Recent content by Francis Vaughan

Latency is the elephant in the room. A heck of a lot of music is produced "in the box" to the extent that they dispense with human players for many tracks and autotune the hell out of singers etc. But if you want actual real life humans creating real life music, there are limitations to what you...

There is a clear logical fallacy of false syllogism occurring here. The tests so far have been: There is a claim that poor audio equipment can benefit, Here is a poor bit of equipment, It didn't benefit, Therefore, there do not exist any examples of equipment that can benefit. This is junk...

How? What are the technical and regulatory steps that can fix this?

How do you propose that the mains borne control signals be fixed? They are fed into your house from the street supply. What about local electrical equipment, your next door neighbour's welder, the motor switching noise from the factory in the next block. Getting it fixed is not always possible...

Nope. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm arguing that the tube based devices have so much intrinsic distortion (due to the use of tubes we assume) that they totally mask anything their power supplies may or may not do to the sound. They are dreadful no matter what AC power they are fed with. Thus...

Sure, there are no end of idiots. They buy special cables and cable lifters for the same reasons. But I'm not sure the prime goal of ASR is to save these people from themselves. They refuse to be convinced about a lot of other woo, so why would measurements here help? Whilst they are seriously...

Sure. But if you close it off at just power conditioners, I feel a bit disappointed. I would really like to explore the questions involving poorly designed (and often boutique) gear. It isn't just total junk like the tube amps you tested that matter. I suspect there really are some awful...

Ha! Guess what brand mine is. Local brand, so not a surprise. Sits in the cellar and has not moved from there in a very long time. I keep wondering whether I should just get the scrap copper value of it. Sentiment rather than logic keeps it safe.

Which things? I know I'm being pedantic, but I didn't think this article was about power filters or conditioners. I though it was about gear that had problems with AC distortion and noise. If the intent is to prove that all power conditioners are a waste of time, perhaps the title should be...

That is an interesting one. A common trick it to elevate the heater supply relative to the cathode, which seems to significantly lower the effect. But indeed, heater coupling is a real thing. YOu get amusing arguments in the tube guitar amp forums where the purists will tell you that a regulated...

I never said it did. This thread is titled "Impact of AC Distortion & Noise on Audio Equipment". So one would assume that that is the goal. Not to dismiss that the existence of any such equipment is justified. It is worthwhile finding gear that has such problems, and gaining some insights about...

That is the problem. You can convince yourself easily that if you sample at an instant, reproducing at a fixed level over a time period will introduce some error. This is where the myth of the staircase comes in. There is no staircase. Talking about an ideal NOS DAC is irrelevant. There is no...

Depends upon what you mean by measurements. The PS sensitivity of Class A and low feedback amplifiers is amplifier design 101, flip open say Douglas Self on the subject and you will find a significant body of work discussing the issues and designs. It stems from pretty basic circuit theory...

I might suggest that choosing a couple of ****** little tube amps that under the best of circumstances are going to be distortion generators is not the right exemplar of a device to test power supply issues. They are crud no matter what happens, and the bad power is simply unable to make them...

I have previously outlined one case where burn in would likely be a real effect, and would act to improve the speaker. But it is limited and unlikely to affect many if not most speaker purchases. However IMHO it would be worth exploring. In general however, exactly so. The vast amount of burn in...