Any HI-FI Buffs on here ?? I need some advice.

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Oldfentiger

Veteran
Location
Pendle, Lancs
I bet expensive cables vs. cheap cables is the 'helmet' debate of the home audio forums.

According my mate, a sound recordist, quality cables make all the difference.
According to my brother, an electronics engineer... it's all marketing bull.

All i know is, my gold plated OFC 'quality' cables sound exactly the same as cables i knocked up myself using doorbell wire and badly soldered phono plugs from Tandy.

My take on this......
Analogue signals - better quality cables give big benefits.
Digital signal - better quality cables are a waste of money.

Of course I could be talking rubbish :tongue:
 

swee'pea99

Squire
Having said which, probably best not to take a good thing to excess...

brahms.jpg


:eek:
 

SpokeyDokey

68, & my GP says I will officially be old at 70!
Moderator
I know this is, of all the issues that exercise hifi nuts (and god knows there are enough of them) arguably the daddy of them all, and I certainly don't want to get into any kind of debate about it (each to his own is my philosophy, as with most things other than incest and morris dancing) but I do think vinyl delivers something digital doesn't. I've never heard this 'ghastly 'wowing' noise' (I guess I don't have a decent enough system), and as for the snap, crackle & pop, I find a proper clean eliminates pretty much all of it, and what remains doesn't bother me in the least.

The 'wow' sounds like a very low frequency base note that starts quietly and rises in volume and then fades away again. Minor stuff but it did irritate me.

As for the snap, crackle and pop - it used to annoy the living daylights out of me during quiet moments in the recording. It just shouldn't be there.

Mind you, with my old ears these days I doubt I could even hear these 'imperfections'! :laugh:
 
Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I downloaded Cool Edit, since bought up by Adobe and re-packaged as Audition, to transfer my records to digital. It had a snap, crackle and pop filter, which was excellent. The whole process was so tortuous though I gave up and just re-bought them on CD
 

SpokeyDokey

68, & my GP says I will officially be old at 70!
Moderator
Naim amp + Naim cd player with B&W CM7 Speakers blows away anything streamed.:okay:

How?

Substitute the digital CD input for a lossless (eg WAV or FLAC) streamed digital input and you will have exactly the same output.
 
Location
Cheshire
I was in much the same position and got a Denon CEOL Piccolo off Superfi for £130 ex demo, kept Wharfdale Diamond speakers and Goldring GR2 turntable (new Ortofon Red and Project Phono box).. it sounds great 65W nice and loud, internet radio is genius. I used to work in a hifi shop and had Naim/Dynaudio set up before this... a lot of diminishing returns with hi fi!
 

SpokeyDokey

68, & my GP says I will officially be old at 70!
Moderator
You need to listen to them side by side which i can do, There is quite a lot of difference. ^_^

I can. There isn't.

Seriously - tell me how one lossless medium can sound different to another lossless medium through the same equipment? It's exactly the same digital signal being converted to an analogue output, some gain applied and then dumped through the speakers.

It's just not possible.

The only thing I can think of is that you are comparing something like a streamed MP3 to a CD?
 
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