The
situation with the multichannel amps/receivers for AV may be different,
though. These may have digital inputs to allow the unit to process the
digital stream from something like a DVD player. However these aren't
(currently at least) the norm for serious stereo audio use.

This raises an interesting point; a while ago, I was planning on building
a modest home cinema/hi-fi rig and my plan was to treat it much the same
as I treat building computers; good quality central components
(motherboard, PSU, DAC/Amplifier) and Human IO devices (monitor, keyboard,
mouse, speakers) and spend what I can afford on the rest (CPU, memory,
video card, CD transports). The logic behind that is that I
don't want to spend large amounts of money on components that rapidly
become obsolete, but instead spend it on components that will be the last
to be upgraded and for which good quality/stability is necessary.

When I explained this to the guy behind the counter in Richer Sounds he
seemed a bit surprised but intrigued by my strategy. What does the
collective wisdom of u.r.a think?

Except of course the audio world is nothing like the computer world. I would
(controversially say), that really there is no development in audio left.

I have a couple of speakers that are ~25 years old which I love, and a
couple more (uprights) that are over 30 years old. I had to replace the
cones as the old ones were made of paper and were beginning to come apart.
Ditto amplifiers. I am very suspicious of "upgrades", if you get some really
good equipment from the 70s you can build a high end Hifi at about one tenth
the cost of buying similar quality stuff new. Of course, the manufacturers
don't want you to know this. Of course, the main development has been CD
over the years (although some will argue vinyl is better).

I walk in to shops that have a complete HiFi setup for £1,000 and I am
appalled at how crap it sounds compared to my kit :)

Anyway my 2 cents is this:

Speakers should get 60% of the total budget.
Amp should get up to 40% of the total budget
CD player - £100 absolute maximum (even for a very high end system)


Same here. To amuse visitors who brag about their new hi-fi and or home
cinema I play them a tape or two on a Studer recorder from 1979 and just
watch them be amazed when they hear just how good old and realistic
analogue recordings were, replayed over old electrostatics and Spendor
monitors were!..

Driven by old Quad amps!......
--
Tony Sayer

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

Oliver Keating wrote:
"Ian Bell" wrote in message
...

Andy Evans wrote:


Trouble is they are still subjective measurements and therefore of no
value to anyone other than the person who made them

Put it this way - I'd MUCH rather any competent audiophile ranked ten
products in order of preference than gave them arbitrary stars. There's
bad and there's worse.


I would much rather reviwers subjected the kit to some relevant repeatable
tests and published the results. Perhaps then we could avoid the several
thousand pounds power amplifier with several percent distortion receiving

a

rave reviw.


One simple but effective way I have found to test hi-fi is to have it
playing a recording, and then have a microphone positioned in an ideal
location recording the output.

With really high end stuff, the recording will be indistinguishable from the
original, but of course there is degredation directly related to the
speakers/amps, so perhaps a could test would be to record the recording, and
repeat until a blind test reveals the difference between the original and
the recorded, and simply note the number of recordings it took.

Btw - what thousand pound amplifiers have a several percent distortion?

Many SET's at the top of the power range.

--
Nick

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

Oliver Keating wrote:
"Ian Bell" wrote in message
...

Andy Evans wrote:


Trouble is they are still subjective measurements and therefore of no
value to anyone other than the person who made them

Put it this way - I'd MUCH rather any competent audiophile ranked ten
products in order of preference than gave them arbitrary stars. There's
bad and there's worse.


I would much rather reviwers subjected the kit to some relevant repeatable
tests and published the results. Perhaps then we could avoid the several
thousand pounds power amplifier with several percent distortion receiving

a

rave reviw.


One simple but effective way I have found to test hi-fi is to have it
playing a recording, and then have a microphone positioned in an ideal
location recording the output.

With really high end stuff, the recording will be indistinguishable from the
original, but of course there is degredation directly related to the
speakers/amps, so perhaps a could test would be to record the recording, and
repeat until a blind test reveals the difference between the original and
the recorded, and simply note the number of recordings it took.

Btw - what thousand pound amplifiers have a several percent distortion?

Many SET's at the top of the power range.

--
Nick

"What HiFi" - can it be trusted?
 

Jim Lesurf wrote:

Or: ;-

position 4: Obtain some reliably obtained measurements, combined with some
listening tests that confirm that the kit is basically OK. Then use the
measured values to estimate their impact upon your own requirements, based
upon your own experience, situation, and taste. :-) (Can view this as a
varient upon position 1 if you like.)

Well, I would prefer a variant on that, call it 4a, combined with 3. Use
the numbers to find a short list of basically OK kit, then use listening
test in your own situation to see what works best for you. Then throw
away all the mags and spend the money on LP/CD etc...

The magazines seem to have taken to avoiding measurements as they take time
and money to produce, as well as some level of real understanding by the
reviewer.

They have apparently also decided they are incapable of explaining how
readers can make intelligent use of them. It isn't a "bigger/lower the
better" thing in many cases. It is a matter of what values may be most
suitable for some readers, but not for others. The snag is that the
reviewers have to understand this, and be able to explain it clearly for
the benefit of newer readers.


Yes thats the point I was trying to get at in 1, it doesn't matter in
the real world if a amp produces .001 or .002% THD. But I do know people
who chose kit based just on these sorts of numbers, I suspect it saves
them from the need to understand anything, and avoids waisting time
hearing the stuff.

I fear it is 'dumbing down'. The impression is that they have decided their
readers are too dim to understand, and they can't be bothered to even try
and explain. Easier to say, "I am an expert and X is better than Y, so
there."


I think a lot of people just view HiFi as another thing they should own,
You can almost see the check boxes,

HiFi (x)
Home Cinema (x)
Second Car (x)
etc.

It stuns me when I see mags like "Stuff" that is full of lists of what
people need to spend money on this month. Maybe I am just getting old, I
certainly fit the "Grumpy old men" description I saw on the TV over the
hols...

--
Nick