Raising HiFi (Optical Blog)

firebottle and optical Thanks, I'll try that in a couple of months when I return to the uk.

So after a tale of relative woe (although it's still only hifi folks), comes a much more positive update.


I've had a few false dawns before, hence why I have delayed this summery until now. Not that I haven't 'really' heard or made significant changes/improvements in the past, more that they have been short-lived or simply served to highlight further issues the clearer and more transparent the system becomes.


A few months ago I did a full recap on the Martin Logan Prodigy speakers, things were sounding good, really good in fact and it seemed to have addressed an imbalance that was starting to be heard from the speakers.


Firstly I must state I am a forensic listener, I do listen for small imperfections, imbalances and things sounding 'off'. I don't really listen off-axis or as 'background music'. It's just the way I do it otherwise I don't really see the point in system upgrades beyond something that sounds 'decent'. That's certainly not to say I'm right or wrong in my preferred listening style, I know most of you guys have done it all before and walked this path so will be rolling your eyes and just letting me get on with it (makes same mistakes as everyone else) and that's totally fine. As I'm finding with my own younger ones, sometimes it's best to let them find out for themselves, so effectively that's what I'm doing.


Anyway, with that in mind the 'problem' speaker has continued to degrade in performance (as documented in previous posts) to the point where I've had to employ room correction/EQ to address the imbalance and boost certain frequencies by a couple of db to get things back to somewhere near where it was before.


Well it got to me, the continual compromise of using correction/EQ which in my opinion does change the presentation enough to remove some of the 'soul' (due to processing/extra cabling etc), was just not an enjoyable listen.


I pulled apart the Logan's (well the problematic one at least) and went through almost every single connection and solder joint (well at this point I was hardly going to make it any worse, was I?).


Was I??!!


On the wiring going to the main panel (it's had a repair before but not by my hand) there are a few 'splodges' where the wires meet the panel. It's a dodgy area as if you pull the wires away from the panels (they go to 3 specific areas of the panel) without leaving enough solder on the connection to the panel itself, you've just ruined you panel . . . . hence why I left them well alone. The other critical issue here is not having the exposed ends of the wires touching any other parts of the panel or indeed the other two wires, there's not much to work with so all lengths and amount stripped from the ends of the wires have to be very equal so as not to pull one of the other wires onto anywhere which could short it out or mess with the grounding.


Difficult to explain but lets just say it's a pig, a very risky pig.

Luckily I managed to remove the wires, tidy up their routing to the various parts of the panel and solder them back on in a more uniform way. All the wires now had the same amount of tension from the cable outlet to the input terminals and I managed to use a lot less solder to attach them after stripping the wires to reveal some untouched, clean wire underneath.

Looked tidy but would it work . . . .

Whilst I was in amongst the panel I had heard that the speakers rely on a specific amount of tension/pressure to be applied from the frames to the panels for sensitivity levels to be achieved. Ie; if the panel is too loose and 'wobbling' about within the frame, the membranes themselves are wasting energy (kinetic?) instead of converting it into sound pressure, makes sense.

So I reinforced the edges of the panels with a few layers of electrical tape, creating a firmer grip from the frames as the original foam padding was quite soft and had lost tension in places. So much so that the panel would actually quite easily slip down in the frame on occasion simply under it's own weight. You can buy special stoppers that go underneath the frames to stop this but I suppose it's also a fairly useful indication of this repair being required?

Anyway, either way it's firmly gripped by the frame now.
So now it was time to test them, no room correction, no EQ just standard configuration.


Now this is where I write the following paragraphs, bask in my humble achievement (yes I realise all I've done is 3 blobs of solder and a bit of tape), get home and bang, it laughs in my face again. Well that's the risk I'll have to take, because for the last 48 hours or so they have been playing in complete harmony. In balance, in phase, in sync.

There is nothing more distracting to me than a stereo image being out of balance with obvious shift to either side of elements that should (or usually are) slap bang in the middle, vocals, bass, kick-drums etc.

Well I'm no longer being distracted, at least not by that.

Before this issue was rectified there was absolutely no point in me messing around with cables and cartridges, valves and all the rest of it. Literally no point as whatever I was hearing from any upgrade/change would be ruined by the imbalance.

These are the things I really enjoy messing about with, having the main building blocks in place (most importantly of all being the speakers of course) means that it's easy and fun to swap in/try other tweaks and it has completely renewed and unlocked my enthusiasm for doing so.



With the speakers back in balance one thing is very VERY obvious about the system now, it is absolutely crystal clear. Not in a glossy, forensic way but there's just such a natural ease to the presentation. No nasty treble spikes or muffled bass. Midrange strings and woodwind seem to cut through the air and 'pierce' the space in front of and around the speakers, something I've still to this day only heard electrostats achieve.

Does my room still have issues? Yes, is the bass quite as deep or impactful as I would like it (even with two subs)? No, but is it a much more satisfying and well rounded listen, one that I could comfortably live with and continue to work on and tweak without wondering if I'm throwing good money after bad to chase something that won't happen?

Categorically yes.


Ultimately it has reinvigorated my hifi aspirations and significantly improved my mood regarding hifi. I wouldn't say I'm so skewed towards hifi that I was letting it impact my demeanour within my household but I'm certainly a little more 'chipper' shall we say as a result. Although it's already got me into trouble for waking up the kids last night so I must have been going some . . . .


Thanks for reading.

I posted about that a while back. I am the same, I listen for problems, not for how deep the soundstage is or for the 'musical flow' or whatever. If there is a flaw it will bug me forever and I'll never be happy no matter how much 'emotional connection' I'm getting with the drummer - or whatever. 

Really interesting and fantastic writing Chris! Glad you have them back on song.

Arke visits Optical (Or Jason schools Chris in system upgrading to be more accurate . . . )


Part 1.

Big Day.

So a big day arrived for myself (and for Jason I believe), not only would I be listening to some speakers that I had hoped and suspected would elevate my listening reference, but finally Jason and I would meet up in person to listen to some tunes, win win in my book.

We got going fairly early doors as Jason arrived at 11 something in the morning after making the effort to take on the 300 mile or so trip with a car packed to the brim with his creations.

This gave us some time to have a quick listen to my kit as it was as well as do some measurements before we changed anything.

I'd been playing with positioning as well as a few other elements with my current setup (the Martin Logan Prodigy's) and overall they were sounding (as near as I could recall) close to their best.

Also I'd actually started to combat some of the 'issues' faced by speakers in my room by removing some things off the back wall which served to slightly re-enforce the bass output from the speakers around the 'dead-zone' that seemed to be the listening position.

My mantra going into this demo was something along the lines of this:

• If the Arke Vader's blow the Logans out of the water - win
• If the Logans are on a par (or better) of performance with the Vaders - win
• If the Vaders are better at some things and the Logan's at others - lose (no idea what to do then!)
• If the Vaders are better overall but don't offer the electrostat 'magic' presentation that I'm accustomed to - lose (as my search to 'have it all' will be prolonged)
So how did the Logan's perform (with my current reference of how speakers can sound in this room), taking into account I've had some pretty decent stuff in here sound absolutely terrible?

The setup as it was on the day:



We played a few tracks via my digital setup, usual suspects for me - Mark Knopfler, John Martyn, some of my "whale music" (as my dad puts it), soundscapes and soundtracks etc.

He'll correct me if I'm wrong but while he wasn't bowled over by the sound, Jason didn't seem to think it was awful so the system hadn't completely embarrassed itself yet. Vocals are fairly present and the mids are fairly coherent with some nice top-end and the bass underpinning the presentation. What is always good on the stats and panels is the size of the soundstage, things were big and tall to boot (well so they should be with 5'7" panels just over 2.6m away from your head . . . haha.

So now to the measurements (carried out with a decent mic and REW software).

I'd always suspected that even though I was satisfied with the sound from the Logan's at this point that something was missing, from two main areas. Firstly the bass was never as strong as a pair of big drivers on each speaker should be. You could hear it and it was 'there' but it never really thumped you in the chest until the volume started reaching rather high SPL levels.

Secondly there was not that texture on the mid to low end that I had with other speakers such as Quad 63 and 57's. The Logan's certainly presented the information, don't get me wrong, but it just didn't poke out of the soundstage with as much gusto as previous stats.

Overall the measurements were telling us that there was a big suck-out/dip around the 40hz area. That would explain the lack of texture on the low end and why the bass never seemed to hit that well. From what I understand from Jason (as this point) the Martin Logan's were actually sounding a lot worse in the low end than the measurements were suggesting, in fact the measurements weren't that awful, so it didn't quite completely explain why we weren't getting the right amount of slam and texture with two big drivers playing in a relatively small room.

Logic would suggest that if anything we should have way too much LF energy around that area, the amount of acoustic treatment I have wouldn't really be affecting anything under 70Hz as it would need to be many inches thicker to cancel any of those low frequency waves . . . . so we were a bit stumped.

Jason has a theory that the larger amount of distortion introduced by the Logans in the LF was serving to 'smear' the output making the bass a bit muddy and less cohesive. Which makes sense as the Vaders should be audibly far superior in this department.

It's also possible the rear driver from the Martin Logan's was actually working against the front one, even though it's supposed to help it. It's possible my room just isn't big enough to support the output from these two drivers working at the same time and the walls are so close (compared to the environment they are designed for) that they are cancelling each other out resulting in less bass than we should be getting.

Part 3.

Vinyl.

I had my 'trusty' (oh dear) phono stage in play here so span some tunes on my SP10. I started with the Blade Runner soundtrack, a great work-out for any speaker and indeed any vinyl setup.

It sounded okay . . . . but aspects of it (in fact most) were behind the digital. Played a few of the same tracks we'd heard on digital and I think the conclusion was the same, pleasant in parts, yes absolutely but it wasn't doing what I had hoped to be honest.

So we threw Jason's BB3 phono stage into the mix . . . . . A mixture of emotions here . . . .

What a piece of kit that it, I'll say that straight off the bat. From a cold start and before the valves had even had a chance to warm up it added all these aspects. Tonality, character, detail, depth, palpability and above all enjoyment.

I've had some good sounds out of my old phono stage in my opinion it is still good as it's comfortably beaten off competition from Arcam, Musical Fidelity among others, which also happily lived in my system.

But this was Sunday League straight up to Premier League quality (for me at least). An audible jump that catapulted the analogue side of my system so far ahead of the digital that it became laugh out loud funny.

I don't know if your system has the same effect but when something becomes that good (especially if you 'thought' it was good or even excellent before) it can literally make you laugh out loud because the contrast to before is literally comical.

It's a Morris Minor to a Mazerati, it's Amstrad to Apple, it's N'Dubz to Jimmy Hendrix . . . . . no comparison, what so ever.

Both will provide an outcome, drive, succeed in business, make a sound . . . . but the end result is worlds apart.

It didn't go off after that, we didn't switch back to digital, we did not move. Apart from to eat our curry around 9PM I think it must have been but who cares about those details . . . .

The system playing with Vinyl:



The following 3 hours or so we were just selecting anything and everything, we had a few beers and sampled some of my favourite whisky but we'd already reached the reference point by now, so mild intoxication only serving to elevate it further. But we'd already heard the system do profound things so I can say with some certainty we would have enjoyed it just as much without aforementioned liquid aid . . . but it was really good to add it to the mix all the same.

A special mention has to go to a clearly very accomplished pressing I have of Jeff Buckley – Grace. A few of the tracks completely melted us with their emotion and beautifully complex passages as well as the hauntingly simple ones. The TT, phono stage amps and speakers just unravelled them with, and there’s no other description for it, actual grace.

To be completely honest (as I try to be) there were a couple of moment where it strayed into sounding a tad shrill or sibilant/splashy on loud close-mic’d vocals, noticed mainly by Jason as he knew the records well. But only at very high volume and it certainly didn’t distract beyond the sheer immersive enjoyment still. I attribute this practically exclusively to my £300 MC cartridge on the end of a rather basic RB300 arm with Litz wiring, in fact I’m convinced these are the cause of any very slight issue.

Keep in mind we are absolutely splitting hairs here and being very critical, very unlikely that it was the speakers at all and almost certainly some of the ancillary equipment showing it’s level, which the arm/wiring and cart are well below the rest to be fair.

System Setup:

Speakers: Martin Logan Prodigy / Troels Gravesen CNO4's (Built by Jason (Arke))

Pre: Bigbottle Audio BT2 (Built By Oli (Bigman80))

Power: Neurochrome 686 (Built by Tom Christensen and modified/improved by Alan (Firebottle))

DAC: Lindell DACX

Reclocker: Mutec MC3 USB (Modified by ME (oh dear))

TT: Technics SP10 with Audio Technica OC9 XEN and Rega RB300 (litz) (Built by Angus (Phonomac))

Phonostage/s: D.Klimo LAR Clone (Modified by me) / Bigbottle Audio BB3 (Built by Oli/Jason (Arke))

Cables: SAEC CCC 1980/3000 (Interconnects) / SAEC 750 (Speaker)

Indeed, well done, and I agree with Oliver. Good speakers do that, revealing what's going on, along / further up the chain.

That sounds like a fantastic result.
Congrats to both.

Which, of course, makes me look somewhat askance at my faithful MBLs....

.... Nah, they'll do!

Great result, Chris, so pleased for you.

You created great tension in your write up, with changes not going to plan, but then a few adjustment and wow.

These speakers sound like wonderful things.

Did sitting that close to them create any issues? Asking for a friend

Enjoy the music

Superb write up Chris and fantastic result.
The enthusiasm is obvious and infectious!
The first time I heard Oliver’s Ektas was a revelation.
Also being drawn into music that I’d never listened to before was a new experience.
My Ektas are being brought over by Jason a week next Wednesday.
I have no doubt they will be as transformative in my system.
Kudos to Jason on building such kit.

Yes, and 11....

Plenty of sub 30hz energising the room without boom. Super clean.

Yeah absolutely Dave, that's an important factor you've touched upon there, the 'service' proivided by @arke should not be underestimated. I am (and will soon be even more) happy.