Random Acts of Upgrades

Emotiva UMC-1 vs. Onkyo TX-SR707

2011-10-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

This one will be quick. I used the Onkyo TX-SR707 as a processor. Feeding an external Innersound ESL amplifier for the fronts, Focal Profile 908s or something like that. To upgrade and make some dough, I sold the ESL, and the Onkyo, replacing it with an Emotiva UMC-1 and a pair of Yamaha P2xxx series amplifiers from the late 80s.

I had almost no reliability issues with the Onkyo. It functioned like a champ, and the universal remote that came with it was incredibly full functioned, though lacked meaningful backlighting. However, there is absolutely no comparison in the quality of sound between it and the Emotiva UMC-1 that just replaced it.

This isn't subtle only an audiophile would hear it either. It was a night and day difference in imaging and mid-treble to treble response. It makes me wonder if the Audyssey EQ in the Onkyo was totally off, or if whether there was just a generally depressed treble in the Onkyo. The Emotiva not only brought treble and sibilance alive, but filled in the images between my speakers. Honestly, I wish I had the patience and test tools because the difference is so great I can't believe these two units reproduce sounds above 4K with the same response curves. It's just a completely different world. I regret it took me as long as it did to upgrade.

MediaMonkey and JRiver's Media Center

2011-09-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

September 30, 2011

I've been staring at a collection of about 50 mostly unlistened to CD's for the past year. Mind you, I totally like the music, but I've been promising myself that soon I was going to rip them via a lossless codec to my Network Attached Storage (NAS). After that, I would put them away someplace safe. I would have started on this earlier, except that I also promised that as part of that project I would go over the other 300 or so CD's on the CD rack and re-rip them as well. About half of them or more are already on the NAS, but in MP3, WMA or WAV (yes, I know, I know, I'm not really sure how I ended up with WAV files).

I have been taking a whole new look at my stereo, and in the process I looked at HDTrack's recommended PC software. They list only two, both of which I am currently using. MediaMonkey and JRriver's Media Center.

Here Are My Impressions:
Overall I think I am going to have to keep them both for different reasons.

JRiver's Media Center is easily the winner when it comes to ripping CDs. Once you have configured your default codec (FLAC, etc.) network paths, and track naming conventions, the entire process is almost completely automated. I can put my laptop next to my PC and rip two disks at once, with rarely any manual intervention. I turn on something on Hulu, and before the show is over I have ripped 10 to 20 CD's and barely interrupted my strangly un-masculine obsession with watching Gilmore Girls reruns. I justify it by claiming Heather Graham is a babe. She is, but that part is not the only reason. Back to the software. MediaMonkey, on the other hand, sucks for ripping large CD libraries. It feels really like regressing into the stone age. Media MediaMonkey needs intervention both before and after the ripping has been done. Before it rips you have to select the right meta data, which oddly brings over the album art. If you want album art you are forced to go get the tags again in order to get the album art, despite the fact that MediaMonkey had the artwork before you began. This is a process which JRiver completely automates. All I do with Media Center is put a CD in. Wait for it to eject. Done. This isn't every time, but about 90% of the time. Every so often I have to manually intevene by helping it pick a song list.

It is painfully obvious to me that the MediaMonkey developers are all network music guys and haven't seen a physical CD in years or they would have fixed this ages ago.

Also JRiver has a very very nice user interface which is never out of synch with what the program is doing. Not true with MediaMonkey. It's kind of ugly, and the windows are often out of synch with what the tool is actually doing. This makes it wickedly confusing to understand what steps to take next. Is it really going to save Tori Amos as if she were Deep Blue Something?

Why Keep the Monkey?
MediaMonkey does have some seriously nice features. It is ridiculously fast compared to JRiver at importing my 9,000+ song library. Also, music playback on MediaMonkey never ever stutters when clicking around the menu tree which JRiver often does, interrupting an otherwise pristine musical experience, and others have commented on just how good MediaMonkey is at re-organizing files and metadata. MediaMonkey can do on-the-fly conversion to my old Creative Zen player, and of course, I paid for it already so I better get some use out of it.

For the next few months I'm definitely not going to use MedidaMonkey for a while. After that, I'll look at it again, and post any new impressions.

Update December 5, 2011
Another reason to hate the monkey is it's inability to perform bit-perfect playback without plugins which are poorly documented. I have one word which sums up MediaMonkey: TOY! If you are serious about music, and audio and you get your music from sources other than MP3 downloads, look elsewhere.

Theta Digital HDMI Upgrade is for Real?

2011-01-28T13:59:00.000-08:00

According to recent posts at Ultra High End, Theta Digital has actually started to deliver Casablanca III HD upgrades which include HDMI as well as upgraded DAC's. Good for them!

Does Meridian Even Have Competition Anymore?

2010-05-18T21:44:00.001-07:00

I'm speaking specifically of vendors who are in the domain that is high-end digital audio and home theater. Seriously? Is there anyone left besides Meridian who has a comprehensive lineup, and who is committed to pushing digital audio as far as it will go?

As far as I know Meridian is the only company that is in the high-end Home Theater market place who isn't pandering exclusively to the custom installation market. Everyone else has gone *POOF!* or has become available exclusively to the home audio installers.

Even the Onkyo Integra line has disappeared from consumer audio stores and seems to be available only through installers, and I shudder to think of what getting their time to sell me a surround processor would be like. "Are you buying a new home or adding to a new one?" "Excuse me?" "How many rooms do you want touch sensitive remotes in?" "Huh?" "What home automation do you currently have?" "You mean like a garage door opener?" No, no thank you. I'd rather buy used just to save myself the experience.

OK, there ARE others selling home theater gear in the crossover domain, but they have limited products in this domain or they haven't released anything in years. So many wannabe's have come and gone. Halcro, Fostex, Sunfire, Carver. Where are they now? Lexicon is still around, but besides an Oppo based BluRay player have they released anything else? Do they even have an HDMI processor?

Like it or not it seems that most of the R&D money in high-end digital home theater has been sucked out of the market. What we need now is an open-source solution. We need innovation from enthusiasts who aren't willing to settle for what gets packaged up and sold to contractors and the masses as the best we can do. People who aren't threatened by patents or technology and who know that it's worth building something incredible together.

Before I go, there does seem to be one other company who has a shot, Cary Audio, but they aren't quite in the same place as Meridian. They are broader based, selling tubes and analog gear as well as A/V processors at a price range that is closer to what most non-bankers can afford. I will have to think about this. Maybe this is all perception in my head, but now that I get to the bottom of my own blog I'm not sure I agree with my thesis anymore. Suggestions?

Brands I miss and Brands I am Grateful For

2010-05-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

Brands I miss:

* SUMO
* Tandberg - Not only a great FM Tuner, but amplifiers that really could control any speaker better than anything. And let's not forget their luscious reel to reel and cassette players.
* Nakamichi
* Threshold
* Kyocera as an audio brand.
* Snell while Peter Snell was alive.

Brands I am grateful are still with us:
* Conrad Johnson
* Audio Research
* JBL (love / hate relationship. How do you design an $11,000 speaker with $1000 worth of parts and still have to make it in Mexico to turn a profit? On the other hand, they sound soooo good....)
* Focal - Best performing, widest range of top value speakers in the business and terribly under appreciated in the US.
* Monitor Audio, though I liked them better as an undervalued bargain brand than as a high end manufacturer they are trying to become with the new Platinum line.
* dCS - Can't afford any of them, but I still wonder if anyone has bested their Ring DAC for sheer ingenuity of DAC technology.
* Meridian - For pushing the Digital envelope, sounding great and being such a bargain on Audiogon
* Analysis Plus
* Kimber Cable
* Cardas

The Audio Undead

2010-05-16T20:07:00.001-07:00

I remember a long time ago on TV, perhaps the Twilight Zone, there was an episode where in a country home Grandpa had died but he was too stubborn to accept it so he kept showing up for meals, each time looking more and more disgusting. Only after he is surprised with a bag of black pepper and he sneezes his nose off does he finally accept the truth and die.

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that many of us have cherished brands from our past who passed away without any sort of ceremony or sometimes even notice. These days it seems that instead of the brand actually laying down and dying gracefully the web allows them go hang on long after they should have been acknowledged to be beyond hope. Which brings me to a few brands I've been looking at lately whom I wonder if they aren't doing just that.

As you may know, I am a huge fan of Theta Digital, though I believe that they have passed beyond this world and into the world of the past. Because of that I've been doing some online snooping of them. One thing I found that is new to me is that Morris Kessler, the person at the head of Amplifier Technologies, Inc. (ATI not to be confused with the graphics card manufacturer) also had started SAE a long time ago and that has ties to a company which we know know is dead but I really liked, Sumo.

Anyway, onto the undead. I took a look at the web presence of ATI and Theta Digital whom ATI acquired in November, 2007. If I look only at the web side of things it looks like ATI is done for. No new products in years, and all Theta has to show recently is a modified Oppo player becoming the flagship disk player. In the past I have rung the death bell for Theta Alone but now I must wonder if we should have been ringing it for ATI as well. Time will tell.

Along the same themes of death and resurrection is Miller and Kreisel, or MK Sound. As many may remember, they went belly up quite suddenly a while ago, but the original web address www.mksound.com now takes you to Ken Kreisel Professional Sound. Ken may have the web address, but not the brand, as MK Sound is now apparently under the management of the Dolphin group, with both Ken and Dolphin trying to claim the legacy of the professional movie monitoring business MK Sound had established. Good luck to both of them.

Also receiving honorable mention for not quite giving up is the reborn Threshold brand. I really had high hopes for them.

I shouldn't be so melancholy I suppose, it's just that I save my money for years and when I finally can afford what I want, they go under.

Gaim / Pidgin Sucks

2010-04-21T18:04:00.001-07:00

Pidgin is a free multi-chat client. It used to be called GAIM. It is similar in intent to Trillian.

So, the quick review. My main reason for investigating it was that Trillian does not offer encrypted messaging outside of AOL, and that messaging is subject to relatively simple attacks.

So, on to Pidgin. After 30 minutes of screwing around with it, neither AOL nor Yahoo were connecting. Only MSN worked.

I'm very very happy to get rid of it.

Lexicon vs. Oppo Blu Ray Player

2010-04-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

Stereophile ran a fairly decent article on the Oppo player and it's reincarnation under the Lexicon brand name. I nearly chocked. Not because the article was descent, they do that now and then, but because I had no idea Lexicon still existed! Hah!

Apple iPad - Two Comments

2010-04-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

Two things you should know about the Apple iPad:

1. It has no USB adapter.

2. It doesn't support Adobe Flash, but I doubt Steve Job's explanation that it's too slow. The real reason they won't support flash is that the moment they do they open up the iPad to being a remote computing platform. Imagine what you could do if you could run programs on your Mac or Windows PC, but control it from your iPad, or what if you could purchase a service, allowing you to run any program from a cloud based application. This would break Apple's main goal in selling the iPad: To get money from every single application. That's where their real cashflow is coming from, not the hardware itself.

Next up, the Slingbox Pro-HD

2010-01-31T13:28:00.000-08:00

I just purchased a Slingbox Pro-HD from a local Best Buy. In case you dont' know, this cute little device let's you turn either a video source or your CATV/Hi Def TV Antenna into a network resource.

Once plugged in and configured correctly it let's you watch your video sources (think Cable or Satellite box) from anywhere in the house or even around the world in HD assuming you have the bandwidth for it.

Unlike a lot of network appliances out which had completely inadequate cooling, the Slingbox has pretty good cooling thanks to the perforated panels on the front and back, along with vents under the feet which have enough spacing to actually allow air to get around the circuit board and up into the appliance. I thought I wouldn't have any issues with it, but after using it for a couple of days I noticed two things. First, that occasionally I'd have to power cycle the Slingbox to get it to work, and secondly that the underside of the box gets wickedly hot. Not only does this bode ill for the chips inside, it also means it's giving my DirecTV receiver excess heat. Time for a little investigation!

First, had to figure out how to disassemble the box. There are four screws which hold the entire thing in place, cleverly hidden underneath the rubber foot pads. Easy to do. You also have to take off the cosmetic metalic perforated grill on the back. It's no big loss to toss it. No one's ever going to see it and it just gets in the way of air flow. If you are careful though, i'm sure you can put it back on.

Four screws hold on the metalic shroud which seems to be to contain the EMI/RFI coming out of the box. Once you've taken that apart, you'll see something like this:

Overall a nice layout, but not a single heat sink in site. The good news is that Slingbox seems to have taken the high road, specifying higher temperature grade parts than they could have gotten away with, especially that TI chip in the middle.

That is a combination RISC/ARM chip and DSP designed specifically for video processing. At idle it reaches about 100F, but when transmitting video to your PC it runs at about 150F, or close to 85C, the upper limit of the standard issue chip. The temperature underneath that chip seems to be about 10-15 colder. So you can see why cooling this chip would be good for the Slingbox and anything beneath it. You may also notice big copper areas underneath the MOSFET devices. These are used to cool off the MOSFETS by transfering as much of the heat to the circuit board itself.

Something else I noticed. This box is never off. All the major IC's stay hot even when it's not doing anything. The coolest the TI chip ever got was around 100 degrees. As a result, I've decided to start off by adding some passive cooling. Using a combination of new Zalman RAM heatsinks and an old 80386 heat sink I took a first pass at cooling this beastie down. Below are the results.

That round black heatsink is probably complete overkill, but I will say that it's temperature now is about 30 degrees cooler than it was, and that the underside is cooler as well. You may also want to substitute the Swiftech VGA RAM coolers instead of the Zalman. They're copper, and about twice as tall which may give you a little better performance.

I'm not sure either solution alone satisfies me yet, and I have found an extra power supply. The generous people over at Slingbox have included a USB port on the back of the slingbox, for which I have no use for, except to attach a small 5V fan to! Muahahahahah. So, the next part of this project is to take a fan that originally went to a hard disk cooler, and attach it to the underside of the top panel, and power it through the USB port. If I can do that I know I can bring the CPU temp down from 120 to about 100 or less.

The Future of High End Home Theater

2009-10-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

There are two directions I see coming, one you probably know about, the other you do not.

The first is PC based sources. The idea of having an audio appliance will come and go, with perhaps some hold outs, but most vendors going to a pure PC based solution. Sorry Apple, you'll probably be left out because of your insistence of all hardware coming from you. Vendors will be looking for PC's because they already read all the software. DVD/Blue-Ray/Internet Radio, and anything else that happens there will be cheap readers for on the PC. Now, some will take the PC accessory route, like USB DAC's, but more sophisticated, either by offering PC cards or perhaps by using custom outboard processors like E-MU uses.

The second, not so obvious trend will be hyper modularization. Companies with the know how and money to spend will realize that the only way to keep delivering the best solutions, and the most flexible solutions will be tiny modules that can be plugged into a virtual network, all of which can be PC configured and driven.

Imagine if you will a rack mountable chassis that accepts 1 to 12 cards, each of which can be a processing card or an output card. That these cards can handle audio or video. That you control how things are routed via a PC based configuration program that allows you drag and drop these cards into your own custom audio / video processing chain. Further, because the system is so modular, and the PC is just a commodity item you end up paying no more than say a couple of hundred dollars more than a mid-range Onkyo or Pioneer processor.

Also imagine that multiple chassis are linked via a simple network cable, and that output cards are all optically isolated from the network, and master clocks and FIFO buffers are all near the target outputs.

After this there may be another open vs. closed platforms battle. Some companies will have entirely closed systems, and others will publish their spec's out to the world to design accessories for. Wouldn't it be great if you could say, get your DAC's from Benchmark, but then buy whatever room EQ you chose? Or have just one media storage appliance in your entire house, and then pick and choose which rooms get what type of playback? Does your half bathroom really need 9.1 channels of 24/192 dCS ring DAC's to play the morning news while you browse yet another lame ass review for magic stones to put on top of your amplifiers? Those companies who have the most confidence in their products will take the open source approach. Those who feel they have a lot to loose if people can pick and choose will go closed. They'll come up with bogus stories about tight integration and better user experience, blah blah blah.

What made me think of this? Perhaps it comes from my obsessively watching for news from Theta, and their unwillingness to start a new platform paradigm instead of trying to upgrade the Casablanca. While they seem to be making noises about releasing an HDMI card in our lifetimes, what I see absent that everyone is going to ask about next is the room correction software. Mind you, I'm an absorber/diffuser sort of guy but the latest generation of acoustics processing software looks really sweet to me. What good is it, people will ask, for an aging platform to add all the latest HDMI audio formats if they can't also integrate it with the latest generation digital processors? When the Casablanca can't help you get room eq, internet radio, or download the latest 24/96 track is it really anything more than a rack of DAC's already?

I don't know what Theta, Meridian, dCS or Halcro will do next, but I do think that when the economy perks back up the high end will once again reconsider the home theater market and be looking for some completely new completely outrageous product platforms, and I believe that those who don't go into making the PC a complete home theater platform will look towards networking and hyper modularity as the next logical places to be. I also wonder how long it will take for smart stereophiles who also happen to be industrial and electrical engineers to start their own open source home theater platforms. Also, my guess is that some smart video only companies are probably already thinking this way and we may see entries from them competing for the real high end space sooner rather than later.

If only I could upgrade the Stereophile cover

2009-09-16T17:53:00.001-07:00

I'm constantly amused by Stephen Mejias' blog over at Stereophile. In particular the self congratulatory postings they have been making about their covers lately, especially since they are so damn boring they literally put me to sleep. When I get a copy I have to quickly turn the cover so I don't collapse in a narcoleptic fit before I get to any of the articles.

Seriously Stephen, you put out a magazine cover that is exactly like every other cover Sterepohile has published in the last thee years and you want to crow over you choice of border color? Wow, that's just delusional. Do you think that covering up a couple of letters on the end of "Stereophile" makes you edgy? Or was it your daring choice of plum for the border? Give us a break, please! What I think you guys do over there is have a pair of dice. One has colors on it, from which you'll pick the border color, the other which side of the speaker you'll take the cover photo from. You wake up, roll them and that's what you go with, then get all giggly like a school girl if you do something clever, but please don't' tell me that took you more than an hour. Yes, I am including the time it takes to unpack the speaker and take the picture in your single back drop. Come on, splurge a little, rent a cat or a backdrop or something. How about a pug? No, how about a plant on top of those Wilson's from last week? A nice fern growing out of the top of them would be nice. You really want to shock me? Put a mezzo soprano on the cover.

What is it with you sick fascination with sterile hardware and page after page of technical data on the performance of a new DAC? Puhleese. Talk about repetitive. I am glad you are doing it, really, but page after page? What a total waste of valuable space.

Theta HDMI A Year Later

2009-09-16T17:45:00.001-07:00

In September of 2008 Theta Digital announced HDMI support for the Casablanca III. I just wanted to say it's a full year later and I haven't yet seen any evidence any HDMI product has ever shipped to a customer from Theta Digital, and December is not looking any better.

Meridian - That's What I'm Talking About

2009-07-06T15:23:00.000-07:00

So about one month after I suggested that Theta Digital was amongst the living dead, and suggested that they should have built an out-board adapter instead of completely re-working the Casablanca cashcow from the ground up, Meridian introduces a product along exactly the lines I was suggesting, for about $3,000 meridian owners of several different processors can purchase the HD621 and upgrade to full HDMI.

They could probably sell 3x as many if they could make it work with Casablanca's instead! Hah!

NHT changes it's name to NDY!

2009-06-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

For Not Dead Yet! Hahah.

Speaker Manufacturer Now Hear This has announced they are back in business, and plan to re-launch themselves as an Internet only company.

If you like a lot of presence, efficiency and volume, NHT are your speakers.

Sadly, I've never heard a pair of NHT's I liked, or felt were natural on anything other than brassy big band jazz or rock and roll.

Good luck to them just the same!

Nigel

The New York Citty Ballet's "Romeo + Juliet"

2009-05-30T17:41:00.000-07:00

I was only able to watch Peter Martin's "Romeo + Juliet" on television. Most of it in HD via WGBH, the rest through a lower res version sent out via DirecTV. Both versions suffered from a maddening tick on the right channel.

I could kvetch a full pages worth, but here it is in a few sentences. The best dancing happens well before the interlude. The lead's are entirely believable, but I'm afraid there's just not enough pretty dancing, and most of the group dancing scenes were choreographed "loosely." What I mean is that most group dance numbers were very individualized. It would have been nice to see this fine troupe doing at least a couple of really tightly synchronized pieces.

If you love ballet for ballet's sake, this R&J will leave you feeling like you just had Chinese food. Full, yet hungry. On the other hand, if you are looking for an experience that will sate your hunger for drama and moves at a good clip, this may be just the ticket!

Theta: We're not dead yet!

2009-05-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

Finally we see 1 piece of evidence from Theta that they're not dead yet and are actually doing something customer facing. The Theta Digital website has been completely redone, though there's precious little new useful content in it.

Even if they manage to revive the brand, I think any current Theta owner is going to be better served by selling their current units and getting other processors if BluRay is your thing. Whatever business Theta gets in their next product cycle will probably be built on entirely new customer base. I hope their ready to start from scratch.

Why BD-Live Sucks

2009-02-13T15:19:00.000-08:00

BD Live sucks for several reasons. First, it's almost impossible for developers to stop upgrading "features" they want to offer, that means that while your BD player may work today it may not tomorrow. Second, it delays release of movies previously released on DVD. Third, honestly, I want as LITTLE computing in my appliances as possible. I don't want my fridge to run Windows CE, I don't want Windows in my car, or Linux in my DVD player or toaster oven.

Why? Because I want them to just work. I stick a movie in, and it should play. The only features I really care about are the resolution of the sound and video, compatability with my surround hardware and the usual forward/backward/scene selection controls. I don't want it to go online and check for updates, I don't want to conference with the same jack-asses that are busy twittering CNN what they think of octuplets, and I don't want to come home one day to find that an upgrade that happened while I was at work suddenly is preventing some disks from working. Also, I was really disapointed in reviews of early players which seem to indicate that they just didn't have the horsepower to play movies correctly, or that some movies didn't have the bandwidth necessary to create a seamless experience. For heaven's sake, stop wasting useless time on features I can't possibly care about and focus on as broad a range of movies being BD ready as possible. It's been 8 years since the release of the Fellowship of the Ring and it's still only on DVD, but in the mean time every crap action movie that's come out has gone straight to BD. Ugh!

E-MU 1616m PCI with Hi Resolution Music Follow Up

2009-02-13T09:22:00.000-08:00

I've been playing around with Hi Rez digital files lately, and have had a chance to revisit the pros and cons of the E-MU 1616m which is my desktop PC's audio interface.

If you read Stereophile you might have noticed the very positive reviews they just gave the Bryston BCD-1 CD player. It turns out that the E-MU 1616m and the Bryston share DAC's, both use the CS4398. So, this bodes well for fans of the E-MU seeing it as a cheap, high-end DAC for your PC.

Of course, there are significant differences. As far as I can tell, the E-MU does no oversampling and uses rather conventional JRC op-amps while the Bryston oversamples uses a discrete output section.

As I may have mentioned before, the 1616m is definitely NOT designed to be a consumer friendly sound card. You need to know what you are doing, and how to route the signals in to the right jacks. If you are really familiar with mixers, and audio production, this is all a no-brainer. If your a musicphile living on the cheap, it's a bit frustrating. Another negative is that you may be forced to constantly re-start your PatchMix session (the virtual mixer that comes with the 1616m) when you change source program OR even between songs. Let me explain.

The 1616m and it's driver software will not do any sample rate conversion except for 44.1 kHz <--> 48.0 kHz. All sounds have to match the PatchMix sample rate. Under Windows XP, this means that the basic computer sounds won't play at all except in 44.1kHz/48 kHz modes. It also means that to play music that mixes tracks with different sample rates you'll have to either get a player which does smaple rate conversion OR restart PatchMix in between songs. This also seems to mean that some DVD players may not work unless you go back down to 44.1 kHz/48 kHz.

There is a crazy, crazy work around to all of this however. If you have a built in sound card, you can use it for your Windows and DVD sounds. Use a mini-jack to pull the singnal out of your soundcard and back into the E-MU pod as a new source. Yes, it's hokey, but hey, that's all low rez stuff anyway.

On the plus side though, one thing you can do better on the E-MU than you can with any other PC or even home audio choice is set up compressors for late night viewing. The current fad of recording voices as soft as possible and EVERY Foley effect as loud as possible makes this especially useful. I can watch Harry Potter late at night while my partner is sleeping in the next room, saving the house shaking for more reasonable hours.

R.I.P. Theta Digital

2009-02-10T10:01:00.001-08:00

July 5, 2009 Update: Since this post is up so high on Google searches for "Theta Digital" I want to send you to the latest notes here: Theta: We're Not Dead Yet! complete with a comment from Theta, and my own reply.

Theta Digital, one of the early innovators in digital music and cinema reproduction for the home is hereby presumed dead. The death seems to have occured sometime between an announcement in November, 2007 that it had been acquired by Amplifier Technologies Inc. and now. Since that time Theta's website ceased all updates and no new products have shipped.

That's not really the first nail in the coffin. Loyal Theta owners have been complaining for years that Theta failed to do two things. One was provide an upgrade path to the Casanova for the Dolby Digital EX/dts ES 7.1 formats (which I personally believe were a HUGE waste of money, and could have been easily fixed with outboard adapters) but another more serious problem was the lack of HDMI support of any kind. As you probably remember HDMI ready TV sets started appearing in 2003. Six years later in 2009 all Theta can muster is non-demonstrated HDMI backplate for the Theta Casablanca as seen in this Stereophile blog. What this means is that customers who have bought the most expensive cinema processor available in part because of promised upgrade paths can't even get the latest BluRay audio formats (DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD) to play in their native modes. However, I've read somewhere that the next Casanova Upgrade is going to be around $3,000 to $5,000. Excuse me? For about the price you can go and buy a new Cary Audio 11a and 11v combo, then throw them away in 3 years when the next standards are available.

Look, I don't know for sure if Theta has turned the lights out or not, but at this point I will say that ATI has failed to capitalize on it's investment in Theta, and missed shipping products in time to stay alive and keep their loyal base happy. For all intents and purposes, the value of the asset (Theta Digital) has probably gone down to near zero. All the Theta owners have have better options from other vendors. I'm just surprised ATI hasn't figured this out yet.

Now, here's my armchair quarter-backing. What Theta should have done was done what Cary did. Put together an outboard video processor which pulled the audio out of the HDMI signal, and into existing Casablanca's. I'm sure that what is killing them is the major redesign of the guts of the Casanova they are attempting today. My guess is that they ran into one of the classic engineering mistakes. They forgot how much time had actually gone into getting the first Casablanca done right, and they underestimated how much work the new layout was going to take. Now they're 80% done with a difficult design and they can't back out, and they can't go forward, so they wait until some one points at the elephant in the room and decides to either reinvent the brand, or turns out the lights. At the same time, Cary is in a much better situation. They have completely overshadowed what even the promised Casablanca could do for significantly less. The one missing feature is the ability to pick your own DAC's, and if Cary really gets into it, they could do that too with digital outputs and a six shooter like external volume control.

Again, ALL this is speculation. However, it fits known patterns of death marches. Some one prove me wrong! :)

Parts ConneXion and Counterfeits

2009-01-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

According to an article in Stereophile I read today, The Lotus Group is accusing Parts ConneXion of selling counterfeit parts, and negotiating in bad faith. Let me add my two cents. I've been using Parts Connexion for years and have found them utterly reliable and helpful, and never had a problem with a suspected counterfeit part. However,

One of the things that seems to have led Joseph to accuse Chris of negotiating in bad faith was the early advertising of the Oyaide power connectors. Unfortunately, this is a problem they've had for YEARS. Parts ConneXion regularly pre-announces products that never materialize. If you don't believe me just click on the link to the pcXaudio line. They've been announcing they were developing new products along the Assemblage/Sonic Frontiers since I've been doing business with them. I've also seen announcements for Elna silk capacitors come and go, with no actual product ever appearing. I think that if Chris Johnson was actually a counterfeiter, he'd have bought some caps from Korea and labelled them as Elna's. Easy enough to do. However, he isn't. What he is is overly optimistic about just how wide the gap between what he wants to do and what he can do.

So, to Joseph Cohen, your right, Chris does bite off more than he can chew, but that is all he is probably guilty of. I don't believe that Chris would either knowingly acquire counterfeits, or resell them, and I also don't believe that he is the kind of person who would negotiate in bad faith with you or anyone else. As a rep of audio products myself (long ago) I can totally see myself doing just what he did, meaning no harm to anyone.

To Chris Johnson, get those products out the door man! The iPod/PC audio revolution would love to have your products.

Focal/JM Labs: Small or Large?

2008-11-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

I've been a big fan of Focal/JM Labs for several years. The beryllium and aluminum/magnesium tweeters have such air, and naturalness about them I just can't avoid being drawn to them. In addition their W material really stands out for their transparency and dynamic range which few other drivers have.

There is one thing I've noticed consistenly about bookshelf focals using their W sthough, and a recent Hi-Fi+ review points out. The bookshelves have a bit of a notch in the upper midrange. I think it's related to the small diameter voice coil, but here's a funny thing: The floorstanding speakers, with similar Mid/Woofers don't have this problem. This notch makes them sound a tiny bit nasaly. Good for low volume listening, but at louder volumes, compared directly with their floorstanding siblings, this problem is more noticable.

So, my quick advice: Focal's make awesome speakers, but before you shell out money for the bookshelves + a subwoofer, listen to the floorstanders. I think that for the same money, and footprint they are just better speakers.

Dave Wilson Owes Me Money

2008-11-06T13:58:00.001-08:00

About a year ago I had promised myself I would never buy another issue of The Absolute Sound again. What got me so bothered was their coverage of the Wilson Duette. You can see the cover on the right. Mind you, I can see a reviewer going head over heels for a speaker or component here and there, but the sheer size of the review, including at least 4 full-color/full-page pinup shots of the Duettes was just ridiculous. Hell they devoted an entire page to a picture of the Duette's external crossover!!!! What an insane amount of free press for Wilson. This isn't reviewing, this is blatant advertising. If TAS is going to devote an entire section to advertising for a speaker brand, they should give the magazine away so at least we readers won't feel completely ripped off. In addition to that, it weakens the magazine's brand. Anyone with any sense (and money doesn't equal sense) is going to see through these "reviews" for blatant advertising, and will have serious quesitons about just how objective the reviews of all the products presented in the magazine. Whether TAS gave Wilson this coverage in exchange for past advertising or they got paid directly, or they were promised future advertising, I don't know, but no reasonable person would look at that coverage and conclude there wasn't serious collusion to sell Wilson speaekers in these two issues.

So, I should have learned my lesson, but honestly, lately I've been bored by the reviews at Stereophile, so I decided to stop by the news rack in Harvard square, and pick up TAS and hi-fi+ just to shake things up. I should have seen the Wilson Alexandria Series 2 on the cover, but I was so desperate that I didn't think about it and bought the magazine without opening it first. Damnit! Yet again, an endless set of pages of reviews, gloating, and interviews with Dave Wilson himself. Dave, if you are reading this, you owe me the price of two magazines. TAS, I promise never to buy your magazine again. This time it's for real.

In Memory of the Snell A series

2008-10-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

Today I found a person on Audiogon selling his Snell A2's near me for only $500. I hope he doesn't mind if I steal his picture, if I help him sell these wonderful loudspeakers. I really really wish I could buy them but I have absolutely no place in my house to put them (and my gf tells me she'd kill me).

At $500 with new woofers these speakers are a total steal, even if for only one reason. What the Snell A series speakers have done better than ANY speaker I've ever listened to is that their bass response sounds equally amazing no matter the room you put them in. This particular ability, to perform equally well in a small room or large I've just never heard replicated.

The Snell A's had bass that was awesome, limitless, and not fussy. Any room you put them in, the bass was just, breathtaking. I don't mean that they were scary, or goosebump raising, which they could be, but instead what I mean is that listening to them you felt as if the room, the speakers, the air in your lungs were all somehow coupled together and that the Snells could suck the air right out of your lungs if they tried. And in addition to all that, they felt utterly and completely balanced and real without ever feeling heavy, or offensive, as many large speakers can sound. You can get more bass from something like the large Wilsons, and several of the current super-subsoofers out there today but you can't put most of them into an average sized living room without sounding bad.

If you imagine the best midrange from an electrostatic you ever heard, and then put that quality into a bass driver, these speakers had it, only with ten times the dynamic range. The one negative thing is they were VERY sensitive to amps. Forget driving the bass with tubes or pathetic zero feedback amps. I mean it. You'll need an amp with a high damping factor with at least some local feedback but when you do, wow.

Damn we miss you Peter.

The Best PC DAC/Preamp, it's not a Benchmark

2008-10-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

There are have been a lot of new companies and names in the audio business over the last 10 years but none of those has succeeded in crossing over from the professional market to the high-end audio market better than Benchmark Media, makers of the much talked about Benchmark DAC and Benchmark DAC1 Pre.

All you have to do is count the number of reviews in consumer mags over the past year and notice how many reviewed products come from professional sound companies. Besides the Grace Designs m902 Headphone Amplifier I can't think of a single other example.

Honestly, I haven't heard either of these products, but I have to explain that based on features alone, neither of these works as well for me as the E-MU 1616m. The reason is simple, I need to multi-task my audio. In other words, I need to mix it, not just listen to 1 thing at a time. I know the high-end is all about listening to 1 thing at a time, but honestly, most people today listen to music from their computer, or while sitting at their computer. When we do, we need to hear multiple things at once. We need the alerts and digital audio from the PC, but we may want to hear an external CD player, or FM radio, and the PC sounds. In other words, we need to be able to listen to multiple things, and if we have taste and can afford it, we want it all to be high quality.

Let me explain further. In my home office, which also happens to be my bedroom, I have my AKG 240 headphones, and a pair of Monitor Audio S6 desktop speakers. The speakers face the bed for watching online movies, or DVD's, but I spend most of my time in here at my desk, with the headphones on listening to a class. Sometimes I want the classical music from the radio on the speakers, and the online class and any computer beeps all coming through the headphones, all at the same time, but not always.

The E-MU 1616m with it's multiple analog and digital inputs, as well as multiple digital and analog outputs does this all for me. It also happens to have multiple very good DACs and a headphone amplifier. There's also interesting features which I have no use for, such as two microphone preamps, with phantom power. If you don't know what that is, then you don't do much live recording. :)

The fact is this is an overkill product for me. If you have a small club, or a large house with multiple zones, this product can work as a very capable multi-zone preamp, letting you set up multiple sources, multiple destinations, and run it all from one place with very high quality, low noise, low distortion results.

Lastly, if I really really wanted to, I could use the 1616m as a very high quality, low jitter PC to S/pdif converter, for about the same price as the USB option on the Benchmark DAC, then run it to any DAC in the world. Plus, with it's digital processing features, I can do serious EQ in the pure digital domain. Also, because the E-MU 1616m uses a proprietary interface, a lot of the ground loop and interface problems inherent in the USB interface just disappear.

There is one downside. The learning curve for the mixer software is steep if you've never used a mixer or digital production software before. There are more buttons, bells and whistles involved. Fortunately once you know how to use the Solo and Mute buttons, as well as the Output assignments, the rest is all gravy.

So, my advice if you are willing to step up to using professional grade tools, and you need the flexibility that I do you simply MUST listen to the E-MU 1616m.

The Most Common Myths About Home Theater

2008-03-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

This post is for the average movie enthusiast who wants a high quality home theater experience, whether he's renting an apartment, or just starting out with home theater, but who isn't sure where to put his money. Those of you who already set aside 1,200 square feet of your home for a separate room with theater seats, an industrial popcorn maker, and automated curtains in a tacky bordello red, as recommended by your installer, who by the way integrated your remote with your garage door opener, can stop reading right now. This is not the post for you.

You've heard about books like "The Secrets of Home Theater". Tells you everything you need to buy and how to hook it up. This article is what NOT to buy, and what you should do instead. This article is also about making spectacular movie experiences accessible to those of passionate, but modest means.

When Dolby Surround first came to the home, decoding VHS HI-FI movies into the front and rear channels, only 3 channels of speakers were used, or sold. Left, Right, and two surround speakers with the same signal. Sometimes with a subwoofer, sometimes not depending on the equipment.

Today we see receivers and equipment regularly having 7.1 channel outputs, and sometimes boasting up to 9.1 or 9.2 channel outputs. While equipment makers try to sell the well heeled the more is better solution, they keep leaving most true enthusiasts to sigh, and say "I can't afford Home Theater" and settling for using the Left and Right channels out of the DVD players, and hooking them up to their stereo, or even their TV speakers thinking to themselves that they will never be able to get "really good" home theater sound.

I'm going to show you how you can invest in "old school" equipment, and get something fantastically better than "really good" that will make you stop envying the pimped out theater rooms, and start enjoying yourself.

The Myth of the Center Channel
The first myth is that you need a center channel. You don't need it. It may not even do anything useful for you. "What, huh? But but but...."

Look, in movie theaters, Dolby Surround (pro-logic to you consumers) was designed so that no matter where you were sitting, looking at a 50' (that's fifty FEET, not inches) screen, your ears would hear the sound coming from the right location. In fact, Dolby Surround was tuned for effects in very large rooms. It was designed to go snap, crackle, pop, across the screen. It does do that, but the only reason for a center channel was the screens were soooo wide, and people often sat on the sides of the theater, that the only way to ensure dialogue stayed localized, and that the recording engineers could transmit the correct effect was with three channels behind the screen (sometimes 5 in mag 70mm) . Unless you have a screen that big, or are sitting too close, having 3 speakers is ridiculous.

Fortunately, most processors, and receivers let you set the center channel to "phantom" mode, redirecting it to the left and right speakers. So, save your money, skip the center channel. You'll need it elsewhere.

The Myth of the Subwoofer

The myth is that your theater will sound better with some oversized subwoofer than without it. Total myth, for most people. Look, here is what usually happens. You live in some apartment, or even a house, with a listening room 12' x 20' and you go looking for a subwoofer.

You go to the store, and they put a glass of water down next to you, then they demonstrate some ultra powerful 3,500 watt, Class A rated sub in a perfectly tuned room which does a Jurassic Park on the water glass next to you. Your hooked. You don't even pay attention to the sound of dialogue, or that every time an actor closes a door in the DVD it sounds like a T-Rex is eating your car, or that Meg Ryan's breath sounds like Darth Vader. The vibes got you. Maybe you can't afford this one for $12,000 with it's delta-sigma amplifier, built in equalizer, and ability to hack into the Death Star like R2D2, but there's it's smaller brother which has a few scuff marks and the dealer can just let it go for a dollar under $2,500.

You get hit home, but because you use your room for things like, I don't know, working, eating, playing Wii and entertaining, there's only one place to put it. And, it's probably the worst sounding place in the room. You turn it on, you find out that it is spectacularly loud for movies, but it colors everything and you can't stand it with music playing. Your girlfriend can't understand the words (like you were ever listening to them) and Conan O'Brien sounds much more Republican now than he used to. Truth is, chances are you bought a sub that's too big for your room, and you aren't going to be able to place it well, and even if you do, it's going to be very hard to integrate it with your speakers. It's like buying a Hummer to do 90 MPH in the narrow streets of Rome. Nice idea, but just not happening. The kid on his scooter will get through with less hassle and look like less of a dork.

So, my advice after living with an M&K sub for over 15 years, and doing all sorts of things to try to get it to get it to work not only with it's own satellites and in several living rooms, dump it. Instead, get some full range front speakers. Nice floor standers that will go no lower than 40 Hz and play loudly without distorting. Another point, is floor standing speakers are usually designed to sound good where people tend to put them, a few inches from the rear wall, and out from the sides. Having a 40 Hz cutoff is really the ideal response for the average TV watcher's living room.

The Myth of the Dipole Surrounds
If you've gone shopping for surround speakers lately you've probably encountered "dipole" surrounds. Surrounds which fire in different directions with different polarity. Basically the idea (was it some geek at THX who thought of this?) was to use tricks of speaker design to make up for you only having 2 rear speakers. What a terrible idea this was, if ever there was one. I've never heard a pair that sounded anywhere near as good as a theater. The reason is that even a small theater would often have 4 surround speakers, which would wrap around you, enveloping you in the rain, the firefight, or even the deep ocean through the oh so thin walls of a wounded submarine.

The Dipole speakers, then Bipolar and related ideas like tripolar speakers (this may be an MK Sound trademark) just were never anything but "odd" sounding. What's worse is that these speakers often cost 2x the cost of their front channel brethren. Instead of buying gadgety surround speakers which are nothing like what is used in motion picture studios or theaters, buy 2 pairs of "normal" (i.e. monopole) speakers for your surrounds. Buy two pairs even if they don't match your fronts or each other. Believe me, the experience with the extra pair of surrounds is so much better, you won't care if they match or not. Don't deny yourself this sheer pleasure. Really. Audio Advisor often has small closeout speakers which are ideal for under $60 a pair.

The Myth of the 7.1 Processor / Amplifier
I remember spending a lot of time reading posts from disgruntled Theta Casanova owners that they wouldn't be able to upgrade their processors from 5.1 to 7.1, and that Theta was not really going to provide an upgrade path for this great little processor. My goodness was there a lot of vitriol in Theta's direction for this decision. A year later Theta was sold to ATI (the amplifier company, not the video card company). I chuckled the entire time, and as soon as they were widely available for under $1,200 I bought one at Audiogon.

For those who are new, the extra 2.0 channels were two discrete (as in separate) rear surround channels. They were first introduced in movie theaters with Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES.
I've gone to theater's and listened to the extra two surround channels. What a load of huey. It's not that they aren't used, it's that engineers, and effects people are still not really sure about how to treat surround speakers. Are they for immersion, effects, or should they provide pinpoint sound location?

Honestly, in almost all movies engineers use the rear speakers for immersion, and then they realise at some point in the movie "oh, right, the producers insisted that I do something special with the surround tracks, I know, let me add wall to wall farts across the back wall....." Sorry, I just can't justify spending extra money, and electricity on having 4 discrete surround channels when I know this is not how the majority of movies are recorded or treated today.

So, if you've been paying attention, you've noticed the math doesn't add up. I've just told you to buy 2 front speakers, and 4 surround speakers, but only 5.1 capable processors/receivers/amplifiers. Huh? Shouldn't that be a 6.1, or 7.1?

Wire the speakers in parallel if your amp is kick-ass. Wire them in series if it has big warning labels like "This amplifier will explode like an al-quaeda dirty bomb if you hook up speakers less than 8 Ohms" By the way, this is how the pro's do it. If you aren't sure, ask for guidance.

The Bottom Line
The bottom line is the ideal starter set up is a 6.0 channel system. With the following equipment:

1 pair of floor standing speakers for L and R
No center channel speaker
2 pairs of direct radiating speakers for the two surround channels (4 surround speakers total)
5.1 channel processor or preamp that can redirect the subwoofer output to the L and R as well as handle surrounds which are "small" and fronts that are "large"
No subwoofer unless you absolutely can't have large front speakers.
If you are buying separate electronics, buy a pair of stereo amplifiers, with the front amp bigger than the rears. This is critical because the front L&R speakers are serving up the acoustic power needed by their normal signals plus the Center, Low Frequency Effects (the discrete 0.1 channel), and the bass for all the surrounds. This also lets you get really nice amplifier for the fronts, especially important if your an audiophile and love good music. In my HT I use 300 Watts for the front, 75 for the rears. The surround amp is a professional grade Yamaha amp with clipping indicators and it's NEVER come near clipping.
Consider powered professional/studio speakers for the surrounds. They can be high quality but relatively cheap by comparison, and eliminate the need for yet another amplifier in the rack. In fact if you really want to be iconoclastic, do professional powered speakers all the way around. You'll do it for about 1/8 of what your local high-end dealer would have charged you for the 6 channel amplifier plus speakers. Alternatively, they are making some great powered wireless speakers, this let's you place your surrounds without stringing wires under carpet, in the basement, or through the attic.
Timbrally matching the surrounds to your fronts is not nearly as important as sales people claim it is. You really are better off having the 4 surrounds, than having 2 which match your fronts. This timbral matching never existed in theaters, and is a complete fabrication of speaker makers who want you to buy 6 of their top of the line speakers all at once.

Write to me, let me know how this advice has helped you. If you really do love movies, and not counting speakers, I hope this advice has given you a good way to get to movie heaven, while still affording that vacation to Kilimanjaro you were planning.

Going Wirelessly Wired - Home Networking

2008-03-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

I'm an odd fellow. I'm odd because I want convenient things like wireless home networking, but I want performance, reliability and simplicity at the same time, and I'm willing to experiment to find the right way to go about it. In other words throw money at it.

So, here is the set up. I rent the top half of an home. The DSL modem, router, and everything else is in the opposite part of the house to where my home office is. Long history behind that, but it was the only way I could keep my significant other from flipping out over reliability issues otherwise. She gets a wired connection to the router, I suffer through with the wireless one. Now, to make a long story very short, I was having serious Internet reliability issues. Web sites could not be found, my DSL connection was going down at least hourly, etc. When you just use the network to surf and do e-mail that's no bid deal, but when your working from home via a VPN connection, and using some fat-bootie e-mail/contact manager tool like Lotus notes, getting bumped off regularly is a big problem. So I put myself and my home network through the grueling ordeal of upgrading.

First, my Netgear router, which yes, was heavily modified by me with the addition of heatsinks and fans, was replaced by a new DLink Wireless N (802.11n) router. No difference in DSL behavior. Contacted Covad who wanted to charge me $100 for a new DSL modem. Apparently they don't understand, for $50 I could have switched to Cable TV's broadband. Finally, after getting them to test the phone line, I did some experimenting and found the problem was that the phone cored was wrapped around too many power cords. Once I straightened up the phone cord, our reliability all miraculously improved.

Next problem was the wireless connection. My PC sits about 45 feet from the wireless router. However, that's 3 open doorways in between. With the first router I had such problems getting a good signal in this room that I used a Linksys G/USB 2.0 adapter that was taped to the back of a bookcase next to the door. That gave me pretty good signal quality, all I needed was 12' of USB cable in between. The new Dlink Wireless-N router worked fine with that adapter, but I was trying to be cool, and bought a new N adapter for the PC, one that would sit inside the case, eliminating the need for the USB cable, and hey, with the 2 antennas, and using Wireless-N I was sure I would get a great signal. Sadly, no. I had exactly the same problems in this location using N as I did with G and B adapters in the past. So, back to the G adapter tied to the bookcase.

No matter what they say about range, or how wireless N should be better, once I introduced the same obstacles into the mix, it all went downhill the same way. I could have bought a N type USB adapter, but I have serious questions about how easily they overheat. In the past I had bought another Netgear product which overheated, a Wireless-G USB adapter. So, I wasn't keen on another one. Which makes the next part of this posting odd.

My end solution was to buy a pair of Netgear WNHDE111 access points/bridges (also available as a 2 unit kit, the WNHDEB111) . What's odd about this is that after having 2 pieces of Netgear products overheating due to cheap ass design I would buy another one. Believe it or not, what convinced me was the case design. It looked like they paid a lot more thought into cooling these units, and that the industrial designers were a completely different group than the one's that designed the original router and USB adapter. As an aside, I think the same people designed the Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR box I use which had the same basic case design and the same overheating issues. I have NO proof of this, just my guess, but if you look at how the cooling can barely make it through the same basic case design, and how they laid out the inputs, outputs, power and main CPU, you'll understand why I would think so.

So, now a little background. Netgear and Dlink are both selling what we can loosely term "media bridges". They are designed to wirelessly enable devices which otherwise may not have a wireless connection, and even if they do have it, provide even better speed than they would have otherwise. Examples of this include devices like Apple TV, SonyPlaystation, and any of the various wired and wireless media players currently out there. These media bridges work to fool your equipment into thinking that it's hooked up to your network via the Ethernet plug out the back. Once hooked up, they are pretty much transparent to the devices. Since the connection to your important devices (PC, XBox, etc.) work on well established networking protocols, Ethernet and TCP/IP, they should work for any Ethernet enabled device you can buy. Basically anything you can hook up via Ethernet, you can now convert to a wireless connection. Their marketing spiel is of course that they are designed to let you stream High Definition (HD) audio and video over your wireless network, which is true but what they do is create a second, high speed wireless network which now runs in parallel to your original one. What they don't tell you is, they really don't care what you hook up to it so long as it talks TCP/IP over ethernet, and what device now doesn't?

Anyway, I purchased one of the Netgear bridges, thinking "Hey, it's a Wireless N device, it should work with my D-Link N router. Well, no such luck. They use the same N protocol but a completely different frequency, 2.7 GHz and 5 GHz. So, in order to make this work, had to have two. Purchased a second one, upgraded the firmware, set up the security configuration on each manually. Powered it all up. And, as if by magic, I have Ethernet-like speeds coming out at both ends. Sweet!

The benefit in my home office is, I can stick one in my bookshelf, in the room's sweet spot, then run 1 Ethernet cable to my desk, where I have an inexpensive DLink 5 port Gigabit switch, and then I can hook up my laptop, my desktop, even an Internet cam. Whatever devices I want to hook up I can, without buying additional wireless adapters. Another major benefit to this all in my mind is not having to install new devices. Half of all the wireless problems I have had have stemmed from getting the drivers installed correctly. Now, my PC and laptop think they are hooked up via the Ethernet cable, and my network's performance has been great ever since.

What's next? Next I'll probably purchase some sort of High-Def media player for the living room and hook it up the same way. I'm waiting for the Netflix/LG settop device to come out, but I'm also thinking about getting a Sony Playstation 3. Even if I never play another game, I think it's the only Blu-Ray player on the market I won't have to upgrade to keep current. Sony has invested a lot of money on the PS3 platform, and it's consistently been the first Blu-Ray player to meet each new specification.

Also, another aside, I think that if this keeps up the other Blu-Ray licensees will figure out they've been had. Sony doesn't want to license Blu-Ray, they want to dominate it. Their continuous evolution of the Blu-Ray player standard will mean that only PS3 owners will be able to keep their players more than a few months before they are obsolete.

Resmed S8 Version 2

2008-03-20T19:49:00.001-07:00

After trying out my original filter mods I found myself working harder to breathe than I did before. Under load, the filter media surface area was just too small to avoid straining the motor, and my lungs. So, I did what any other hacker would do. I multiplied the surface area by 8, and tried again. Problem solved, but, instead of a square patch, I ended up with this 6" white felt tube sticking out of the corner, and the whole thing looks rather obscene. Fortunately I'm now putting the S8 in my night stand, with plenty of ventilation, and you can't see it. What would mom think?

Modding the Resmed S8 CPAP Machine

2008-02-25T16:32:00.000-08:00

Finally, after several overnight studies in two different sleep labs, my doctors have prescribed me a C-PAP machine. Basically, it's a bed snorkel. The mask provides pressurized air to your airways while you sleep, reducing the number of times your airways collapse and try to choke you. Now, if you just died in the middle of the night, this wouldn't be so bad. I mean, it's just death, but what actually happens is that your brain, for some odd reason, realizes you are choking, and wakes you up, so you semi-consciously start breathing again. If this happens frequently enough, instead of dying peacefully in your sleep, you wake up feeling like sleeping is very hard work. In other words, barely rested.

So, enter the CPAP machine. Keep your airways full of air, and you don't wake up before choking to death. In fact, you don't choke much at all. No dying, no waking. Just nice even sleep.

The one major problem I see with almost all CPAP machines being sold today, and the Resmed in particular, is that they really are not designed to be all that quiet, but more importantly for allergy sufferers, the filtration really stinks. They fit this tiny bit of polyester fluff in at the entrance of the machine, which basically won't filter out anything but big tufts of cat hair. Everything else in your room, you will breathe, at high pressure. Not a great way to spend the night. They do make in-line filters, but these have a chance of tricking the pressure meters into thinkign your air pressure is higher than it is. It really would have been oh so very easy for Resmed to put in a HEPA filter on the inake.

I should have taken a picture of the intake before I cleaned it for you to see. It was really dirty. Also, instead of providing you with a place to put an intake filter, or at least a place to attach one to, Remsed instead has an opening that makes it almost impossible to attach anything useful to the intake, like for instance, a muffler, or a HEPA filter. Very frustrating. And on top of everything else, my MD prescribed this particular model. Mind you, it works very well, and I understand it's very reliable, and small and portable and the integrated humidifier is pretty sweet, but they are like morticians. They really don't want you shopping around for the best casket, they want you to buy the one they tell you to buy.

So, what is a hacker like me to do? Well, it turns out that in the woodworking and industrial worlds they make these huge dust collection/air cleaning systems. Often a professional mill work or woodworking shop, and sometimes advanced hobbyists, will have large dust collectors with 4-6" ducts running around their shop, sucking up all the wood chips and keeping the shop clean and the air breathable as the craftspeople work. The air gets expelled in a variety of ways, including through these long polyester felt tubes, at the bottom of which is usually a trash bin of some sort. Anyway, the point is, the polyester felt used in these bags normally filters materials down to 1 micron, and after getting nice and packed with wood dust, they get even better, filtering down to 0.3 microns, or about. Not quite HEPA standards (0.3 microns all the time) but MUCH better than what Resmed provides.

So, my solution? Purchase a bag from Oneida Air , cut out just enough filter media to cover the intake, duct tape it in place, and voila, suddenly I can breathe easier at night. :) I've tried it at least one night, and it worked fine, with no apparent change in performance of the CPAP machine. If I was really clever, what I would do is measure the amperage while it runs to see if there's a difference in strain on the air pump with and without the felt, bur right now, my work and school are taking up too much of my time. If I had more time I would have created a felt "pocket" so that I could increase the surface area of the filter. In the next incarnation this is probably what I will do, though honestly it's hard to tell it needs it.

The Things We Do for Love

2008-02-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

When you are looking at a mid-80s piece of gear the first thing you have to look at are the power supply filter caps, like the one's I pulled out of the Yammie yesterday.

They are in pretty good shape, and will probably last a while longer, but let's face it, these caps are 20 years old. They aren't fresh anymore, and if they go, you risk loosing everything else in the component. As it turns out, the Yamaha, Sumo Polaris and other amplifiers from this era shared the same filter caps.

Today, unfortunately, these caps are extremely difficult to come by. What makes them so special is the 80V rating. You can buy 15,000uF 100V caps right off the shelf, without any problem however they tend to be 120mm long. About 30 mm longer than the originals. The only manufacturer I could find that still makes them is Nippon Chemi-Con, so as a result of this it looks like I'm going to be forced to purchase a small lot of them, and then try to resell any I don't use. Not exactly how I planned on making extra cash this year.

However, if you find yourself in the same boat as I am, and need these caps, send me a yell, I'll be happy to sell you what I don't use. :)

The Yamaha P2100 Amplifier

2008-02-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

The P2100 was introduced in 1977, about 10 years before the P2075, and it's interesting to look at the differences that there are in the circuits of these two amplifiers.

The 2075 is about a 50 W/Channel stereo amplifier. It includes fully balanced inputs thanks to a pair of JRC op-amps, as well as monolithic chip driver and amplifier stages. While you may sniff at the chip amp design, they did a lot of things better in the 2075 than in the 2100. The inputs are truly balanced, many of the audio signal resistors are metal film, copious amounts of bypass capacitors are used throughout the design, and the output stage is heavily protected. Also, the 2075 relies on a lot of ceramic capacitors used as bypass caps.

On the other hand the P2100, while it has a completely discrete audio path, has a single ended input, and almost no bypass capacitors to speak of. The power supply rails go through three different boards with no local capacitor storage at all. While the resistors are mostly cheap carbon composite the capacitors are all polystyrene or tantalum. There's also almost no output protection to speak of. A couple of thermal cut off switches attached to the heat sinks are all you get.

Both amps use several cemented resistors especially near the output stages.

So, the question is what to do, what to do. First, the 15,000uF/86V screw terminal storage caps in the power supply are completely unavailable today. I'm going to have to find suitable substitutes. This probably means designing a new power supply board. If I'm going to do that, I might as well throw in some discrete, zero-recovery diodes, and large value bypass caps.

Next, the cement and carbon comp. resistors will have to go. So will every single electrolytic in the unit.

Last, if I get really ambitious, I'll design a new input driver board to turn the input into a truly balanced design. I'll probably use the design from the 2075 to stay true to the Yamaha spirit.

More when I start ordering parts. :)

Being a Harvard Extension School Student

2007-09-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

It may be obvious if you think of it, but in your life, the most important upgrades you can make is to yourself. That is, to upgrade your capabilities mentally or physically. As a result of this kind of thinking I have begun taking courses at the Harvard Extension School (HES).

One of the most frequent difficulties I have is explaining to others what it means to be a student of HES, compared to a "real Harvard student." I'll try to answer this for students, potential students, parents and anyone who wants a quick overview of how the two schools are different.

As the HES website notes, of all the colleges that make up Harvard University, only two grant undergraduate degrees, HES and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

We can divide the differences between HES and FAS in the following broad categories:

Admissions
Size
Course selection
Price
Community
Props

Admissions
HES is easy to get into compared to FAS. This is one major reason HES students just don't get the respect. More below. Harvard keeps a severe boundary between admissions to HES and FAS. The only legitimate way to get into FAS is to go through the FAS admissions process. There is no transfer of students between the two schools.

Size
Harvard FAS has approximately 6,000 undergraduate students enrolled in any given year, while HES has about 600. Also, according to my calculations, HES accepts around 120-180 degree applicants per year. So one way to look at it is that HES is a very small college in a huge university. As a student, the relationship you have to the undergraduate office is really intimate. They know you. Your not going to get away with much, so be careful who you flip off while driving or walking through Cambridge, it could have an immediate effect on your academic progress.

Course Selection
Academically, the biggest difference is not in quality, but in quantity. If you look at the picture above you'll see the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course catalog on the top, with the HES course catalog on the bottom. The difference is HUGE. FAS offers many more courses, and many more degree specialties. While HES offers many areas of "serious" academic study, it offers no practical art class and only 5 music classes, with only one touching on western art music (i.e. classical). If I may launch from the words of Professor Robert Levine, with apologies, who argues that classical music is essential to the educated mind, if not soul, this lack of potential for a classical musical education is a place where I really wish FAS would improve and then promote. It would give the school a richness I think is missing.

As far as academic quality and rigor of study, HES shares many of the professors from other Harvard colleges, including not only FAS but Harvard Medical School as well, and some classes are identical, given by the same teachers, using the same materials and grading. Indeed, in order to get an HES degree, you must complete at least 52 units with Harvard faculty.

There is however a very bright side to all of this. Keep your GPA over 3.33 and you can apply for special student status, allowing you to take courses through FAS (at full FAS prices!) during the day. A major incentive not to ever get an F.

Price
The prices for courses at HES are very reasonable, it's like an expensive community college. Undergraduate, for credit courses are around $700-$900 each.

Community
The other big way in which HES is different than FAS is the sense of community. There are student organizations and student led activities but with the average student working full time and not living on campus it doesn't feel like a college experience to me, and that is a sad thing. I regret not only not having finished my undergrad when I was young but also not having made the lifelong friends people make in college.

Props
What the social standing / pecking order is of HES students compared to FAS students is a huge and real issue. It is too big a topic for this entry but I am going to spend some time researching it and writing on each aspect of it in the future. But, the quick answer is, right now there isn't much consensus even within the university. Students from FAS and HES don't actually know how to act around each other. It's pretty funny sometimes, sometimes it's sad. Do FAS students say they go to Harvard or FAS? Should extension school students say they go to Harvard or HES? Is that discriminatory or honest? See how messy this is? It's like a bad joke that begins:

"Two Harvard students walk into a bar, the bartender looks up and says ......... "

Works Cited
Even though this IS just a blog, Harvard (FAS and HES) takes plagiarism very seriously, so to avoid being accused of not citing sources 50 years from now as I'm about to accept my Ph.D. (hah!) I would like to note my sources. Much of the materials here are from the HES and FAS websites, and catalogs, especially the Harvard Fact Book, and the Harvard at a Glance web page.

There's no Such Thing as a Good Remote

2007-06-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

My perfect remote control is an old Marantz RC2000. It was a hungry beast when it came to batteries, but it was an awesome remote when it came to behaving just like you wanted it to, visibility and reliability.

The Logitech Harmony 520 remote, by comparison, was svelte, a battery miser, and an absolutely selfish, manipulative bitch of an appliance. I took particular glee in recycling it's innards when it froze up on me and no amount of replacing the batteries would work. About a week after I had thrown it out, Logitech sent me a very nice e-mail informing me about the remote's "safe mode" boot process. Sorry, too late. I've moved on. Damned if I want an appliance in my life which needs a "safe mode" to boot. Damnit, would it have cost them that much to include a reset button underneath?

I purchased a new Marantz 1400 from Accessories4Less which made it a bargain, and it arrived promptly, with no fuss.

The good news:

Easy programmability, not only text, and buttons but especially, the MACROS are a breeze compared to the lame ass browser/wizard based interface Logitech uses.
Most devices were built in.

The bad news:

Really poor visibility of the LCD
Won't learn new Samsung TV commands (but built in Samsung codes work), leaving me without the compass buttons.
Theta commands not built in.

Am I happier than I was with the Logitech? Yes! Am I completely satisfied? No.

For those of you out there with remotes which do everything you need, tonight, when you are watching Stargate SG-1 re-runs in Dolby Surround, hold the remote close to your breast, and tell it how lucky you really are.

The New Era of Low Quality Appliances

2007-06-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

You know, I hate to say this, but my experience lately with high technology gadgets has been really terrible.

Let me explain. Over the last two years I've invested in the following:

Samsung 50" 1080p DLP TV
HP PC
New NVidia 7600 video card
Hauppague WinTV-PVR USB2 TV recorder
Logitech Harmony 520 remote.
Netgear USB Wireless adapter
Netgear WGR614v4 Router (not so new)
Pentax Optio pocket digital camera
Lumix Digital camera
Panasonic 3 station phone system

In almost every case, there was some disappointment involved.

First, I really didn't want a 50" TV, but my GF complained about the 37" TVs we saw being too pixilated, and Samsung was really the only brand she liked. So four hours of arguing later, she sees the latest 50" DLP and says "Oh, that's nice" and I'm so frustrated I say "DONE!" and we buy it, for our tiny living room with the couch 5' away from it! Take it home, lug it up the stairs myself, turn it on, and after it's finished scanning all the cable channels, it's working perfectly. For 6 hours. Call up Samsung on 6/2. 6/9 they call me and tell me that the parts they ordered aren't in yet, will have to wait until 6/15 or so to get the repair person out. I'm out $2k for six hours of TV. Also, now that the TV is in, my GF says she doesn't care if I get a small TV or not. The she tells me in the same breath they aren't as good. Lesson learned: Pay for the delivery, so that if the thing breaks you can have them haul it out and exchange it for you.

The HP PC which I am typing this on was sold to me as having half a gig of memory, expandable to 4. Well, the truth is, it had less than 512 Megs usable because part of that was used by the on-board graphics card. And despite the Staple's salesperson's confident assurance that it would take 4 Gigs, it won't. On the plus side, (probably thanks in part to the diligent work of US Attorney's before the Bush purge) the $50 rebate offer was actually paid in a timely manner.

The WinTV-PVR/USB2 appliance stops working if the CPU gets too hot, which is often unless you add a heatsink and fan.

For better performance with Half-Life 2 I purchased a new NVidia 7600 card at Best Buy. The NVidia card keeps having random stuck thread issues when replaying things recorded in Windows Media Player, it's especially bad if I have other windows open.

The Logitech Harmony 520 remote control is now sitting in the trash, because after having to change a configuration again through the stinking Hell Hole of a web site they use to manage your remote, it froze up on me and there's no way to reset it to the original factory conditions. No real "reset" button on the bleeding thing.

Both networking devices purchased from Netgear also are also having reliability problems. I know for a fact that the router overheats, and suspect the USB adapter does as well. How do I know? Well, after adding heat sinks and fan to the WGR614v4 router, the thing ONLY breaks down when the fan stops working. I would totally throw it out if the Linksys routers worked with my VPN software which I use to teleconference from work. But guess what? Even though Linksys and my VPN software are made by different divisions of Cysco, they actually don't work right. Also, I find Linksys installation software to be buggy, and din't integrate well with Windows XP on my previous PC. So I'm basically F*d.

The funny thing is, the Netgear wireless router appliance is about the same size, shape and has the same basic layout as the Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR appliance. Makes me wonder if they share the same industrial design house. Also, I've been really tempted to buy the new Netgear wireless media devices, so I can hook it up to my new Samsung DLP TV (if it's ever working again) but I read a couple of reviews online that complained about it inexplicably dropping out just like the problems I've had with their router and USB wireless adapter. Makes me want to stay away from it unless I can get an Ethernet cable run to the living room.

The Pentax Optio camera froze during a download and wouldn't come back until after I threw it into the trash. My GF rescued it so it's hers. The Lumix camera on the other hand has worked great, but it's sure bulky by comparison.

The Panasonic wireless phone works fine, but if the power is out for too long the base station forgets what time it is. Crap, it's 2007, don't they have that figured out yet?

So, I guess the point to all of this is, I used to like improvements and upgrades, but damn, with the low reliability of electronics being sold these days, I really am put off on ever upgrading anything again. I don't care if they release 100 Gbyte wireless routers. So long as the one I have works, I'm leaving them alone, because it seems to me that I'm going to have to buy 2 of anything in order to get 1 that works. So from now on, I'll double the price of anything I buy before I decide to purchase a new one or not.

Is it wrong of me to want things that are simple, and reliable? I don't want Microsoft running my refrigerator, I don't want a USB adapter in my car, I don't want an operating system in my camera, and I don't ever, ever want to wait for my phone to boot up. I press the button, and it is waiting for me to dial. End of story! No flashing lights, no slide shows as it figures out that it's a phone, nothing.

Based on all of this, go ahead and ask me how many years it's going to be before I give up my landline telephone.

Ebay Madness

2007-04-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

About two months ago I ordered a vintage Yamaha amplifier to use for my surrounds in the home theater setup. I ordered it from a vendor with a fantastic rating who did a lot of business with pro audio gear.

It took him a month to get me the amplifier, and when it got here it had a bad relay. Honestly, I should have given him a negative rating, but since it gave me an excuse to open the amp up and do things to it, I only gave him a neutral rating.

Anyway, the point is, because of this, my next project is upgrading a Yamaha P2075.

I've already replaced most of the power supply caps and by-pass caps. I removed the relay, and replaced it with a relay in a socket. 20 years from now when this relay goes bad, it will take some one 3 minutes to replace it. I've also removed and socketed the op-amps with NE5532. Not top of the line anymore, but they were good enough to give the Benchmark DAC-1 a Class A rating from Stereophile. If this amp wasn't just for the surround speakers I might use the latest op amp from National semi, their much lauded LM4562.

Next week I'll be finishing up the capacitor upgrades, including replacing the coupling caps and also replacing cement resistors with top-of-the-line Mills 5 Watts.

By the way, I really really like the Mills resistors for reliability. I accidentally shorted a Tandberg supply with them in it, and it was only when I noticed smoke coming off one that I realised what I had done. That must have been 10 seconds of severe overload. Once I let everything cool off, the Mills resistor measured exactly the same value as it had started with. Because of this, wherever the reliability of a power resistor is in question, I always use a Mills. Plus, they have a great range of values. If I can't use those, I will use a severely over-speced Vishay Metal Film Power (PR02, 03, etc.)

Next time I'll post before and after pics.

Cheers!

High End Hi Fidelity: Surviving as an Industry

2007-03-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Lots of interesting things are happening to the Hi Fidelity Industry (HFI). By HFI I mean several different groups:

Recording artists, and music labels
Hi Fi equipment manufacturers
Retail stores of CDs and stereo reproduction equipment
Internet Radio

Some is positive, and some is negative, but I think that the negative will eventually become positive.

The advent of MP3 music players and online music providers has begun to destroy the bastion of power that were major record labels. The biggest contributor to this isn't the technology itself, but the ability of consumers to purchase single tracks at a time. While this may mean the end of the concept album in pop-music land, I think in the long run, it will mean the decrease of influence that major record labels will have on our culture and music.

Also, recently record labels have tried to destroy small mom and pop internet radio stations by imposing a flat fee per record played. This is a boneheaded move. The independent artists will quickly find this as an opportunity, and regroup, offering the independent radio stations a sweeter deal than they had before. The indy-radio station will return, only with even LESS pop music/major label influence. Instead of destroying the indy-station, they will just reduce the relevance and power that "major record labels" will weild.

Another interesting trend is that serious music listeners are buying local, and directly from artists. The closing of 800 CD stores in 2006 will mean that music listeners will be buying more from their local symphonies, and jazz ensembles than they did before, meaning at the end of the day that musicians, especially good musicians, will make more money than they ever did before. This coupled with the inddependent radio station revival which will occur, will mean we will at the end of the day get much better modern music than we ever did before.

I also think that we are going to see more classical music being actually recorded. Why? Because with the closing down of major stores keeping back-catalogs dating back 50 years, there will be more immediate demand for the purchase of CD's before, and after concerts today.

I was going to write this all together as a long post, but I think I will stop here, and post more tomorrow about how the equipment industry will survive as well.

Power Conditioners Go Green

2007-03-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

A few years ago PS Audio and Richard Gray helped energize the market for power conditioning products. Both seemed to offer real, measurable improvements in sound and video quality. In a way they started a race which continues to this day.

While the Richard Grey appoach has always been inherently "green", the PS Audio approach certainly was not. By using class A/B amplifiers, they would burn a lot of electricity and fossil fuels just by being turned on and they were every expensive per watt. On the other hand, the Power Plants could guarantee the quality of the output signal, something RG's approach, being in parallel with your devices, could not do.

Because of this, when ExactPower showed up with a radical, green approach to generating perfectly clean AC power, I thought surely the Power Plants would have serious competition. By using a buck/boost transformer in the path of the AC, they could blow the Power Plants out of the water in terms of wattage, with efficiency's over 90%, compared to the 50% or so efficient Power Plants.

To my surprise, Exact Power doesn't seem to have made many inroads. They list one dealer and seem to want to do most of their business over the net. I have no idea how many units they sell a year.

In the mean time, PS Audio has come up with a much more efficient design. They aren't giving out many details on how they are doing it, but it sounds a lot like they are borrowing some ideas from Bob Carver's amplifiers. Carver amplifiers would use power supplies with multiple, fixed rails. A switch before the output stage would select one rail or the other based on the incoming waveform, and the output amplifier would be responsible for cushioning these fixed-step changes as well as generating the final output to the speakers.

My point to all of this rambling is just that I'm glad to see that more high-tech approaches to power conditioning are going beyond the brute-force approach and using technology which is not only better sounding, but better for the environment and for the consumer's pocket books as well.

Happy Listening!

Roger Sanders of InnerSound is Back

2007-03-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

I found out through the web grapevine that Roger Sanders, founder of InnerSound is back, and has started a new company, focusing on electronics at Sanders Sound Systems.

For a short period of time I was the New England rep for InnerSound. In a way, I was the catalyst for good and bad things to happen to Roger. My girlfriend was producing ads for InnerSound, which ran in Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. When he ran full page ads in TAS, they often complemented Sara by copying the color schemes on the cover.

Anyway, around 2002 I was also the rep for a company I used to do some industrial and PCB design for, Smart Theater Systems (now Smart Devices). Norm from SMART called me up and said he wanted to go to the NY Home Theater Expo held in NY every year, but wanted to share a room with some one. SMART was producing a very nice performing (if industrial looking) line of power conditioners, as well as licensing the Hafler amplifier designs to produce a hybrid tube/solid-state amplifier which was well received. As it turned out, at the time InnerSound and SMART were both located in Georgia, so getting them together was pretty easy.

Anyway, Roger had the speakers, and SMART had the amplifiers, and together we had a budget for a complete room display. At this convention, John Marks from Stereophile spent a long enough time auditioning the InnerSound speakers to agree to finally commit to giving them a real review. You'd think Roger would have been really happy with me. Nope, he ignored me completely, and chose to have dinner with designers of a new tube amp that as far as I know was never sold.

Anyway, Stereophile gave them a great review, which is when Roger's fortune's changed for the worse. At some point Roger met a man with money to invest, who convinced him to move the factory from Georgia to Colorado. After this, as is well known, there was a falling out, and Roger left InnerSound. So, I was good for Roger, and I was bad for Roger.

My point to all of this, however, is that Roger is back in business, and seems to be quickly rebuilding products based on the original philosophy which he built his company on. Now if he can make electrostatics with the same smooth responses at the Eros and Isis with wider dispersion, he'll soon be the talk of the audio world.

Good luck to you Roger!

MK Speakers are No More!

2007-03-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

Miller & Kreisel Sound has shut down it's doors. You can find some information at their website, MK Sound as well as the Stereophile article here.

There are allegations of counterfeit, Chinese made speakers being partly responsible for their demise, as well as innuendos of ex-business partners or employees being part of it as well.

I do not know if any of this is true, but I must say, I'm kind of surprised MK made it as far as they did anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my MK S-1B with the V-1 subwoofer combination that is the heart of my living room's home theater system. When I bought my main speakers, I happened to know the MK rep for the SE US, and since there were no dealers in Georgia, I got a deal. At the time I was a starving student, trying to make a business as an installer. I think they were great sounding, and well priced when I bought them, 15-20 years ago. Since then however, I never bought another pair, and ended up with Monitor Audio RS1s in the home office, and Cambridge Soundworks for surrounds in the home theater.

There were several problems with the MK speaker line for me as a pure consumer. The first was the complete lack of stores. I have run into 2 stores who even carried MK products. The second problem is just the cost. TINY speakers were running around $600-$800 each! And given the fairly standard Vifa tweeters they were using, I had a real trouble paying that much for them. Even when they had discounts and B grade products, I could find too many speakers that were cheaper and as good or better.

In addition, I think MK Sound suffered from another problem: Too many products.

They tried to spread their brand around to every conceivable type of speaker. Cubes to compete with Bose and Cambridge Soundworks, powered studio grade monitors, super sub woofers, and in-wall speakers. They experimented with every conceivable type of surround speaker. Bi-polar, di-polar, tri-polar, upward firing, behind the couch, you name it. Except for co-axial designs, and PA speakers, they did it all. On the innovation scale, they definitely get a 10+ rating. They were producing almost as many different types of speakers as Sony or Panasonic. The only other brands that I knew of that competed with this many speakers were Cambridge Soundworks, which I heard is in the process of closing many of its stores.

I really wondered how MK Sound could possibly control quality, maintain high prices, and get enough sales volume to keep the doors open. Having so many different models of speakers seemed like a nightmare for their reps. What DO you sell a new store? What products are you going to go in with? What are you going to promote to reviewers? To be really successful you need to have multiple good reviews of a single or closely related speaker models. How can you concentrate your marketing focus and generate brand excitement with 100 different models? This is the business model you would use to sell products to WalMart and Sears, not independent, high end stores.

Where MK Sound seems to have followed the high-end/specialty model is in their subwoofers. They got consistently great reviews on them, and they seemed to be a major part of their business as a result, selling to many customers who probably were not going to use MK speakers for the rest of their systems.

Honestly, this is all questions and conjecture on my part. For all I know they had solved all of these problems. I've never met Ken Kreisler, and don't have an MBA, but, if anyone has any ideas about this, please drop me a note, because I'd be fascinated to find out what really happened.

Take care!

Final Pics of the PV10/PV-Nigel

2007-03-10T19:17:00.000-08:00

It's finally happened, I've made all the upgrades I can stand to do to the PV10 before sending it to CJ for measurements.

On the left you see the Power1 upgrade boards. Or their prototypes. Next generation will be smaller and double sided.

I should hold a contest to see who can recognize the most number of upgrades done to the main board, but I can't think of something to give away. Perhaps a 4700uF Black Gate cap with clamp, or my bag of Solen and Cardas capacitors? Well, ok, but only if I get at least 30 different entries. It's no good if only 2 people read my blog. :)

But seriuosly, if you want to try, send me a comment and I'll tell you how many upgrades you missed. I'll give you a hint, there are no audio path upgrades except the tube sockets. Good luck!

The 3001/A Boards go Out

2007-03-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that all of the pre-orders have been filled and mailed, and should be arriving in customer's mail boxes by Wednesday.

Tandberg Silver Output Boards

2007-03-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

In celebration of the long overdue arrival of the Silver Edition of the output boards, I am posting a complete photo gallery to show just how far things have progressed.

First, apologies for those who have been waiting on boards. My manufacturer is usually very prompt but the high quality of materials which I specified is unusual. When I ordered another customer had just depleted their stock, and they were not prepared. The end result is that I just received the shipment of boards this past Thursday, March 8th.

Orders will be going out this Saturday, March 10th at the latest. Without keeping you in further suspence, here it is, front and back:

Notice the full solder mask and silk screen. You may also notice that the annular rings appear white instead of shiny, this is actually because of the silver content, lead free plating that was used.

Since this is probably the last posting I make about these boards, I'm going to do a full comparison between them and the originals, so please bear with me.

The next picture you see is a composite of the original board. As you can see, while the original used a single side for the ground plane as well as the traces while the 2.0 boards use a double sided board.

By having one side for the traces and another for the ground planes I could design the board with three separate, massive ground planes and optimally routed traces, with better clearances and thicker traces. In combination with the 2.5 oz. copper and silver plating the Silver Edition boards are going to be a large improvement.

I also wanted to share with you were pictures of the Cardas jacks so you can compare them with the originals.

I swiped this picture right off the Cardas web site, I hope they don't mind, but since each board takes 7 of them I think they will be ok with it, so long as I remind you that they have nothing to do with the design, manufacture or sale of the boards.

They look good don't they? Rhodium over silver over brass, oh my!

Here you can see four of the jacks I removed from the original board. Tin and plastic is really all there was to them. Keep in mind that the way these jacks were attached to the board was by bending over the three little tabs onto the board. What has happened a great deal in the years since Tandberg stopped making audio equipment is that male RCA plugs have gotten much tighter and heavier, especially in premium cables. So users would press their new cables into the jacks with all of their might, and unless the tabs were really tight up against the board, there would be just enough motion to literally lift the tabs off of the circuit boards from behind. The Cardas jacks don't use bendable tabs, by the way. The four prongs are thick rhodium/silver/brass which attach with a significant amount of solder.

By the way, sadly, many Tandberg tuners are having problems with the internal connectors separating from the copper on the boards. I think this has a lot to do with the size of the annular rings around them being too small for the solder to get a good grip. My point is, if you are going to replace this board, check all the other connectors you'll be exposing, on the power supply as well as the output stage board. If there is any play, resolder them.

I want to leave you now with two beauty shots.

The first is a picture of the fully assembled prototype board.

While not as professional looking as the Silver boards you can see the ground plane and the beefiness of the jacks. Those of you who have experience looking at the insides of tube gear may feel a twinge of nostalgia.

And this is what the jacks should look like after installation. Please drool carefully.

Logitech Harmony 520 Remote

2007-02-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

It was the best of remotes, it was the worst of remotes.....

As part of my households continuing upgrade process, I had the good fortune, or made the horrific mistake of purchasing a Logitech Harmony 520 remote control from Radio Shack.

Like many people, I have a TV, DVD player, CD player, VCR, AM/FM tuner, and home theater processor. None of which were made by the same manufacturer. So becuase of this, I have had a need for a remote with the following features:

Fully programmable
LCD panel with customizable button names
No matter what mode I am in, it needs to use the processor for the volume functions

For about 10 years I have relied on a Marantz RC2000 as the centerpiece of my home theatre system. However, the years have not been kind to it. It has been dropped, immersed in a wave of an orange juice spill, disassembled, cleaned, and brought back to life. Throughout all of this however it has chuged along. Of the minuses of the RC2000 we could list things like:

Voracious appetite for batteries that would leave your digital cameras whimpering in fear
Lacked a PC interface
Labels had to be manually entered, using the number keypads like sending a text message via a cell phone.
Limited memory compared to the number of gadgets I now posses.
Huge! It is the size and weight of a small man's shoe.

I went to my local 2 channel shop and bought the latest Marantz remote control, for about a hundred bucks, the Marantz RC1200. I thought that given it's heritage, it would surely be a worthy successor to my venerable, greying RC2000. Plus, it had an LCD screen. Perfect, I thought. Sadly, this remote had one major flaw. It didn't really have programmable buttons the way the original did. It had a scroll wheel which allowed you to select among many different "virtual" buttons, but using it was truly a pain. My old one had 8 programmable buttons with 4 screens per device, in addition to 4 macro buttons which I could program with whatever sequence I wanted to.

So, back to the drawing board. My GF noticed the Logitech Harmony remote ads on some TV channel, so after checking them out at my local Radio Shack, I bought one.

This turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. One day later I was having consultations with my therapist and cardiologist. My blood pressure was through the roof and I was angry at the world. It still upsets me to think of what I went through. I imagine that it was somewhat like having your identity stolen and then trying to convince 20 separate legal entities that you did not in fact order 10 large screen TV's and had them shipped to Jamaica. That's how upset and stressed out I was.

"How could any remote control do that to a man?" you may well ask, and the answer is the software you must use to configure the device.

Let me say this without fear of being challenged:

The Harmony remote software is the buggiest piece of crap I have ever seen offered in professional grade software.

Ok, wait, the video game Messiah MIGHT have been close. The difference is that where Messiah probably took the developers years and years of coding, the Harmony Remote software looks like it was specified and developed in a month.

Let me give you a little background on how the Harmony remote is supposed to work, in theory. First, it doesn't really have PC software. What it has is an online service, where the customer should create an account, log in, and configure the remote. Once all the changes are made, you download your settings to the remote via a USB cable.

This software my dear friends, is the gateway to hell.

Not only is the software buggy in the following ways:

Communication freezes, and you have no idea whether to wait or continue or restart
For no apparent reason, you can loose access to a device you have set up online. You try to make changes to it and you get a message like: Unable to display content. with no choice but to delete that device from your list and start over.
There is no straight forward way to delete existing entries or re-organize them in the custom buttons. Once they are there, they seem to be there forever. For the Sony DVD for instance, the actual remote that came with the player only had 40 something buttons. However, the custom buttons take up about 110 entries in the custom pages field, ON TOP of the mapping to the default buttons on the remote. So, what you have to do is delete practically all of them, save them, then go back, and it will delete all the blank entries but ONLY if you have no entries beneath them. Sound complicated? It is.

In addition, there are two major flaws in the software design:

It is completely "wizard"-centric.
The wizards of course don't tell you what they will do, they just ask you some questions, and then they will go off and do things, often the wrong thing.
It is "activity"-centric instead of device-centric.

The wizards are not there to provide assistance to you my friend, they are there to ruin you, to crush your spirit and to take away whatever feeling of power and accomplishment and adequacy you might have scraped together by now. You will weep like a babe at how they curse you with every trap and lie and deception they throw your way. You will never again feel warm, or comforted by your family or friends after having been forced to accept their terms in order to gain control of your stereo again!

Ok, that was melodramatic, BUT my anxiety and fear is real. Imagine the worst voice mail system you've ever been caught in. This will help you understand the way the Harmony software works. It makes large assumptions about how you must want to use the remote, and then forces you to conform, or else.

In particular, it wants to set up "actions" to watch TV or watch a Movie, etc. but the big mistake it tends to make is that it assumes everything is off to begin with, and that your system turns on and off with every activity. I don't know about you, but around here, the stereo stays on most of the day, starting with NPR in the morning, to cable TV in the afternoon, to finally watching a movie on VHS or DVD before finally turning everything off.

As a side problem, it's impossible for you to program your own macro sequences into this thing. You CAN program an activity, but the stupid wizards think they know all the steps you should take to do any particular activity, so if you want to use a different sequence, or whatever, it won't do it. This is infuriating because you KNOW the hardware could do it, but the stupid Wizards are the gate-keepers to the macro programming, so you can't do what you want it to do unless you figure out how to re-program it yourself.

Fortunately, there IS a workaround. You can ignore the activity based options and go straight to adding devices and customizing the buttons, but you don't know this until you've already been tortured by the start up wizards.

It is the best of remotes, it is the worst of remotes. I spent $100 on this thing, and when it is fully configured, and all I have to do is sit in front of my TV and watch a DVD from Netflix, it is reliable, small, easy to understand. But the truth is that even though I can be sitting on the couch with my significant-other for hours, if I play with it too much, I still wake up in a cold sweat, images of their Web software leaving me shivering, afraid, and alone.

The Conrad Johnson PV Upgrades Rethink

2007-02-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

I've had a hard time convincing others to pay for the upgrades I've made to my Conrad Johnson PV10A, and probably with good reason. I have no reputation for success in this area, and potential customers are rightfully concerned about leaving their precious preamps in my hands.

So I'm going to do a couple of things. First, I'm going to take some oscilloscope pictures of the power supply rails to hopefully demonstrate the improvements made by the additional regulator stages. This will let users visually see the difference in noise and channel separation.

Second, I'm sending my PV10 to Conrad Johnson to be measured against specifications. I'll be posting the results here, good or bad. This may take a while as I'm waiting on a box, and really am not anxious to be without my preamp. God these violins sound good. :)

Also, this may matter only to me, I've decided not to offer these as kit forms, the upgrades are just too complicated for most people to do, and have too many steps. I would have to spend a month with documentation, and then probably spend significant amounts of time supporting the end user.

Lastly, I had originally planned on offering 5 or 6 versions of the Power1 upgrades, including various levels of upgrades on the basic system board. This is too confusing. Instead I'm going to offer 3:

Basic upgrade - Replaces important parts on main board power supply, upgrades heater voltage stage. Vishay and Mills resistors, Panasonic FM and Nichicon caps and Gold/Ceramic tube sockets. Specifics may vary according to original.
Power1L - L is for Line stage. Basic + upgrades main regulator, adds 2 Power1 Modules for dual-mono operation. Best for those who are using non-vinyl sources like FM, CD's and external DACs.
Power1V - V is for Vinyl. Just like the Power1L but converts the phono stage to dual mono operation as well. A little more expensive due to additional board level changes.

Prices to be determined. I'm really more interested in the Power1 upgrades because they are the most dramatic and easily verifiable changes. The basic upgrades help a little, but if you don't have the Power1 modules, you may not even be able to tell. Yeah, they cost more too. However, I have to say, I don't think anyone is offering such significant improvements in sound, who isn't also changing the overall character of the sound. Like I said before, if you want a CJ preamp to sound that much different, go buy an Audio Research preamp instead. If you want to sit around and tweak output capacitors all day, go buy some small value inductors or an equalizer. If on the other hand, you want your precious CJ preamp to sound as glorious as it can, send it to me.

I probably won't get serious about offering these upgrades until the summer, as I am re-designing the Power1 module for a smaller size, and different parts mix. Also, response hasn't been great, so I need to get some better documentation to show people why these are upgrades, not modifications.

Conrad Johnson Preamp Upgrades

2007-02-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

Conrad Johnson has the unique distinction in my mind of making not just some of the best sounding preamplifiers ever, but also the most successful lines of preamps ever. In terms of sheer volume, the Conrad Johnson line is as ubiquitous Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord.

Let me explain. We can argue about the sound quality of the Conrad Johnson Premier line, and as to whether or not brand X is better than them or not. Some detractors make good points about them being overly euphonic at times, others feel the Audio Research line sounds best for their tastes. However, when you combine the history of Conrad Johnson Premier preamps being consistently rated in the top echelons of preamps, as well as the tremendous success the PV series has had, I don't think there's another company who can claim better success. There are so many past generations of Premier and PV preamps out there that CJ could stop making new products, and still continue to pay the bills for the next 20 years with the service department alone.

So, based on this, and my own personal experience doing extensive power supply mods for my preamp, I plan to offer these mods for most of the PV line. This includes at least the PV5, PV6, PV7, PV8, PV9 and PV10 and PV11. The upgrades will involve a custom designed power supply board based on the PV12's design with upgraded, high output, high reliability regulator stage, as well as the use of modern low noise, low impedance resistors and capacitors on the board.

In the same way that Conrad Johnson designed their gain stages to be modular, the circuit board I will be installing are also modular and can be used in different ways, depending on the customer's needs and tastes. For instance, with a single board you can upgrade a PV-10 to have dual mono power supplies. With two boards, I can offer dual mono as well as double regulation. The end result is an ultra quiet power supply, and an amazingly silent performance. Another way to use them is to add a separate regulator for the phono section alone. Owners of older PV series preamps would benefit by just substituting the new module for the original altogether.

This in combination with parts upgrades on the main board can lift the performance of most PV preamps to be giant killers for a small outlay in cash. Another benefit is that because you leave the audio circuit in tact, you keep the quality of sound that you fell in love with to begin with.

More on this later, as I have to dig out the board design I used originally, and have to figure out how to charge for it. Also, I need to figure out how to get reviews. I talked to Steve at Enjoy the Music, and he pointed out that reviewers don't like to do reviews for mods, because then they would get requests from every weekend modder in the planet, so before I get a review I'll have to get famous, and I can't get famous until I get a review.... :)

Fortunately while I don't have reviews I do have a PV-10 ready for audition which has 95% of the upgrades in place already. Missing are a few resistor upgrades and replacements of the heater caps. However, you would not believe this is a PV-10 if it were not for the sweet midrange and treble. The deep natural bass and precise sound stage will knock your socks off.

But alas, the trouble at the end of the day is really who will pay for the upgrades? Is it worth it for some one to take a PV-5 and put $400 into it, when they could buy a used PV-12 for $600 on Audiogon, or a used Premier class preamp for around $1500? I don't know. It was worth it for me because I could do the labor myself.

Perhaps I will be better off selling the populated, tested power supply modules for around $75 each. Comments? Suggestions?

Head Phone Amplifier Upgrades

2007-02-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to offer upgrades for two very popular headphone amps, the Pro-Ject Head Box Mk II and the Rega EAR. Both amps use a high current, discrete output stage which makes them a very good, muscular platform for upgrades compared to the very popular and common IC based designs.

Why Upgrade?
Unfortunately, the reality of mass manufacturing, and sales, means that a manufacturer makes less than 30% of the sales price. This means that compromises in parts must be made in order to get the products to a price point that the target market can afford. Because of this, investing in modestly priced upgrades delivered without distributors and sales people in between can yield benefits that surpass purchasing new kilobuck hardware.

These upgrades are based on respecting the existing designs, and making them perform as well as they possibly can. Each manufacturers have made a different set of compromises. The Rega EAR screams for a quieter, more robust power supply but starts with a decent op amp. The Head Box starts with a quiet power supply, but has a really sub-par op-amp. Both amps share the need for better quality audio caps. We leave the basic design alone, but enhance the areas where each is weak, giving you the best of all worlds.

Pro-Ject Head Box Mk II
Basic upgrade:

Replace all electrolytic capacitors with very high quality, low impedance versions
Improve reliability with upgraded specs on critical power supply caps
Socket Op-amp with gold dipped machined low profile socket
Replace Op-amp with same type as used in the stock Rega EAR

Cost: $90 + Shipping

Results:

Much better midrange and treble
Bass opens up completely
Low impedance headphones no longer have severely restricted bass
Performance exceeds stock Rega EAR in many ways, including lower noise, sweeter midrange through clear effortless treble, and an open easy breathing bass.

Rega EAR
Basic Upgrade:

Replace most electrolytic caps with very high quality, low impedance versions (Black Gates by request, for an additional fee)
Modify power supply for lowest possible noise, and gutsier performance. This includes a mod to the circuit design as well as adding parts.
Add by-pass caps on outputs (subject to space limitations)

Results:

Noise greatly reduced, especially hum
Greatly increased clarity
Better midrange through treble, more natural, less restrained.
Slightly gutsier bass

Cost: $90 + Shipping

Advanced Mod (for both):

Socket op-amp with machined, gold dipped low-profile socket.
Replace op-amp with Burr Brown OPA 627s, considered by many to be among the finest available. At $50 per pair, they are certainly among the most expensive!
Replace critical power supply resistors with ultra-quiet, Vishay MIL-SPEC metal film versions
For Head Box only, replace ceramic disk caps to fit adapter

Results:

Unbelievably natural and smooth transients and decay. This applies especially to listening to instruments as well as cues about the room space.
Treble and midrange appear to be effortless, and unrestrained. You loose the sense of listening to headphones.

Cost:

Basic + Advanced Upgrade: $150 if done at once.
Advanced Upgrade: $95 if done after basic

FAQs:

Q: Why is the cost for the basic upgrade so similar for both?
A: Time vs. parts. The Head Box has more parts to replace. The EAR needs a board change to fit the necessary power supply changes, so it takes more time.

Q: Can I get Black Gate caps in the Head Box?
A: Sorry, unfortunately Black Gate caps tend to be physically large, there's only about 19mm of height available in the Head Box. The values that are needed for critical caps like the power supply and coupling caps that are needed are just too tall.

Q: What does the Black Gate upgrade do?
A: Honestly I've never listened to BG's in either of these devices, but there's always some one who wants them in, so yes, it can be done. This would be especially important in the coupling caps. One reasons why I don't usually like to use BG's is that they like to charged for days before sounding good, and I hate wasting electricity. However, the power draw of these amps is so small at idle, this is not an issue.

Q: Is the upgraded Head Box really better than the stock Rega EAR?
A: Clearly. The Head Box starts off weak in the bass, especially with low impedance headphones like the newest Grados. The basic upgrade makes the bass as good as the EAR while surpassing it on the midrange dynamics.

Q: What's the end result of both modified the same way?
A: Honestly, I'm afraid to say that the end result is very similar. Once the basic level is reached, they are very similar in performance. Unfortunately this also means that, in my opinion, if you are starting from scratch your best value is a modified Head Box. On the other hand, if you already bought an EAR and like it, you will be missing out on just how good this amp can be if you don't upgrade it.

Q: Is the Advanced Upgrade really worth it?
A: Yes, completely. When I do the advanced upgrade I socket the op-amps. If you want you can go back and forth between the upgrades I provide and the originals. Request this in advance please so I don't throw the originals out. (Head box op-amps are super cheap, and hard to pull out in one piece though, you may end up with an NE5532 instead of the original, but I promise, it's better than what you had).

Q: Can I get just the Advanced Upgrade?
A: Yes, but...why would you? The stock Head Box won't give you enough bass to drive your high output cans, and the stock Rega EAR won't be quiet enough. Upgrading the op-amp will just make it easier for you to hear how noisy the stock supply is.

Q: Will this void the factory warranty?
A: Yes. However, fixing a future problem with either of them should be a piece of cake. Chances are if anything goes wrong it will be the with the op-amps. The advanced upgrade sockets all of them, so replacing them is a matter of minutes.

Q: Do you offer a warranty?
A: Yes, 90 days parts and labor on parts I actually replace. If both op-amps go however, I'll charge for their replacement, as this tends to only happen after an electrical surge. Also, the Head Box is a very tight tight squeeze for the upgrade parts. If you decide to open it up to look and break off a capacitor, I will charge you for parts and labor. If you are the kind of person who is like that, let me know and I'll ship it to you out of the case, or send you pictures of the upgrade first. :)

Q: Do you have a sample I can listen to?
A: Yes. I have an upgraded Head Box you can listen to if you are in the Boston area.

Q: Do you sell "new upgraded" Head Boxes?
A: Yes, I can source them new. For these I offer 90 Days parts and labor on all parts. Saves you the cost of shipping one to me, but if you can buy one used or at a discount, you can get a better deal.

Q: Can I listen to the upgrade and return it if I don't like it?
A: Honestly I don't like doing this as a lot of people like to reverse engineer a great set of upgrades. If you don't believe the advanced upgrade is worth it, I'll exchange the op-amps and parts for $30.

Tandberg Upgrade Board Pics

2007-02-05T19:28:00.000-08:00

For some reason Audiogon is having trouble processing my pictures, so if you are here to look for more information about the Tandberg 3001/A upgrade board, some pics should be here:

Connector Beauty Shots

The Upgraded Pro-Ject Head Box Mk II

2007-01-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

This morning the Pro-Ject underwent a major upgrade. All the electrolytic caps were replaced with Panasonic FM Caps, and the op-amp was socketed and replaced with an NE5532.

First impressions are WOW! :) The treble response is a lot better, the midrange has opened up and sounds absolutely spacious with deep bass, and a very extended treble. The Head Box Mk II plus this upgrade is highly recommended.

There were a few changes from the standard values which were made, here is what you need to do to replicate:

1000uF caps were upgraded from 16V to 25V. This is more of a longevity issue than sound.
Input caps C13, 14, 16 and 17 were upgraded from 4.7uF to 22uF. For two reasons. First, they are almost the smallest FM caps I could find. Second, I wanted to beef up the bass response.
Output caps C8 and C10 were upgraded from 470uF to 1,000uF. Again, to improve the bass response at the headphones.
Op-Amp replaced with an NE5532. I know I dissed it as old, but it was a good old op-amp and I have them lying around.

If you wanted to do this yourself, you could probably do it for around $20 or less, including shipping from Digikey, making the total amount of time, and money well worth the quality of the head phone amp you are left with. This little amp already sounded better than the Rega EAR when I got it, it now sounds absolutely outstanding. The one minor issue that I'm having is that the case is getting a lot warmer than it did with the previous Op-Amp. I may have to put in some vent holes in the case to ventilate the voltage regulator. Especially since I'm still waiting on the pair of OPA617's from Futurelec. They will most likely warm up the regulator a little more.

The one problem is that it's picking up all the noise coming from my PC, which it masked before. I guess the next step is going to be an outboard DAC for it. :)

One tip, make sure you put the 1,000uF caps as close to the board as you possibly can. It's going to be a tight squeeze.

Upgrading the Suzuki

2007-01-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Well, in this case I'm actually downgrading it. At some point around 1989 I acquired a 1978 Yoshimura modified Suzuki GS 1000. It was actually nearly impossible to ride on the street. So I'm having Bikeworx rebuild the engine, repaint it and the frame, and add all the silly things that the DMV requires such as turn signals, horns, that sort of safety nonsense. So for those of you who care, here is a pic of the bottom half of the engine and transmission. With a little luck, when I'm not soldering uber expensive op-amps into inexpensive gear I'll be riding this.

Inside the Pro-Ject Headphone Amplifier

2007-01-14T08:13:00.000-08:00

It's only fair that if I show you the insides of the Rega EAR I also show you the insides of the Pro-Ject Mk II. Keep in mind that while the Pro-Ject has more parts in it than the Rega, it's case is half the size. Most of the Rega's ingides is air.

Something I forgot to mention in my last post is that another way in which the build of the Head Box is superior to the EAR is that it uses a double sided board with massive ground and power planes. This means less noise, lower power supply impedance. It also allows the board designer to run direct, short traces from one section to another.

It's clear from looking at the design that the designer worked very hard to keep the audio signal paths optimized, and any radiated EMI from the power supply away from them as much as possible. This is why the power supply caps are crammed in the way they are, and also why there's a mix of 470uF 25V caps and 1,000 uF 16V in there as well. The latter I'm a little worried about, because they are filtering the 15V supply, which gives the caps only about 1V margin of error before they are rated to break down rapidly. A pair of 25 Volt caps would make me feel better about the durability of them. I'll see if I can find some miniatures that will fit.

The Pro-Ject Headphone Amplifier

2007-01-13T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm still looking for good values in headphone amplifiers. As you might recall, I previosly tried the Rega EAR, which was just too expensive and offered too little, and was noisy, so I started looking for something cheap enough that I could leave at work, and maybe give me equal or better value, and maybe be worth modding a little hear and there.

I think I've found it in the Pro-Ject Head Box MKII. The Pro-Ject headphone amplifier has a similar design to the Rega. Meaning, single ended supply, one op-amp driving a discrete amplifier stage. Externally there are two major differences. The price, $99 for the Pro-Ject vs. $299 for the EAR as well as the complete lack of switches on the Head Box. Which I guess makes sense if you are going to put in some BlackGate capacitors that means you'll have to leave the box on all the time anyway. :)

Listening Tests
Right out of the box, the Head Box is significantly quieter than the Rega EAR. I can hear no noise at all except at the loudest setting. It seems to be a little weak on the bass however, and perhaps a little on the treble as well.

Build Quality
The Pro-Ject headphone amp is less expensive than the EAR, but better made, in my opinion. This major difference probably has to do with the power supply filtering. The EAR had about 1,500 uF of filtration, the Head Box around 4,000, with a significant amount of filtration occuring after the voltage regulator.

Just like the EAR, the Pro-Ject amp has to have capacitors at the outputs. They are about half the size of the EAR's so this may account for why I feel the bass just isn't making it all the way through to the headphones.

Future Mods
There are two major areas where you can improve this little box. First is in the capacitors. Replace them all with Panasonic FM's. For the output caps, replace them with 1,000uFs if possible. This should get you some more oomf.

The other area is in the op-amp. There's nothing wrong with the original, but there is nothing great about it either. Socket it and experiment. If you can find an NE5535 to hear what vintage class-A op amps sounded like, I'd recommend it. :)

I'll post as I apply the mods.

Tandberg 3001 2.0

2006-12-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

Ok, just in time for Christmas I am announcing that I plan to do a run of the 2.0 Output boards.

They will include all of the fixes noted in the manual, the biggest being:

Crossed resistors in fixed outputs
Multipath jack being ever so slightly off
One resistor trace being on the wrong side of the board.

Enhancements include:

Silver plating instead of tin/lead
Fully soldermased and silk screened
Thickest available copper thicknesses

Order yours now for $75. Purchasers of the 1.0 boards receive $15 off. Sorry it can't be more, but these things are expensive when you are doing small runs.

Cheers!

What DID I get into?

2006-12-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

Well, folks, the power supply is fully operational. I wish I could say the same for the tuner.

So long as I'm holding onto the tuning dial, it works great. As soon as I release it, it forgets what station it was last on, and tunes to the highest frequency on the dial.

Also, the presets seem to be broken.

On the plus side, it sounds really great, when I can hold on. :)

So, based on this, I'm going to take it to my favorite Cambridge repair place, Audio Lab to see what Derek can do for me.

Maybe for Christmas.

RTFM!

2006-12-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

Man, if only I had Read the Freaking Manual (R.T.F.M.) a couple of weeks ago I would be listening to the Tandberg instead of griping about upgrading it's power supply.

In the schematic for the Tuning System 2, which is where P801 goes to, pin 1 is clearly an OUTPUT to the power supply. That is, the 5.2 Volts gets generated elsewhere.

I could blame Tandberg, but honestly, had I remembered correctly how a PNP transistor worked, it would have been pretty obvious to me that it was. Fortunately on page 26 there is actually an arrow showing which direction the signal here is going.

What this means is that I really am done with the Power Supply rebuild! Yeay!

With a little luck, next weekend I'll actually be listening to this tuner for the first time!

A fully re-worked power supply with Mills wirewound resistors, and Panasonic FM caps, a slew of upgraded transistors, and a brand new output board with Cardas connectors and Vishay/Dale metal film resistors, this truly is going to be a pretty good piece of gear to own for a few years more. :)

The TDA 3001: Where are all the Parts?

2006-12-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

The power supply is back together, and seems to be working. The 5V supply seems to have some sort of remote sense feedback circuit built in. I don't quite get it, but it was driving me mad until I spent some time with a breadboard and tried out different options.

I've finally decided that rather than assume it's broken, I'm just going to put it back into the tuner and see what it does. I need to check the voltages at the 15V and 25V supplies anyway. While cleaning the header pins which connect to the output board I noticed they had ALL come loose. That is, the solder connections were broken on all of the pins. It wasn't falling out, but it would have made a terrible connection. A few minutes with my 100W solder gun and everything was back where it was. I then took out the alcohol and toothbrush and scrubbed the board to get rid of excess flux and any other dirt which might have accumulated while it was waiting in a box.

The one thing I need before I can re-assemble the tuner is a package of insulated quick-disconnect, crimp on spades. A quick trip to Radio Shack, and the tuner should come back in a snap.

Then I'll probably have to worry about the backup battery and the preselect buttons.

You know, I'm almost ready to begin thinking about my next project. After taking apart the Rega EAR headphone amp, I'm thinking I should consider making my own. The one thing the EAR did well was provide discrete output transistors. Unfortunately, their potential was mired by the use of an aging op-amp design, and single ended supply. I am sure making the product as inexpensive as possible played a major part in these decisions. In order to get rid of the output caps you need a double ended supply, and your biasing solution gets more complicated in order to keep the DC offset as low as possible.

So, maybe next I'll make a headphone amp with high quality op-amp front end, with a Class-A discrete output section. I think I may take apart the InnerSound Electrostatic amplifier I have (manuractured by CODA) and try to use their transistors in my design. Yes, it's ridiculous. but that amp sounds soooo good and it's sooo efficient, that at the voltages we need for headphones they may work really well. Instead of 30 devices per output channel I'll use 2 though. But for this semester, this tuner really is all I'm going to be doing. I have a GPA to maintain. :)

Pics will be coming as I begin the re-assmbly process.

An Afternoon with the Tandberg 3001 Supply

2006-11-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

Rather than try a bunch of things and have then be wrong, I ordered lots of spare transistors of the one's I could order, and I spent most of the afternoon today looking for the bad one in the 25V supply.

After replacing a host of little transistors I finally found the one that was causing the problems. The supply is 95% done. The critical 15V and 25V supplies are working perfectly. It wasn't a complete waste of time though, a lot of the transistors were being upgraded to 65V parts, which will make this unit much more stable should I ever have to remove it and modify it on the bench again.

Unfortunately, I'm still having serious problems with the two 5V supplies though. Let me share with you my current (haha!) problems. Take a look at the relevant part of the schematic:

To the left of the 33 Ohm/4W resistor is 15 Volts, as it should be. The problem I'm having is that the two transistors you see here should be outputting 5 and 5.2 V respectively. However, there is too much of a voltage drop through R822, leaving me with something like 2.8 V instead of the 5.9 I should expect. The problem seems to be the current draw through Q814(Q813 on the board). The way I see it, in order for the power supply to behave as documented, there should be about 4.1 mA through R827, and about 1.4mA through Q814. Instead, I'm getting 4.8 mA through Q814 alone. What I don't understand is WHY. The parts all seem to be working correctly. If I remove Q813, and replace Q814 with a brand new part, I still have the same problem. I can't get the voltage at the base of Q813 up to 5.9V. And from what I can see, besides actually changing the value of R827 I really don't have a chance. The input voltage remains a rock solid 15.04 volts throughout though.

I've removed the electrolytic, and measured all of the resistors. Everything is measuring what it should.

Suggestions? Is the schematic bogus to start with?

Modding The Rega EAR Headphone Amplifier

2006-11-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

Even though I don't think the Rega EAR is worth the purchase new, I decided to put in information for those of you who may already own a Rega EAR and are kind of curious about getting into making your own modifications. This is actually a device that will be simple to mod for a few bucks which can actually yield some serious benefits.

Tools you'll need:

Metric Allen wrench set
Phillips screwdriver
Soldering Iron
Solder Wick
Solder

You'll need the metric Allen wrench set to remove the front cover. You'll just strip them otherwise, they are on tight.

Take the back plate off. Before you do anything else, measure the space between the top of the board and the case. You'll need this to make sure you don't buy caps which are too tall.

Disclaimer:
If you read instructions on the internet and follow them without accepting responsibility for your actions, or without really knowing what you are doing and hurt yourself, burn down your house, ruin your stereo or go stark raving mad and start attacking your neighbors lawn mower with an ax while naked in the middle of winter, you are a certifiable dufus and should read no further.

If on the other hand you realise that you are taking risks for the functionality of the equipment you are modifying, and your own health and safety, and will take full responsibility for the consequences of your actions and you are not going to try to act like a dufus by blaming the author of this or any other article online, then please continue.

Capacitors
First, a note about how capacitors are measured. There are three mesuarements which are usually important. Capacitance, Voltage and Temperature. Capacitance is the only value which affects how the part works in circuit. Voltage and Temperature affect when the part will fail. If you put a cap in with too small a voltage rating, it will break down very quickly. For this reason, you can increase the voltage and temperature grades on a capacitor relatively safely. On the other hand, going too far over in voltage may cause you to use a part too physically large, which will be more inductive and may not physically fit. For instance, it's ok to replace a 35V Cap with a 50V or 100V cap. There are cases when the manufacturers original parts were rated too low (see my posts on the Tandberg 3001 power supply) in which case a voltage upgrade makes a really good idea. I don't think you'll find this a problem with the Rega.

One thing to be careful of is that electrolytic capacitors have a direction they should be used in or they will fail fast. Observe how they are mounted in the original, look for (+) signs on the silk screen. Make sure the (-) mark on the capacitor goes to the opposite pin.

Take every electrolytic you see, and replace them with Panasonic FM capacitors, available from Digikey. You should leave the values the same except for the the power supply and output caps. The power supply filter caps are the two large caps rated 1,000uF right next to the power supply jack. Buy the largest cap you can fit into their place. If you can fig 1,800uF you should. This isn't just upgrade-itis. This unit has some serious hum, the only way to remove it is going to be to increase the filter capacitance. By putting in low inductance caps, we can also hope to reduce some of the hiss as well.

For the output caps, putting in bigger units will give you better bass, at the expense of increased inductance and less treble. I suggest that since the Pana FM caps are so low in inductance anyway you should upgrade these by 10-20% if they will fit. You should be able to fit a 0.1uF metal poly film cap underneath each output capacitor. Check the case to board spacing first though.

For all other electrolytic caps, match the original uF values. Leave the ceramic and box caps alone.

Fuse
After adding significant capacitance to the power supply you may blow the little fuse near the jack. Ce est le vie. Short the puppy and move on. Ok, no, just kidding. If this problem arises I would seriously do is add a fuse jack to the back of the unit, and wire it to where this thing is. Then try to put the smallest fuse which doesn't fail when you power the unit on. Somewhere around 200mA to 315mA 5x20mm fuse should work.

You can check the on board fuse for failure by testing the AC voltage across it. It should be near 0. If it's the same as the voltage coming from the wall wart, it's blown.

Op-amp
The single chip in the middle of the board towards the back is an NE5532 dual operational amplifier. Rega probably picked this particular op amp because it makes the rest of the circuit incredibly easy. Let me explain. For an op amp, the 5532 has very low output impedance and is able to drive 600 Ohms to +- 10 V easily. This means they can buffer the input and drive the current gain stage directly, without any more parts. In other words, it's the cheapest possible solution they could find and still have a large current gain capability.

Remove it and replace it with a high quality machined IC socket. This single upgrade is going to give you the most amount of fun, because you'll then be able to experiment with a variety of different dual op amps until you find the one that you like best without having to pull out the solder gun each time.

I suggest the first good one to try is an NE5535. It's probably got the closest sound of the NE5532, but with smoother, richer detail, while still being a rather "cold" part. Philips released it as a Class-A biased version of the NE5532, but I don't think they even bothered to use it in their own products very much and it consumed higher power so except for the modifications market it didn't make much of a dent in the market. I believe Walt Jung (Walt, e-mail me if I'm wrong) wrote about this being a marvelous upgrade to the 5532, but I cold be mistaken. Mouser and Digikey no longer carry it but I found some at ICPlus. Keep in mind that the 5535 does not have the current gain capability of the 5532, so if you have very low impedance headphones, this may not be a good choice, however, several Burr Brown

In any event, once you have socketed the op amp you should be able to find a long list or audiophile recommended parts that will fit, including some who make adapter boards so you can use some of the very expensive Burr Brown single op amps in the socket. Being able to hear the effect different op amps have may alone be a reason to mod the EAR. Here is a good resource for op amp replacements: Tangentsoft Op Amp List

Also, take a look at the op amp pins. I believe there are a couple of unused part locations which were meant to be filter caps but are now marked N/C. You can tell because one of the cap pins will connect to pin 4 or pin 8 of the op amp. If this is true, put a 10uF to 22uF Pana FM cap in each. Pin 4 should connect to the capacitors (-) side. Pin 8 to the (+) side.

Final Words
Like I've said, the Rega EAR is not worth purchasing for the sake of upgrading it. If on the other hand you already have it, you want to learn how to do things yourself, and you are happy to spend about $30 in parts in teaching yourself and your ears how different components affect your sound, then you are in an excellent place. Please let me know how your experiments turn out.

Rega EAR Headphone Amplifier, Final Analysis

2006-11-23T13:08:00.000-08:00

After taking a close look at the insides (see previous post) and listening to the Rega EAR headphone amplifier for about 3 hours I can finally give you my reader my definitive take on the product.

I tried four different pairs of headphones:

AKG K 701
AKG K 240 Studio
Shure E4C
Sony MDR-V600

and 2 different source components. I compared the EAR to my SUMO Athena non-headphone enabled preamp, as well as to the direct outputs of my Creative Labs Jukebox Zen 2.0. I actually chose the Athena because I knew that it had limited low impedance drive capability. I figured that it would emulate what a poorly designed headphone jack would do to the sound. On the plus side, it's pure class A and has about a 600 Ohm output impedance, which is pretty darn low for a line level amplifier. Still, it should have been blown away by the EAR.

After a few hours of listening, and after looking closely at the insides I can't recommend this product. Either in absolute terms or price / performance wise.

Compared to the Sumo Athena, it adds too little. The only times I could tell it was a better driver for the headphones was with the 29 Ohm E4C's. Compared to the direct outs, it seemed to muddle the sounds and rob bass drums of their midrange strike and impact. With the AKG 701s it seems to get harsh when there are complicated passages with a lot of upper midrange. Overall, it's a noisy piece of gear, which makes sense given the limited filtering done in the power supply. You can't turn it up too much before the hum of the power supply is clearly evident. The Sony MDR-V600s made the noise problem even worse. They are the most sensitive headphones I have and have a lot more treble than the AKGs which made the hiss from the Rega almost unberaable.

My sample even has some weird oscilation going on when you turned the volume up just a bit, which would disapear, but come on, guys. It's not like you don't have anyone in England who can show you how to design a current amplifier stage that won't oscillate. Otherwise I found the sound to be a complete "Why bother?"

My suggestion to would be amp buyers is to give this one a pass, or buy one, then sell the plastic Rega label on the front so you can go through it top to bottom and mod it until it shines. If. Well, never mind. Don't buy it.

The Rega EAR Gutted!

2006-11-22T16:08:00.000-08:00

Last weekend after finishing a mid-term early, I decided to reward myself with a new headphone amplifier. I'd been using this as my primary listening station:

What you see are a pair of AKG K240 600 Ohm headphones. Why 600 Ohms? Because I'm driving them directly from the James Bonjiorno designed SUMO Athena preamp. It's a Class A design with tremendously low output impedance. Certainly low enough to drive these headphones, but it does get noisy if I turn up the gain as much as I need to.

I wanted a headphone amp so I could get gain and power, and free up some desk space. The Rega EAR is less than half the width of my preamp, and fits nicely in a cubby in the desk.

After getting the EAR home, the first thing I did, which was probably a mistake, was take it apart so I could look at the guts. In large part because no magazine review I'd seen had shown us the insides. And now I know why. Tis a sad thing indeed. I am hesitant to even show you but since I know thats why you come here, I'll give you the full naked view first:

From what I can see, you could make something better with about $40 worth of parts. $45 if you include the wall wart. Throw in another $40 and you could have top quality jacks.

The inadequacies with the price/value of this product begin in the power supply. It is single ended power supply, with a single voltage regulator. Remember this, because this is going to cause us problems in the audio section design, which we will cover later.

All of the electrolytic caps are standard grade Korean made Samwha capacitors. By the way, nothing wrong with Korean products. Especially their shoes! My complaint is that they are very standard grade parts, and that by using the simplest possible power supply design you end up having to route your output signal through capacitors before feeding your cans.

Another sad parts about this product is the single input buffer and possibly voltage gain stage. Rega chose to use a single op amp, the NE5532. It's a fine Op Amp. Phillips used to put them in their top of the line CD players, circa 1989. Come on fellows, it's 2006, almost 2007. Would it have killed you to at least use the class A biased NE5535 instead, or any of the superior Burr Brown or Analog Devices products out there today? And how about two of them so you minimize the crosstalk between them?

The one bit of good news is the discrete output stage. Unfortunately whatever good this does for us is undone by the power supply. Because it's a single ended supply, this means that there must be output capacitors. And there are. Two big electrolytics, which are NOT bypassed. That's right. No bypassing. Just straight through. Are they kidding me? No, seriously, an NE5532 and tin can electrolytic output caps? Are they bleeping kidding me?

The last problem I had was that the circuit board is single sided. There's nothing wrong with this, in general, but when you use a single sided circuit board you end up sacrificing the cleanness of the copper layout in order to save a few bucks in the board manufacture. This tends to affect the critical ground and power planes the most. Also, this is a dirt cheap thing to change.

If you can get this thing cheap, it may be a good started uprgrade project for some one. Rip out the electrolytics and replace them all with Panasonic FM. Bypass the output caps, and socket the Op Amp so you can experiment with a variety of op amps.

I did get a chance to audition the Rega EAR at the store with an AKG 701, and compare it to a pair of 600 Ohm AKG 240s. In my opinion, the AKG 701's started to sound compressed and tired when music got complicated and loud.

Over the rest of the week I'll start actually listening to this thing in my system. And maybe after that I'll start discussing the upgrades. But seriously, it's almost a sad thing to NOT upgrade this thing.

Based purely on the parts they put into this product, I have to say, you are better off saving your money and getting something like the HeadRoom Micro Amp for $299. It has seriously better parts value than this... throw back to the days of early mass market Japanese components.

Sorry Rega, I think that this is an exorbitant amount of money to charge people for what you are giving them. Get rid of the extruded aluminum exterior, and take the money you'd save on it and put it towards some decent grade components.

By this Thanksgiving weekend I'll have my actual listening tests concluded and will publish the results.

Coming up Next: The Rega EAR

2006-11-19T19:49:00.000-08:00

Gentle Reader,

I have purchased a Rega EAR headphone amplifier for use in my ever evolving home office system. It's gotten great reviews among the head can users plus I got it at a steep discount for being sitting too long as the demo unit at a local headphone store. Don't let that fool you though, most of the other one's disapeared quickly.

Over the next few days I'll be evaluating it against my reference standard headphone amp, a vintage Sumo Athena, as well as the direct outputs of my Creative Zen 2.0 driving my AKG 240 600 Ohm cans as well as the Shure E4C's.

I have to tell you, construction wise, I think it's very little product for the money. $299 new is a lot of change to put down on a circuit board with so few parts, that uses an off the shelf wall wart as it's primary supply. I'll be posting pictures of the insides, and recommended upgrades as I go along, if I think it's worth it.

Cheers!

Man, Just how many Transistors Can you Replace?

2006-11-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

It's been hard going here folks. The 25V supply is not showing me any love, but I am getting closer. The most likely problem I'm having is the darlington arrangement. The T0-92 which drives the TO-220 shorted, and at some point the brand new 6.8V zener I put in also smoked.

I have found upgrades for most of the NPN and PNP transistors used, usually just an improvement in the voltage rating. This may not sound like anything useful, but actually, since I don't have a load on the power supply, the voltage after the bridge rectifiers is unusually hot. Higher voltage transistors, and a higher wattage zener will help me keep the thing alive longer until I can put it back into the tuner.

After this, it's back to the 5V supply. Which is basically where I was a month ago. :))

Beware the Lurkers!

2006-11-11T13:51:00.000-08:00

One thing I've come to find out about you, dear readers, is that when my blog posts positive things, I get a lot of requests for more information, maybe even some custom mods. But when I post that I've just smoked a resistor, people who were previously sending me e-mails suddenly pretend they don't know me.

So from now on, it's nothing but good stories! About how wonderful the tuner sounds now that I've modded it, and how incredibly sexy the insides and outsides look, and how the mods I have made to my Conrad Johnson PV-10/Erik surpass all tube preamps, ever. All lies, of course, since the tuner isn't even working, and the PV-Erik sounds good, but not better than the good folks at CJ do on their better days, but come on, what do you want? Endless florid reviews that amazingly all say that every single piece of equipment I listen to is priced exactly what it is worth? Don't you get enough of that from the audiophile rags? Well, OK then, I can write like that too, and from now on, I will.

Psych!! Haha! This is not one of those sites I'm afraid. This blog is for the Solder Slapping Adventurer! The Geek who wields his iron like a light saber, striking fear into the hearts of tweak peddlers, gullible consumers, and sometimes our own children and spouses. We are not made of fearful stuff, for we are warriors and we undestand that the feeling of a 500V capacitor discharging through our fingers then down the left side of our rib cage to grab the pericardium so hard we can feel it's entire circumference around our hearts is to be knighted by Thor himself! Now raise your temperature controlled soldering iron into the heart of the storm above your heads, into the toxic fumes of evaporated rosin and scream your defiant battle cry:

Mod-it!

Mod-IT!!

MOD-IT!!!

NPN's, aren't they all the same???

2006-11-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

Well, kind of sort of. :) I think I found a temporary solution to my blown transistors issue, an MPS A42 which thank goodness does not have a center collector. It's also a 300V part, but what the heck, I'll take whatever I can. The gain is close to the originals.

This may all be moot, as I have wasted most of the weekend and haven't really studied. I really wanted to listen to my tuner before the end of the week. Guess it will have to wait.

Honey, what's that smell?

2006-11-04T14:37:00.000-08:00

"Um, nothing dear.........."

I replied, pulling the power cord on the power supply I was trying to revive.

I had the power supply 90% operational, the only thing I was having issues with was too little on the 5V supply. So, I was re-checking the the voltages using little pieces of wire in the Molex jacks, when I accidentally shorted the 25V supply go ground. Urgh!! !

That smell which wasn't really there was the bouquet of a young 5 watt Mills resister starting to melt it's protective cover.

Now, the PS is 30% operational. I have 15V, but no 25V or 5V coming out of this thing. I could probably get it working again with some generic replacements, but for some reason I don't have a single NPN transistor in a TO-92 case in the house. I guess it's time to order from Mouser again, and I might as well order more power resistors from Parts Exchange, if I'm going to be smoking what I have.

I can't find a source for the BD 419. I can find close matches, but most of the modern replacements have a center collector, which make them hard to retrofit. At this point I feel lucky just to have found the general specs for it. In case anyone can help find a replacment I am looking for:

Pins: EBC
Power: 2W
Hfe: 60
Vce 100
Through hole, so TO-220 or TO-202

On the other hand this may be a sign from Eutectic, the God of Solder, to design a new power supply board. I may very well end up with the single most expensive Tandberg 3001 ever. :)

More later!

The Long Way Home

2006-10-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

Gentle Reader (and I do mean singular!),

I'm happy to say that the power supply rebuild has all but finished. Let me walk you through the pictures. First, is a picture of the original, unadulterated board.

Notice the large cap in the middle next to the transformer? If it was a can of beans you would have had to throw it out for having expanded beyond it's size. My work was cut out for me.

Replace every electrolytic capacitor and every cement resistor. First job was to remove every single part. Leaving me with a very naked board, like this one.

I removed the two main transistors and their heat sinks so I could take better measurements of the circuit board and the holes underneath.

After removing all the parts, I like to add parts back based on the height of the parts. The smallest parts, or those which are closest to the board go in first, then I move my way vertically. This basically meant that the 22uF capacitors went in first, then the power resistors, and then the big filter caps next to the tranformer.

I know it makes me seem old-school to say this, but I really am amazed at how much smaller and better components are today than they were just 10 years ago. Let me show you the finished board to explain.

Look at just how small the caps are compared to the originals. Also, see those tiny black resistors? Believe it or not, they are 5 Watt Mills non-inductive wirewound. You can't get any quieter than this friends, and they are tiny compared to the cement resistors they replace.

You might notice the canary yellow trim-pots which have suddenly apeared too. These are definitely a nice upgrade. The originals were open, carbon composites. These are sealed conductive plastic trim pots. Smooth as honey, electrically quiet, and have much better long term reliability and stability than the originals. Unfortunately one thing I did find when I put everything back together is that the 5V outputs were far too low, which I think is due to a bad transistor. Not a huge deal, but it means the tuner won't be put back together this weekend.

Mid-Terms are Over, Mostly..

2006-10-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

Which means, I can take a little break from the world of academics and focus on the power supply. Mikel at the FM Tuner Group suggested I should upgrade one cap to an 80V or better unit, which is on order, but everything else I think I need I have, so Saturday I begin the overaul, and perhaps begin the mechanical drawings on a PS upgrade.

You know, many people whose opinion I respect say that the power supply in the 3001/A is very good, and I mostly agree, but it's not what I would call spectacular. In particular, you have a situation where all of the filter and storage capacitors are on high impedance paths away from the voltage regulation stages. The voltage regulators are kind of live and let live when it comes to all of the different boards they supply. Each board contributes a portion of the overall filtering, but electrically each board is far from the regulators, so sags in the main regulators may take unnecessarily long periods of time to correct. It's all very touchy-feely. Each board can affect all the other boards to some extent.

So, my research is going to be in creating a daughter board to allow the regulator transistors to dominate the output voltages, letting the filtering on the individual boards relax and no longer worry about what the other boards are doing to the supply, and shorten the effective distance between the regulators and the boards themselves. Maybe. I only sold a few of the output boards, so if I do this next step it will be a one off. The good news is that from my initial research I can do it all in a non-destructive manner. I think. Well.....

Digital Camera Cases

2006-10-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

Since my GF has adopted my old digital camera, I bought a new one, and then I went out shopping for a camera cover for it.

I have come to the conclusion that there really is no such thing as a good one.

I bought a Tamrac Neo, which I guess means it's made of neoprene, that stretchy fabric they use in wet suites. I have to tell you all, that it's not designed to protect the camera from anything but dust, scratches and mild finger taps. There is no real cushioning in the case at all. It's just stretchy fabric. I also bought a little case for my Pentax Optio. It fell off the strap of my back pack as I was walking to the train, and it has never been the same since. There was almost no padding in that one either.

So, seriously, Tamrac, what are you, and all your competitors thinking? I can't beleive that it's all that difficult to put some foam, something, anything mroe in these cases. Even shock absorbing jell.

On top of all this, the neo case is actually made much bigger than it needs to be by the ultra wide back which the neoprene is sewn onto. I can but hope that some industrious Chinese textile mill will read this and start producing genuinely protective portable case for digitals.

Connector Porn

2006-10-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

First, a little tease with the shrouds fitted over the jacks, enlarged slightly to fit the threads. The cross resistor is a fix to a problem in the Rev 1.0 boards, which is fixed in 2.0.

Second, a coy shot from the side with the shrouds removed for your viewing fancy.

Naked Cardas jacks, Vishay Dale Resistors and all the other parts an audiophile needs to listen to ensure his listening satisfaction.

Isn't that a lovely thing? Beautiful high performance jacks reflected in a pool of plated copper. Makes the electrons weep to be still.

Lastly, a sadly out of focus picture from behind, the burn marks proof of a poorly trained and inexperienced solder monkey trying to fix a mis- aligned jack.

You really must be sure you put the jacks in straight, because desoldering them after is insanely difficult. I almost gave up and took the board apart.

Real Pics!

2006-10-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

Finally, I have pics to show you, my faithful reader (singular, hah!) Take a look at what it looks like installed in the back of my 3001. The missing screws below the switch is because I lost it. The board fit perfectly. More pics shortly.

It's Your Turn Now

2006-10-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

I realise that in part my postings are kind of rambling in lieu of people talking back to me. I haven't gotten a single comment here about the upgrade boards. I have 6 people on e-bay watching to see if the boards will sell, one e-mail asking for 2.0 boards, but no one else really talking to me about what they would like to see, or whether they like the idea or not.

So, if you are reading this blog with interest, please, drop me a comment, tell me what you like, what you are thinking, what you are working on. Are you wanting the 2.0 boards, but want to see if other's will commit first? Do you wonder if modding this venerable tuner is worth the effort now, or are you busy with school and work so you want to upgrade, but not now? What's goin gon?

Thanks!

Reviews are coming? Maybe.

2006-10-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

I got a little good news yesterday, a Tandberg owner has asked me to sell two output boards to him to be installed by a well known FM tuner guy. I'm hoping that I can get some feedback from him which I can use to improve any mistakes I haven't caught, as well as encourage other's to purchase the remaining 2 boards or give me reason to make the 2.0 run.

I've also been doodling a PS daughter-card design. I am pretty sure I'll be able to do the PS mod board. It will be either a tweaker's delight, or a perfectionists heaven, adding a great deal of bottom end to the sound, and maybe reduce overal tuner noise, as well as making the PS incredibly reliable, especially with the early models.

Tandberg PS - Fantasy Land

2006-10-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

Ok, I take it back. There are some major upgrades I would do to the power supply if money were no object:

Double the output transistors used for the 25V and the 15V outputs. This means Q805 and Q811. I haven't done all the math yet, but I think I should be able to keep the original design, without having to entirely redesign the section before.
Add around 600uF of storage right before these transistors.
Possibly add around 250uF of storage after them.

The benefits would be:

Cut the power dissipation in half for each transistor,
Adding significant heat sink radiating area,
Decreasing the output impedance of the power supply
Huge increase in the dynamic current output of this stage.

Having the 1000uF storage cap 1R2 away from the output transistors is just sad. And having no capacitance on the output is also kind of sad. Admitedly, the boards that this goes to all have their own filtering, but at least some polyester film caps on the outputs, if not some more serious filtering would not kill anyone. I'm really kind of impressed that this tuner achieved what it did with such limited power supply capacitance, but this explains a lot of the inductors being used as power supply filters as well.

"But isn't this overkill?" the weak would ask, and we'd say "hell yes!"

Perhaps there is a way to do this with the original, without throwing out the original, either by modding the existing board, or perhaps creating a small upgrade board like I did with the PV-Erik, allowing you to retrofit it. Hmmmmm, I'll think about this as I'm removing caps.

Doh, yes, of course you can buy them assembled!

2006-10-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being so dense. I have spent so much time reading around at the FM Tuner Info Site I really thought most people with these tuners would be hobbyists like me, with too many parts and solder lying around, but I realised that many of the people who enjoy listening to the sexiest tuners in the world (Tandbergs of course!) may not be the solder monkey that I am. So, yes, you can buy the fully assembled boards. I will still need the original for the de-emphasis switch, but all the other parts are orderable. So, if you want to upgrade your tuner outputs but are afraid of doing anything more complicated than removing some panel screws and pulling an IC out of it's socket, no problem.

Prices still to be determined, but not cheap, the Cardas jacks are $10 a piece, plus the board, plus the connectors, and of course labor which is distracting me from school and a girlfriend who want to know how it is I say I am broke, but can somehow afford to purchase the last two boxes of hand made NOS carbon film resistors found in an abandonded Shinto Shrine in a mountain of Yokohama which are still so slightly radioactive that they must be smuggled into the country hidden in 100lb cases of marijuana to avoid alerting Homeland Security.

Am I the only one with these problems??

I'll pull out your heart you filthy bastard!

2006-10-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

This is what I get for watching Venture Brothers before typing. :)

Ok, it's not a bastard, and it's not it's heart but the power supply. For the next stage of the rebuild I've pulled the power supply completely out of the case. This will let me get to all the parts, and test it without risking the rest of the unit.

I plan the following upgrades:

Replace all cement resistors with Mills Wire-wound low inductance 5 watts. This is a significant wattage upgrade as well.
Replace every electrolytic cap. If the voltage required is 50 or less, use Panasonic FM, otherwise FC. Bypass critical caps under the board.
Replace carbon open frame trim pots with either ceramic or conductive plastic closed frame both of which are quieter and more stable. The conductive plastic pots are better, but lower wattage. I'll have to investigate why one of the originals got cooked before I can commit to them.

This is also a board which could benefit from an upgrade, but I don't think there's enough interest out there. It would be significantly more expensive than the output boads which I don't think I'll sell enough of the prototypes, let alone any production runs. But, if I can use this blog to fantasize a little, I would:

Size the footprints for Panasonic FM caps, Mills 12 Watt power resistors
Use double sided, 2.5 oz. silver plated boards
Improve the tuner's cooling by:

Using much better, taller heat sinks closer in design to what I used in the PV-Erik. The downside of these is that their footprint is huge by comparison, which is another reason why the double sided baord and smaller parts elswhere will be important.

Add more vent holes directly under the heat sink fins
Add TO-220 heat sinks to a few of the smaller transistors. This will make warm up a little longer, but greatly improve reliability. They will probably never fail due to heat stress again.

For each 1,000uF cap I would use two 500uF-600uF caps to get lower inductance while keeping the same or slightly higher storage
Add metal film bypass caps on all the critical electrolytics.
Use the best modern ultra-fast recovery diodes for the bridge rectifiers.
Improve the traces by:

More than doubling the copper weight
Thicker, better traces.
Huge power and ground planes

If I could get enough orders, I would probably be serious about it, but the bare board would probably run around $400, so for now, I will just start replacing parts as I take a break from school. Maybe by Christmas I'll actually be listening to NPR. Or sending the 3001 to a tuner expert who can get the RF portions tuned up. Or I'll start replacing all the other electrolytics in the system. More likely I'll be trying to catch up because I was soldering instead of studying. :)

I'll post more if I get another digital camera, or after I have done the PS uprgrade.

Take care!

It all fits, and looks great!

2006-10-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

It is a real real shame that my Pentax E-10 is now sitting in the garbage can, because otherwise I would have a bunch of pictures to show you, including the fully assembled board, in the tuner. :)

And I have to tell you that from the outside and inside, it is a thing of beauty.

On the outside, with the original shrouds installed over the jacks, it looks very cool. The board connectors with the power supply and the mainboard jumper fit as if they were made for each other. :)

The de-emphasis switch, the standoffs, the audio jacks all are in exactly the right place. Also, the way the Cardas jacks are mounted to the board itself, they feel a lot more sturdy when connecting a cable to them. The one tiny issue in assembly is the cross-resistor I put on the back, to correct for the swap I did. It needs to be right up to the board to best avoid the PS board. Also, I found that trying to raise it from the board just makes it prone to being bent as I work on the front. Best to raise the crossed resistor on the component side if you want to minimize cross talk.

There's something really magical about Radio Shack Soldering irons...

2006-10-07T12:48:00.000-07:00

in that every one I've ever used needed to have the tips tightened.

Which means, that I was wrong about the size of soldering iron you needed for the jacks. The 100 Watt soldering gun from Radio Shack works just fine if you make sure the tip is on tight.

I'm looking at my first board, it's gorgeous. :) The tin plating really complements the Cardas jacks, and quite by accident, the metal film cap and the Vishay/Dale metal film resistors go together really well too. I'll try borrowing a camera over the next week so you can see what I'm talking about.

For now, I must clean up my desk, put all the parts away, and start studying. Wish me luck!

Audiogon

2006-10-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that I actually have two other Tandberg fans interested in the boards so far. Please see my Audiogon listing for sales details.

Maybe I can convince my S.O. that this really isn't the reason we can't buy a house after all. :)

Board Pics!

2006-10-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's not nearly as nice as a real picture, but the scans are not bad either. The boards really look much better than that, especially when you can see the shiny tin plating.

Output Board, Initial Review

2006-10-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the bad news. My digital Pentax has given up the ghost. I dropped it in Boston and it's been barely alive ever since. It's now officially unusable. This means no assembly pics, but I may do some scans of the board.

I've de-populated the original (i.e. ruined) as fast as I could, and compared the two boards.

Here's the objective review:

The prototype is really really good. The multipath output needs to move about a third of a millimeter. Otherwise mechanically it's a really good match for the original. Not only that, it's really a beautiful piece of copper, tin and fiberglass. It's not perfect though. Here are the issues I've found so far:

The fixed L and R outputs. Fortunately you can cross the resistors that go to them very easily.
One of the scope outputs has the last trace on the wrong side. Fixable with electrical tape.
The holes for the switch are really really tight. I had to use a pair of Robo Grips to finish seating them. I probably could have avoided using solder. :)
I broke the capacitor. I'm replacing it with a 0.1uF metal film. I hope that's good enough! :) It's the right physical size anyway. :) The original one says 250 one one line and then underneath it u 1.

These are not show stopper issues, specially if you weren't going to use the scope outputs.

The one show stopper I do have is that the 100 watt soldering gun I have doesn't come even close to putting out enough heat to solder on the Cardas jacks. Tomorrow I'm off to Radio Shack for a 150/250 watt soldering iron. If that doesn't work, I'm screwed, because I am not about to buy a solder pot for this thing!

I'm making fixes to the design, but I am only going to make another run if there is significant interest. Otherwise, this run of six boards is all there will be.

The Wick and Me...

2006-10-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

I have prototype boards! Because these are in fact prototypes, I have to take some different steps than hopefully anyone else will. In order to properly guage any differences between the prototype and the original, I have to completely de-populate the original, removing every single part so I can take the two empty boards and put one over the other to accurately see at any differences in the two. Those of you who purchase any of these will be able to get by with just pulling off the Molex connectors, switch and cap.

I have eye-balled them so far and they look really really good. There may be some slight variations in the scope outputs which I will have to correct, but so far, if all you wanted was audio outs, it looks pretty good. :)

Oh, and the Cardas connectors fit MARVELOUSLY! :) I'm very very happy with the way they snap in.

Erik

Prototyping...

2006-10-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

The board design is off to the factory, should have it back by Friday.

I'm happy to say that some major improvements were made before it was submitted. The ground plane was broken into 2 sections, one for the audio and one for the multipath and scope outputs.

The traces and resistor locations were optimized even more, giving the fixed outputs the shortest, most isolated trace paths possible. The VARIABEL [sic, "inside" joke, which is itself a bad pun] outputs also have very good trace routing, but maybe a tiny bit less optimal.

The original board kept clearances of about 0.050" around the audio signal traces, this board will have 0.100" clearances, significantly shorter traces, as well as a massive grounds in a star-like configuration. This, along with Cardas jacks (which I understand were originally designed for Jeff Rowland Design) should make this about the best output boards you can put in a Tandberg tuner, short of re-designing how the boards connected to each other. There is also, as I mentioned before, a special feature for multiple cable addicts which I will show you once the boards are back.

The sad part is, I'll probably be selling my extras on e-bay before I ever get to hear the benefits myself. This is because it will be a couple of weeks before the power supply rebuild is complete.

More when the parts start to arrive!

Pics, sort of!

2006-10-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you wondering what the boards I'm making will look like, here is a 3D model created by PCB 123 Layout from Sunstone. The software is among the best that I have used in the free or try before you buy category. It turns out that Sunstone is the parent company for Express PCB, which also has a free PCB layout package. Frankly, it's easier to use, but I went with this one in order to be able to order boards with more features, like 2.5 oz. copper, silver plating, etc.

One of the biggest problems with this software is that it doesn't treat corners as an entity. And that means if you don't like how a trace is routed, you seem to have to delete the whole trace and start from scratch. Oh well, the price I pay for my hobby. Also, please note that the quality of the image is poor, which is based in part on the 3D rendering, and in part on the fact that it's a cut of a screen shot, so don't judge me by the jagged edges. :)

So where is the progress?

2006-10-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Tandberg 3001 FM Tuner refurbish project is continuing, sometimes at the expense of my studies, but the output board and the power supply are moving forward.

The Output Board
I received the Cardas output jacks Friday which means I was able to finish laying out the board with accurate device footprints. I will probably order a prototype run of the board this Wednesday, when you may see me selling the extras on E-bay if they fit.

I've also ordered all of the parts for it as well, which is just Vishay Mil-Spec Metal Film ultra low noise resistors. Everything else I will be pulling off the original board.

The Power Supply
When I bought the Tandberg 3001 tuner, I was informed something smoked, and when I took the cover off and found that in the power supply at least one cap had expanded beyond it's normal physical dimensions as well as a carbonized trimmer pot. In addition, I read in a Yahoo FM Tuner group that the power resistors were standard cement types, and sure enough mine were too.

As most of you know, electrolytic caps do have a limited shelf life, and are often the first to go in electronics gear, often taking out other components around them. So for the PS, I ordered abox full of Panasonic FM and FC capacitors, Kiwame Carbon Film and Vishay Metal Oxide resistors, new trimmer pots, and bags full of Panasonic Metal Film caps to use for bypassing. There will probably be a need for new transistors as well, but taking each one out and testing it would not be easy. Instead I will replace all the caps first, and then see if I can diagnose any bad transistors. After this, I will replace the trimmer pots, and power resistors.

Ok, before anyone starts, there is just no space in this thing for the fancy Solen/Auralcap/Multicap bypass caps that are all the rage so don't even start with me. If you aren't going to get hot without those, scroll down and droll at the CJ Power supply mods, then come back to this project. :) Maybe when I start making power supply boards for the 3001 from scratch we can discuss these. :) Just kidding, there's no way I have time for this with work and school. However, if you are a well-heeled devotee of the 3001 and really want a custom built power supply board with some seriously upgraded capabilities and components, send me a note. :) Maybe I can make a bunch of them at once.

Ok, so why not some Black Gate caps? Mostly, they have too long of a burn in time which starts over when you turn the unit off. According to what I read, it takes days for their electrolyte to become fully saturated and for you to get the full BG experience. With a vintage piece of gear like this with notorious overheating problems I just felt that BG's would not be worth the cost of ownership. I'm not going to leave it turned on for more than a day or weekend at a time. Besides, the Panasonic FM's are really really good compared to what was in there originally when this tuner was dominating the FM tuner ratings. Lastly, frankly, I need to see if this tuner ever turns on again. The power supply smoking may have ruined it, in which case spending a couple of hundred bucks on PS caps would be a complete waste.

On Progress and Humility
FYI, this tuner is going to rock when I am done, but honestly, if I had to design this tuner from scratch, there is NO way I could come close to the achievements Mr. Tandberg made to Audio, so I want to take a moment and express my gratitude at being able to in a small way connect with the work he and his engineers did in the 80s.

However, it is also true that many things have changed since then, so it is likely that Mr. Tandberg himself would have made improvements in several areas if he were still around. To begin with, double sided circuit boards are much cheaper in both production and prototype quantities. This is one major reason why I will make the amount of imrpovement in the output board that I will. It's worth going over because much that applies to it can apply to many re-builds of vintage equipment. The original board was single sided, forcing the ground plane had to share space with the audio traces. Because my version is double sided I can put down a massive ground plane on one side, with the signal traces on the other, which gives me better spacing which should lead to lower crosstalk and lower noise than the originals. The other reason this version will be better are the connectors. Rhodium over silver over brass will beat tin over plastic almost every time. As I noted above, I'm using very low noise Vishay resistors on the board as well. Lastly, I'm adding a surprise to the board specifically for that rare breed, the FM and cable junkie. He's not an average audiophile, nor is he an average cable head either. This species of audiophile still tries to find an FM station worth listening to AND he's a cable junkie. A very rare combination, usually found around Boston or LA or Chicago. But I won't say more until the boards are back. :)

The next place where things have gotten better than the Tandberg (and frankly, MY) days is in the size and quality of components. Electrolytic capacitors as well as power resistors have made major improvements in their quality as well as their size. A half watt or 5 watt resistor is much smaller than it used to be. Also, you can find some very high power resistors in metal film versions, which can take 30 watts in the space of a TO-220 case. High power, high stability and low noise in small packages. Sadly I can't use them without redesigning the power supply board (hah!) so I'm going to have to "settle" for some Kiwame's and Metal Oxides. But still, they are SO much smaller than their originals it's almost hard to use them. Two watt 1.2 Ohm Metal Oxide resistors are so small these days it may be difficult to put them in the place where the 2 1/2" long resistor went originally.

Also, we now have the ability to get very low inductance electrolytic capacitors in smaller packages than what Mr. Tandberg used as "standard." I'm talking about the Panasonic FM series here. They are smaller, have something like half the impedance of most other low inductance electrolytics when compared to Nichicon low impedance types. The one bit of a drag is that I can only find them with values up to 50V, so you have to step down to Panasonic FC types to get 63V caps. Not a big deal if you can apply some under-the-board metalized polyester film caps to make up for this small shortcoming.

My point to all of this is that I think if Mr. Tandberg had been succesful, and was still around, I think he would be designing with:

Double sided boards
Smaller, higher quaility components which....
Would let him get enough space for things like metal film resistors with heat sinks, bypass caps, larger ground planes and traces, along with holes in the board for the transistor and resistor heat sinks.

One of the things I've noticed about the 3001 is that I don't think I have ever owned a component so full of parts. I think this tuner has more parts than all of my other audio components put together. Putting together this many parts, on so many circuit boards using single sided technology in a low profile design really was an amazing bit of work. If I were to do the industrial design for gear like this I would have used a card cage design, and have made it twice as tall. This is closer to what Revox did during the same era, making their products easy to service but looking a bit like ham radios or toasters by comparison.

When I post again I'll put pictures of the insides of the Tandberg 3001 so you can see what I'm talking about when I say "full of parts."

Maybe I should change the name...

2006-09-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

of this blog, because I'm so far away from working on power conditioning that it's almost not funny. Instead I've been busy working on my own mini-system, finding ways to improve it one way or another. I've been looking for a good vintage tuner and DAC to put into my CJ/Sumo/Monitor Audio system, and came across at Tandberg 3001 at Goodwins for $275. Now, if you are any sort of FM fan at all you know that a 3001 doesn't sell for less than $700 anywhere unless there is something wrong with it.

So, I went to Goodwin's and got the answer. Aparently this unit came out of some well heeled accumulator (as opposed to collector) of audio gear. The output board was "cracked" and parts in the power supply "assumed their gaseous state." So, I offered him $200 and walked out with it.

Here is a picture of the output board. It's not really as bad as described. The problem is two fold. It seems like a previous owner used really high pressure connectors and pushed so hard on the RCA jacks that it pulled the tabs and the copper off the PCB on the back. The other problem is that these jacks are just tin and plastic.

So, I am left with a couple of choices, I could scrape off some solder mask, and add big gobs of solder, and stick it back in, and start working on the power supply OR I could make a new PCB board sized for Cardas RCA jacks. Well, if you've followed my blog at all, you know which of these two choices I'm going to take. :)

The mechanical drawing of the original board has been completed, now I'm debating which PCB manufacturer to go with. I like the software that Express PCB offers, but I may want options, like thicker copper traces, or gold plating in case I find others who would like to upgrade their Tandberg 3001 or 3001A boards.

The Conrad Johnson PV-Erik

2006-08-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

Here is another picture, this time from behind, and with all of the wires in place.

There are several major changes. In the front (top of the pic), where the Necromonger heat sink is, the original power supply was upgraded to produce 360V, at 1A if needed.

To the right are the dual mono supplies that take the 360 V and feed each tube 330 independently. Towards the back you can see the red and blue wires (red for Right, of course!) which feed each tube independently, as well as a better picture of the Azuma sockets. I was able to take advantage of unused component holes for these, all I did was enlarge them slightly so I would be able to use enough of the wire to get a solid connection.

The wiring is all Cardas 14 ga. Litz copper wiring. Most of the solder was Cardas, but I admit that some of it, especially for the diodes and resistors, was just Radio Shack silver content solder. I just couldn't wait for the shipment from the Parts Connection to arrive. All resistors are metal film, but not particularly high quality. I did get some Dale/Vishay resistors from Mouser, which were only $0.30 each for the 18k coupling resistor.

The two black wires carry the 360 V from the original regulator stage to the two new stages. There is only one ground wire. This was mostly caused by the fact that I had a really hard time soldering 14 ga. wires with a 40 watt soldering gun. I eventually got the knack of it, but for now, this is how it will have to be. The PCB was designed for this from the start, and will help keep the star grounding method of the original board.

Recognize Me?

2006-08-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

Tell me honestly, it's not that easy to tell that you are looking at the insides of a PV-10 now is it? Some day some one is going to make a living restoring these things, and they are going to open this up and go "what the f****??!!"

Tubes in a Shroud

2006-08-10T17:26:00.000-07:00

While I was ordering parts from the Parts Connexion I also went ahead and got some upgrades for the tubes. What you are looking at are the 12AU7's in Perl tube coolers. In case you are wondering, yes, they really do remove a lot of heat from the tube itself. Whether that will have any benefit at all in the long run, I have no direct experience.

If you look carefully you'll also see the white of the new sockets peeking out. These are Azuma ceramic sockets with gold plated pins. As far as I know, these were the best sockets I could find which could be made to fit. They come with a gold plated pin in the center. Fortunately a little time with a hand drill and they pop right off, leaving the rest of the socket in perfect condition.
Some Tube-o-philes prefer the brown resin sockets which were original with the preamp. They think it's microphonics are the best, and the contacts are good enough. I looked at the contacts, they looked nasty. I'm sorry, they were going. If I every decide to worry about microphonics, that's what the tube coolers will do.

Droolicious caps!

2006-08-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

The boards are now fully assembled, and I managed to figure out a way to mount them that didn't violate the fundamental laws of physics. Take a look! Each board has a pair of 3.9 uF Solens and a single Cardas 0.22uF bypass cap. Also, all the wiring and most of the solder is Cardas as well.

Conrad Johnson Power Supply Evolution

2006-08-10T16:58:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article over at Stereophile which is mostly about the CT5 preamplifier, but it also talks about how they have moved away from multiple regulation stages as they did in the PV-12 and other preamps, to simplify the design.

I still need the first stage to help drop the voltage, becuase I'm still toying with the idea of removing or reducing the resistor between the two storage caps. Also, by doing it this way, I'm adding more storage capacitance than I would otherwise. I've added nearly 16uF to the overall design, 8uF per channel. That's pretty good at 330V!

Voltage Regulator Schematics

2006-08-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

The voltage regulator stages should be familiar to anyone who has worked with Conrad Johnson PV series preamps in the past. The main differences are the output transistor as well as the selection of zener diodes. There is also a difference in the resistor beneath the first diodes, but this value does not seem to be very important. CJ specs 0.15 PS caps for bypass caps which I have been told were made by MultiCap. Frankly, I'm not only running out of room but I wanted to try the Cardas caps in this project, so I'll be using a single 0.22uF Golden Ratio bypass cap across the output filter cap. If I can find enough space for them.

Assembling The Mounting Plate

2006-08-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

It's still very much a work in progress, but I figured out how to mount the power supplies without gutting the phono stage layout beneath. I'm going to use a mounting plate to mount the boards on. Take a look below. Tell me, honestly, are you CJ fans out there shocked at the metamorphosis happening? :) More when I actually figure out which order the screws have to go in.

Pinup shot

2006-08-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

In case you are wondering what the boards look like when there are parts in them, here you go. The big Solen and Cardas caps are still missing, which is why the board looks so naked. When they go in you'll see that all the spare real estate disapears.

It's alive!

2006-08-04T19:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is just incredibly exciting! :) I assembled all of one board except for the storage caps which are still en-route, used some component leads I had lying around (suddenly I have LOTS of them) for temporary test points, and hooked it up with jumpers to the PV-10s power supply.

Check out the reading on the Fluke next to it, 330 Volts!!! Perfect! Not bad considering I layed out the PCB from scratch, huh?

I'm going to try to finish assembling the other board tonight, and if I have time test it. I probably have another week before the storage caps arrive in the mail, so between now and then I have to figure out a way to mount these boards so that they don't short something and without ruining the underlying phonograph stage layout.

Do you see that large fiberglass "plate" held on by four black screws? Underneath that are all the holes and traces for the phonograph stage. If you had paid another $200 those holes would be filled with the actual parts. For some strange reason, the underlying B+ is still hot. I say strange because Conrad Johnson had to add a jumper in order to make it hot, when they could have just omitted the jumper, and avoided the trouble of putting this cosmetic cover on altogether. Well, who knows what they were thinking. But you'll see how this will work to my advantage in future postings. Stay tuned!

Honest honey, it's just a few parts...

2006-08-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

The first shipment has arrived! Almost all of the non-premium parts have arrived. This means all the diodes, all of the resistors, all the transistors, heat sinks and some mounting hardware and a little metalized film bypass cap. Sorry folks, this is a Panasonic E seriss. I simply could not find a small enough 0.010 cap from any of the premium vendors. They were all too large physically, and way over rated voltage wise. The baby Panasonics are just going to have to be good enough. I will make up for them by adding Cardas in the output caps. Honest!

Even though the main storage caps for this stage won't get here till next week, I can assemble the boards and try them out, to make sure they work, and begin the work of altering the circuit that is on the original.

I'll post more when the soldering iron is hot and I'm ready to start stuffing.

Building a PV-Erik, or PV-Frankenstein, depending on how you see it.

2006-08-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

So, I last wrote that I was fixing a Conrad Johnson PV-10, which was true, but I also wrote that I would be returning to power conditioning, which is only partially true.

Instead of focusing on the power conditioner testing which I had planned, I instead started looking around at the CJ schematics for the PV-10 and 12, and with some helpful ideas from UncleStu at Audio Asulym I decided I would transform my PV-10 into a PV-10 on mega steroids. The challenge is to make it as good of a preamp of it's kind as I could, without actually harming the reasons I fell in love with it in the first place, and I think I have a way of doing this. By leaving the audio circuit 99% untouched, and focusing the work I do on the power supply.

If you scroll down you'll see the insides of a PV-10AL. Notice all that bare space to the right? That's where the phonograph section would normally go if you bought the PV-10A (sans 'L'). In this space I am going to stick two of these circuit boards which you see pictured. They are power supply boards, one for each tube. This will hopefully improve channel separation, power supply regulation, and bass response. They will be chock full of Solen and Cardas Golden Ratio capacitors.

By the way, this is the first PCB I've ever designed for myself. I've designed many, but always for a client or employer. This is the first time I've done one and paid for it out of my own pocket. Pretty nice huh? The design is based on the B+ power supply regulator stages used in the PV-5 through PV-12. It's a little different in that I'm using a TIP50 transistor, which gives me higher breakdown voltages and seriously higher power dissipation than the MJE340s which CJ is so fond of, and seem to blow out so regularly in the preamps this old. So, serious overkill here.

The first batch of parts arrive from DigiKey tomorrow, and then about a week later the fancy caps, jumper wire, etc. arrive from The Parts Connexion.

Stay tuned folks, this really is going to be a major overhaul of the power supply of this preamp, and I'll be documenting all the way.

I think you will see that the mods all stay true to the original circuit philosophy. The only mods I intend to the audio circuit itself are a pair of 0.22uF Cardas caps. Maybe. If I like it. Let's see what the power supply mods do to this baby giant killer first.

The Johnson Power!

2006-07-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

The question itself is: Can I substitute a TIP47 transistor for the MJE340s that Conrad Johnson likes to put in the power supply regulator stages?

Answer: Yes, you can. I tried it, works great. Should consider a TIP48 or better though, the Vce is a little too close to the limit with the TIP47. The TIP50 is even better.

My CJ Preamp is back in business, so my future postings should be a little more on topic, more or less.

Cheers!

Erik

Delays, delays

2006-07-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

I know last time I posted I was all gung-ho to get started on the AC probe design. Then a few things happened. First, Bill Whitlock sent me some of the slides he uses to teach a class on power quality and I suddenly had a bunch of questions for him, which I haven't gotten around to ask, especially about balanced/isolation transformers. This was going to be my weekend for reviewing his slides and really getting down to understanding his presentation.

However, instead, my pride and joy, my Conrad Johnson PV-10AL blew a gasket. Not really a gasket, UncleStu at Audio Asulym helped me diagnose the problem. It blew the voltage regulating transistor that fed the 340V filaments (is that the right word? ). With that out, the full 470Volts of the power supply were apearing there, and I was getting massive 120Hz hum on both outputs. If you look at the picture to the right, it's in the middle of the top, attached to the black heat sink.

I spent a little time trying to look for an "upgrade" for the MJE340 which blew. I think I found one, a TIPS47, which has almost the same or better specs. 350 Vce, 1 A maximum current, and a DC current gain of around 30. This gives me 50 more volts and doubles the current capacity of the MJE340, and has the same gain. The negative point is that it has a substantially higher collector current when off (1mA vs. 0.01mA). It's not a concern, because I doubt seriously that it will ever be drawing less than 5mA, and the cut off is 1mA. I also looked around for some heat sinks for the two TO-92s that are on the board. In any case, I bought the "right" kind and the upgrade kind just in case.

I also spent some time at aParts Connexion looking through their 9 pin tube sockets. Next paycheck I'm going to get a pair of the Azuma's to replace the plastic one's. Now, I know that a lot of people think the brown plastic sockets are really the best, but I've looked in the pins and felt the tubes going in and out, and I have to tell you, they just don't look or feel fabulous. The pins on the tubes and the sockets look oxidized, and the feel of inserting tubes is that of scraping rust off the pins as I insert them. So, call me a poseur, if you must, but I'm changing them. :)

One thing to notice about the right side of that picture. See all that bare space? That's where Conrad Johnson would put a phono preamp if you bought the right version. Seems a damn shame to waste all that space, doesn't it? I think I'll have to re-think my comments about not building a headphone amplifier. I think that I could put in either a headphone amp or a USB DAC in there depending on how ambitious I was. Stay tuned!

I hate putting my foot in my mouth....

2006-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote that it was "a good thing that Jensen decided not to sponsor me". To be honest, I never really asked them for sponsorship, but did ask if I could get a reduced cost signal transformer from them. After no response from them for a couple of days I figured they decided I was a crank and were going to ignore me.

Instead, yesterday I got a very nice e-mail from Bill Whitlock, president of Jensen Transformers, telling me where my original transformer based designs were screwy, and that I should follow up with their sales group.

Sweet! And don't I feel like a jerk? Sorry Bill!

As an aside, Bill also decided to start ExactPower which I had written favorably before in the articles at PqLtd The two things that I like about their power envelope correction products are high efficiency and massive amounts of power line correction which can be done with it.

Now I'm kind of worried Jensen will send me a pair of their high quality transformers, which of course means that I'd be obligated to use them, and that will mean that I'll have to have a bigger circuit board made. Ah, the fear of success. :)

Schematic V2.0

2006-06-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

I decided that before going to production with my circuit board design to find a way to simulate the buffer circuit before hand. I found a shareware product called 5Spice which worked pretty well. I couldn't find a way to zoom in on the schematic, but beggars can't be choosers.

I truly long for the days when I worked for companies that could afford to purchase integrated schematic capture, simulation and PCB layout tools. It would have saved me the trouble of drawing the schematic twice, making my own NE5532 models, and then trying to use different keyboard shortcuts in each. Anyway....

Based on the simulation analysis, I realised that because the voltage divider I was using was single ended, the power line signal shape I was seeing in Visual Analyzer were wrong. The neutral line noise was coming in at 1x while the line signal was 1/10x. Also, I didn't like the band pass characteristics I was seeing. Lastly, I realised that part of my problem was that the input impedance was so high that I was going to get much more noise than any real audio equipment would ever see.

So, with this in mind I redesigned the front end. Now, the input is balanced, the input impedance is reduced to around 55K, and the 115/240VAC switch will instead be used to allow me to short the AC line to ground, so I can see the neutral line noise separately. Don't worry, the input impedance will still be 50k, so no more than 3 mA will flow no matter what I do.

Which brings me to a small point about safety. Originally I did not want to shunt any current at all to ground. I was worried about noise on the ground line affecting my measurments as well as concern if the ground wire sould fail. Either in the case or between the case and the service connection. Also, for many reasons, I wanted the signal ground to float. In part it's because PC's have notoriously bad problems with ground loops. However, with the 50K resistors in place on both sides, the peak current that some one could face is 3mA. You'd can feel 1 mA, but 3mA apears to be safe. To put it in perspective, GFCI breakers installed in your kitchen trip at 10mA. 20mA is conisdered potentially lethal, and 16mA is considered the maximum amount of current that can flow through an adult and still be able to let go of the conductor. So based on all of this, I think it is in fact safe to connect the line and neutral to ground at this point.

Not shown in the schematic are 50mA 5x20mm fuses which will be on the hot and neutral side.

Also, I've changed the arrangement of the TVSS diodes. There are now two, and the'll fire at about 15-20 VAC (depending on which I decide to get, finally). This should ensure that even if a failure of the neutral or ground occur the buffer as well as any connected PC or audio equipment will remain safe. If I had more space, I would instead put in a "muting" cirguit like they use in op-amps and amplifiers so that if the voltage at either input of the buffer were too high it would disconnect, but I just don't have the space, and with 50K of input impedance I don't think anyone will be in danger. If my cat pees on it though, all bets are off, but that would be the case if he peed on my 300w/Ch InnerSound amp as well. So, UL be damned! :)

Why IS my AC so bad?

2006-06-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering just why my AC was as bad as it is, so I've been doing some investigation. The THD measurement is around 7% right now. If you look to the right, there's a picture of part of the AC wafeform. The white circle shows a small negative spike. This is caused by the fluorescent lamp on my desktop. The bigger problem however was the severe drop at the top and bottom of each cycle. It's circled in read.

After some experimentation, I discoverd that it is in fact being caused by a spike on the neutral coming from my laptop's power supply. The graph on the right is a graph of the neutral voltage at my desk. In an ideal world, it should be completely flat, and match the voltage at the ground pin but in my case every half cycle my laptop is putting a significant amount of current onto the neutral wire. Because the resistance between my desk and ground is not zero, the current flow causes a voltage spike to occur in the same direction as the incoming line voltage, with the effective result that the voltage between line and neutral dropping, and more noise and less effective power available to your equipment.

If I turn off the lamp and disconnect the laptop these neutral spikes disapear, the AC waveform becomes much cleaner looking and my THD measurements drop to under 3%.

All of this is great news, because it means I have at least two good ways to test the efficacy of any power conditioners that may come my way, especially those with special sockets for "digital" components.

Cheers!