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Post by 1960broookwood on May 8, 2013 16:06:16 GMT -5
The last time I was in the local high end store Ron the owner had a crappy pair of class D Hegels driven by a crappy Cary SLP feeding a crappy pair of Maggie 1.7's. The sound was nothing short of craptacular. Now just substitute your favorite adjective.
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Post by rtg97229 on May 8, 2013 16:14:27 GMT -5
The last time I was in the local high end store Ron the owner had a crappy pair of class D Hegels driven by a crappy Cary SLP feeding a crappy pair of Maggie 1.7's. The sound was nothing short of craptacular. Now just substitute your favorite adjective. I never liked the sound of Maggies, they just don't sound right to me after listening to ESLs. I would find another audio store.
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Post by GreenKiwi on May 8, 2013 16:17:24 GMT -5
I think that "tone", is really my only issue... a message like " and that goes for 'PRO' electronics as well!"
I think that there are lots of PRO electronics that have no problems being in the same space as "audiophile" electronics. Sure your amps that you use to "create" sound are in a different class... but are you saying that Emotiva's PRO Stealth DAC shouldn't be talked about because it is a PRO product? Pro products seem much more about different feature sets rather than different raw functionality.
I also have to apologize as for some reason I'd thought he had made the comment that read effectively as "If you like tubes, you like distortion", which I don't think comes across right... at any rate, I had lumped a bunch of these comments together and that caused my reaction.
As well as repeated statements about a technology being bad etc, particularly in a thread that someone started to talk about how much they love their new purchase. They probably don't like being told that someone feels that their product is " Class D (ICE modules, so not very original design) put in a box, gussied up, and sold for a pretty good price."
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Post by Andrew Robinson on May 8, 2013 16:21:04 GMT -5
I'm totally a closeted Magnepan fanatic. Have owned every model minus their 20.1s. Have a pair of MMGs on hand always for when the mood strikes me. That being said, one of my all-time favorite loudspeakers is MartinLogan's original CLS. I too owned them for a spell and regret selling them damn near everyday. Both need gobs of power to sound their best. Honestly, it took my Crown XLS 2000 amps running in bridge mono (1,000+ Watts) to get even the MMGs to shape up and fly right. An odd speaker with magical properties but I fear many have never really "heard" them. Just my 2 cents.
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Post by mgbpuff on May 8, 2013 17:36:57 GMT -5
The last time I was in the local high end store Ron the owner had a crappy pair of class D Hegels driven by a crappy Cary SLP feeding a crappy pair of Maggie 1.7's. The sound was nothing short of craptacular. Now just substitute your favorite adjective. The last time I was in the local high end store, Ron the owner, had an edgy pair of class D Hegels driven by a tubey sounding Cary SLP feeding a low frequency challenged pair of Maggie 1.7's. The sound was nothing short of compressed realism.
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Post by mgbpuff on May 8, 2013 17:56:12 GMT -5
Pro components and amplifiers are designed for a different venue in mind. You must be careful in using them mixed with consumer products. Nuff said!
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Post by ocezam on May 10, 2013 7:30:01 GMT -5
Pro components and amplifiers are designed for a different venue in mind. You must be careful in using them mixed with consumer products. Nuff said! The audio god has spoken. We can all quit posting now. Nothing more to say.
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Post by ocezam on May 10, 2013 7:32:46 GMT -5
That being said, one of my all-time favorite loudspeakers is MartinLogan's original CLS. I too owned them for a spell and regret selling them damn near everyday. Both need gobs of power to sound their best. Honestly, it took my Crown XLS 2000 amps running in bridge mono (1,000+ Watts) to get even the MMGs to shape up and fly right. Aren't you aware that your Crowns are crap? They've been deemed so here. I think you should throw them out immediately! .....
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Post by mgbpuff on May 10, 2013 7:46:12 GMT -5
"Nuff said!" as in I'm not saying anything more on the matter. Not as in nobody else can say anything more on the matter. Pro equipment is not as well regulated and the companies that produce 'pro' equipment cover the range from guitar instrumentation houses to hifi audio manufacturers such as Emotiva Pro, and Sherbourn Pro both of whom I am sure do not abandon their integrity in inflated undocumented specifications and ratings. O.K. I said more, but stop this hate flinging directed at me - I do not make direct disparaging remarks about you, I simply am discussing and stating my viewpoints about audio equipment and my warnings about some of the pro equipment is just to let people know that they are rated differently and aimed at a different market in general.
As for the unwise 'crap' statement that I made, please see post 118 in this thread.
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Post by Andrew Robinson on May 10, 2013 9:21:31 GMT -5
Aren't you aware that your Crowns are crap? They've been deemed so here. I think you should throw them out immediately! Oh man, I had no idea. Shoot.
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Post by mshump on May 10, 2013 10:38:03 GMT -5
Wow maybe we all should just take our basketballs and go home !! Though it is interesting !!
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bootman
Emo VIPs
Typing useless posts on internet forums....
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Post by bootman on May 10, 2013 10:46:57 GMT -5
My son is in an undergrad philosophy class and came home and asked me what is art? We went round and round but couldn't definitively come to a conclusion. I took a similar class many many many moons ago. IMHO art is anything that brings out an emotion in people positive or negative. So by that definition some of my useless posts here can be considered "Art". ;D Now this thread can be locked and we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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Post by mgbpuff on May 10, 2013 11:05:28 GMT -5
Audio reproductive equipment isn't art. It's based on science, available components, prudent selection of those components, and good engineering practices. You can go beyond functionality and dress it artfully, but that adds nothing to its performance.
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Post by rtg97229 on May 10, 2013 11:30:53 GMT -5
Audio reproductive equipment isn't art. It's based on science, available components, prudent selection of those components, and good engineering practices. You can go beyond functionality and dress it artfully, but that adds nothing to its performance. What if the amplifier has the word ART on the faceplate?
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bootman
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Typing useless posts on internet forums....
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Post by bootman on May 10, 2013 11:40:21 GMT -5
Audio reproductive equipment isn't art. It's based on science, available components, prudent selection of those components, and good engineering practices. You can go beyond functionality and dress it artfully, but that adds nothing to its performance. Some engineering around RF designs (way above the audio range GHz) is almost like an art form. I have worked with them and sometimes things don't always work out like they do on paper. Sometimes it is trial and error. (and IMO that is where the "art" comes in) But I digress.
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KeithL
Administrator
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Post by KeithL on May 10, 2013 11:50:33 GMT -5
The proper way to think about it is that the PRIORITIES and DESIGN GOALS are quite different with Pro equipment, and this can often lead to results not pleasing to audiophiles. "Pro Equipment" is also a pretty wide category, stretching all the way from studio equipment to portable amps played in parks. In the context of power amplifiers, the priorities usually include "decent sound", small size, light weight, ruggedness and reliability... but the order is often not the same. I'm sure the guys buying amps for a wrestling arena place a very high priority on getting a huge amount of power in a small, cheap, light cabinet that fits their rack and their budget - and that their minimum criterion for "decent sound" isn't the same as the one we audiophiles would use. I'll bet most studio guys are more concerned with how it sounds, even though they might like to meet those other requirements as well. The point is that, while some Pro equipment sounds and performs very well, it's not good to assume that was a priority for a specific piece of pro equipment. Some Pro equipment does NOT perform well or sound good at all by audiophile standards, and a lot of it simply doesn't even provide many standard specifications. For example, MANY "Pro" Class D amplifiers make lots of power. One I know of delivers 6 kW from a 15 pound unit that fits in a 2RU slot with minimal clearance, for a very reasonable price, but the distortion and noise measurements for it are downright awful - and they don't provide those specs unless you ask. As you might expect, it sounds pretty good in a big park playing through PA speakers (and so meets its design goals), but not so good in an audiophile system in a house (which is NOT what it was designed for). On that note, our ProDac (properly the Stealth DC-1) IS designed to sound good and to provide an accurate rendition of whatever you play through it - both of which are usually the priority requirements for both studios and audiophiles. (Arguably, the small size and "pro" output levels are of more concern to professionals and studio folks.) On your other comment, it IS true that "characteristic tube sound" is a combination of specific distortion characteristics, frequency response shape, and damping factor values. The differences between high-end tube equipment and high-end solid state equipment are quite measurable and not at all mysterious. (And it's slightly ingenuous to claim that none of the measurable things matter, and the actual difference is instead some intangible something else, because someone happens to not like what the measurements demonstrate or suggest about their tastes.) A serious photographer may well use a blur filter because it makes some things look better and produces a pleasant effect, but you would find it odd if he suggested he used the blur filter NOT because it blurs the image pleasantly, but because it has some other intangible (and unmeasurable) effect. I think that "tone", is really my only issue... a message like " and that goes for 'PRO' electronics as well!" I think that there are lots of PRO electronics that have no problems being in the same space as "audiophile" electronics. Sure your amps that you use to "create" sound are in a different class... but are you saying that Emotiva's PRO Stealth DAC shouldn't be talked about because it is a PRO product? Pro products seem much more about different feature sets rather than different raw functionality. I also have to apologize as for some reason I'd thought he had made the comment that read effectively as "If you like tubes, you like distortion", which I don't think comes across right... at any rate, I had lumped a bunch of these comments together and that caused my reaction. As well as repeated statements about a technology being bad etc, particularly in a thread that someone started to talk about how much they love their new purchase. They probably don't like being told that someone feels that their product is " Class D (ICE modules, so not very original design) put in a box, gussied up, and sold for a pretty good price."
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Post by mgbpuff on May 10, 2013 12:02:11 GMT -5
Even though you are not talking to me, I know that I am the elephant in the room! Finally, some statements that vindicate some of my assertions about Pro equipment. Sorry for stepping on some feet here - that's what we elephants do!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2013 13:00:08 GMT -5
The proper way to think about it is that the PRIORITIES and DESIGN GOALS are quite different with Pro equipment, and this can often lead to results not pleasing to audiophiles. "Pro Equipment" is also a pretty wide category, stretching all the way from studio equipment to portable amps played in parks. In the context of power amplifiers, the priorities usually include "decent sound", small size, light weight, ruggedness and reliability... but the order is often not the same. I'm sure the guys buying amps for a wrestling arena place a very high priority on getting a huge amount of power in a small, cheap, light cabinet that fits their rack and their budget - and that their minimum criterion for "decent sound" isn't the same as the one we audiophiles would use. I'll bet most studio guys are more concerned with how it sounds, even though they might like to meet those other requirements as well. The point is that, while some Pro equipment sounds and performs very well, it's not good to assume that was a priority for a specific piece of pro equipment. Some Pro equipment does NOT perform well or sound good at all by audiophile standards, and a lot of it simply doesn't even provide many standard specifications. For example, MANY "Pro" Class D amplifiers make lots of power. One I know of delivers 6 kW from a 15 pound unit that fits in a 2RU slot with minimal clearance, for a very reasonable price, but the distortion and noise measurements for it are downright awful - and they don't provide those specs unless you ask. As you might expect, it sounds pretty good in a big park playing through PA speakers (and so meets its design goals), but not so good in an audiophile system in a house (which is NOT what it was designed for). On that note, our ProDac (properly the Stealth DC-1) IS designed to sound good and to provide an accurate rendition of whatever you play through it - both of which are usually the priority requirements for both studios and audiophiles. (Arguably, the small size and "pro" output levels are of more concern to professionals and studio folks.) On your other comment, it IS true that "characteristic tube sound" is a combination of specific distortion characteristics, frequency response shape, and damping factor values. The differences between high-end tube equipment and high-end solid state equipment are quite measurable and not at all mysterious. (And it's slightly ingenuous to claim that none of the measurable things matter, and the actual difference is instead some intangible something else, because someone happens to not like what the measurements demonstrate or suggest about their tastes.) A serious photographer may well use a blur filter because it makes some things look better and produces a pleasant effect, but you would find it odd if he suggested he used the blur filter NOT because it blurs the image pleasantly, but because it has some other intangible (and unmeasurable) effect. I think that "tone", is really my only issue... a message like " and that goes for 'PRO' electronics as well!" I think that there are lots of PRO electronics that have no problems being in the same space as "audiophile" electronics. Sure your amps that you use to "create" sound are in a different class... but are you saying that Emotiva's PRO Stealth DAC shouldn't be talked about because it is a PRO product? Pro products seem much more about different feature sets rather than different raw functionality. I also have to apologize as for some reason I'd thought he had made the comment that read effectively as "If you like tubes, you like distortion", which I don't think comes across right... at any rate, I had lumped a bunch of these comments together and that caused my reaction. As well as repeated statements about a technology being bad etc, particularly in a thread that someone started to talk about how much they love their new purchase. They probably don't like being told that someone feels that their product is " Class D (ICE modules, so not very original design) put in a box, gussied up, and sold for a pretty good price." You say that there are lots of pa amps that put out lots of power but sound bad/if not used the way they are intended......So there are good and bad sounding PA amps is what you are getting at......? So it's exactly the same as HT consumer amps being good and bad...... I don't know why you are singling out pro stuff when it's universal for all amps.
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Post by mgbpuff on May 10, 2013 13:08:53 GMT -5
This from a guy who blows the windows out in his house with his system. He probably has stadium lighting in his bathrooms. What the hay- light is light!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2013 14:31:47 GMT -5
This from a guy who blows the windows out in his house with his system. He probably has stadium lighting in his bathrooms. What the hay- light is light! huh? You've failed the internet I'm afraid.....
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