- Thread Starter
- #21
Yes did that. Everything is correct.Anytime I've perceived something this off, it's always that the phase is off. I'd run a phase check first. I use this simple track for a test. No special equipment needed.
Yes did that. Everything is correct.Anytime I've perceived something this off, it's always that the phase is off. I'd run a phase check first. I use this simple track for a test. No special equipment needed.
The one who paid for product that keeps him satisfied.Who is right?
For sure. Psychoacoustic is a tough thing.Can two people listen to the same thing and hear two totally different things?
Purifi measures good at quasistationary signals.How can an amplifier (especially an amplifier that measures as well as the Purifi based amps) collapse a soundstage and imaging?
I think that knowledge had an effect on him. Better would have been to not tell him and see if he noticed on his own.Yes.
I've listened for another couple of hours this afternoon and still love it.
What Paul McGowan has to say on the topic-
Next time, trick him into thinking the accuphase is playing (when it's actually plugged into the class D) and lets see who gets gobsmacked.
Who knows, he may be right that reducing feedback does what he says, but maybe it's because it jacks up the frequency response. If that's the case then we aren't keeping this down to only 1 variable.This guy has shown on so many occasions that he really has no clue what he's talking about in many circumstances. He's trying to sell you his way overpriced products that perform worse than much cheaper options. Only way he can sell such goods is if he gets you to believe he knows some "magic" that he imparts on his electronics. Evidence from him is more like counter-evidence in my view .
But also i can imagine that higher distortion of Accuphase adds some "spatial" qualities to "flat" tracks while Purifi plays them "as is" = flat.
The Accuphase A-70 has very low distortion. Sure, the March should measure a bit better but not much.I didn't start playing with valve amps until four or five years back, and the imaging was the first thing that struck me when I hooked my first one up - and no, it was not an expectation bias, it was actually quite unexpected. So the increased distortion adding something could be a viable explanation. That said, I only hear any noticeable depth on a very few, and mainly older, recordings, such as Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin. And these days my hearing is rubbish, so anything I say has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
This is my experience as well, although I'd also allocate 20% for room acoustics (e.g. one speaker closer to the wall) and some small but non-negligible % for channel separation in the audio chain. For speaker placement, my method is to do the following, the effort is usually well worth the end result.Are you sure your brother is not bullshitting you? It has been known between siblings … ;-)
If 'soundstage‘ or ‘imaging’ are a thing then they are 99.99% a property of the loudspeakers - their placement in the room, directivity, phase alignment etc. I doubt two excellent amplifiers would make the slightest difference in that respect.
Otherwise, how long is it since your brother last heard your gear before getting the March? Had you changed anything else since he last heard it? Even if nothing changed, audio memory is famously fickle. Without blinded and level matched tests niether of you can be really certain ...
Yep.This is my experience as well, although I'd also allocate 20% for room acoustics (e.g. one speaker closer to the wall) and some small but non-negligible % for channel separation in the audio chain. For speaker placement, my method is to do the following, the effort is usually well worth the end result.
1. Get out some masking tape and make a line on the floor between you (listener) and the plane of the speakers (like the blue tape on the floor of Paul's video).
2. Use a carpenters square to make another line perpendicular to the first line, which will represent the front plane of the speakers.
3. Ensure both speakers are precisely equidistant from the first line, and at the same distance from the 2nd line.
4. Toe in and out both speakers to find the imaging sweet spot. Make sure both speakers have the same toe in/out angle - if you can't measure this effectively, eye-ball it by walking back the first line to the convergence point (or as best as you can, if your back is against the wall). Too much toe-in, and the sound will be very focused, but lack sound stage. Too much toe-out, and you'll have better sound stage at the expense of any "phantom center" effect (i.e. a front stage singer will sound like she/he is singing across the stage, rather than standing in the center).
His first comments on hearing the P 452 in my system were "That sounds terrible. The soundstage has collapsed and the imaging has disappeared. There must be something broken in the amp. I'd send it back and get them to check it. Sounds like the phase has been mucked up. The Accuphase is way better."
Agreed.There are just so many variables and considerations-
Not everybody has the same hearing.
Not everybody listens in the same way for the same things.It is arguable that like wine tasters some people probably have the capacity to refine or train their hearing to be more sensitive to relatively small differences.
People have different expectations of how things should sound based on past experience and preferences.Including cultural and even physiological differences .
People use very different types of music and recordings to try to reference what they think they should hear or want to hear.What people expect from listening to an orchestral recording [Bose 901s anybody?] will be very different to closely miced small ensemble recording in a small space.
Those would be either to much noise or clipping, in case of a bad gain chain. However as long as you don't mix balanced and unbalanced IOs those "loose" standards are good enough that this won't happen.There is not a standard in which source/preamps and power amps interact with each other electrically because there are loose electrical standards for these things.That is highly likely to produce interactional differences in sound .
Power Amplifiers using current drive are not suitable for driving speakers. The same is true for voltage driven power amps with too high output impedance (designs with low or no feedback or SE triode amps coming to mind). The power supply has no influence on imaging, nor any other unknown variables within the electronic chain.How amplifiers and speakers interact electrically is highly variable because speakers have highly variable impedance, driver efficiency and crossover networks that cause phase shifts.Given these factors amplifiers which are completely voltage drive will sound very different to those that are current drive or a mix of voltage and current drive [a lot of valve amps].
Power supply factors.
And I am sure there are a great many other such variables.