Meeting a High Priest of the world of hi-fi BS.

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Location
London
I gave up cycling magazines a couple of years ago after reading one spectacularly bad piece of codswallop. Every cliche was in there, stiff transmission, soaked up road buzz, lively climber, etc, etc. Out of curiosity I googled the testers name, and less than a year prior he'd been writing for a model railway magazine from the same publishing group.
reading some of the stuff in some cycling mags I assume the next port of call for some of the journos is reviewing sex toys.
 

SpokeyDokey

67, & my GP says I will officially be old at 70!
Moderator
I hope you’re detached 😉

We are - properly too, unlike some of these new estates where detached houses are about a foot apart. :rolleyes:

Glad you like the upgrades and really like the speakers :okay:

They are really nice sounding, just playing about today to get the distance from the back wall right before I put the spikes on. For quite small speakers they have a huge port on the back. Strange things they are too as they are designed to be sited parallel to the wall rather than toed-in - they have a wide dispersion field which seems to work as even when listening off-axis the wall of sound remains intact. Danish designers - clever. Interestingly, even at relatively low volumes the sound can be heard very clearly throughout the whole house which was not the case with the old kit. Still trying to get my head around that.

Talking of which.... i got bitten by the upgrade bug earlier this year. A Naim power amp secondhand.
View attachment 537769
Its been a real treat since lockdown, hooked up to record deck too, even 'Rio' by Duran Duran got a play :laugh:

That's a meaty looking beast!

I'm not a Naim fan, but then I like the tone controls and adjustable/defeatable filters on my QUAD pre/power set up although I did 'upgrade' my 33 pre (1967 design) to a 44 a few years back.

That's a debate in itself!

I've not had tone controls for 18 years; the Sugden and this Cyrus don't have them and I have to say I've never felt the need. I notice that a few newer amp's don't have balance controls either; the Cyrus has them but they are relegated to the remote control.
 

raleighnut

Legendary Member
We are - properly too, unlike some of these new estates where detached houses are about a foot apart. :rolleyes:



They are really nice sounding, just playing about today to get the distance from the back wall right before I put the spikes on. For quite small speakers they have a huge port on the back. Strange things they are too as they are designed to be sited parallel to the wall rather than toed-in - they have a wide dispersion field which seems to work as even when listening off-axis the wall of sound remains intact. Danish designers - clever. Interestingly, even at relatively low volumes the sound can be heard very clearly throughout the whole house which was not the case with the old kit. Still trying to get my head around that.



That's a meaty looking beast!



That's a debate in itself!

I've not had tone controls for 18 years; the Sugden and this Cyrus don't have them and I have to say I've never felt the need. I notice that a few newer amp's don't have balance controls either; the Cyrus has them but they are relegated to the remote control.
I don't often use the tone controls/filters but every now and then they are useful with some 'bad' recordings of songs I love, some 'harsh' digital recordings can be made more musical by switching in the 10Khz filter and giving it about 5 (on a level between 0 and 25) to just take away the treble nastiness that is on the recording.

Likewise my use of the old 303's as Poweramps, they're not as powerful as later 'current dumping' models but fairly recently they have become more popular as far more 'musical' than the later models although their unique design (power limited supply rails) means that if one channel has a partictularly loud bit it will reduce the power available to the other channel (on the upside the Amp will survive a 'dead short' across its output with no damage) I've got around this by using 2 of them wired as 2 channel 'monoblocks' where the output of the Preamp is commoned to the inputs of each 303 and the Tweeter and Woofer of each speaker is wired independently (known as 'horizontal Bi-Amping' as opposed to 'vertical Bi-amping' where one drives the Tweeters and the others the main drivers)
 

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
...

I've not had tone controls for 18 years; the Sugden and this Cyrus don't have them and I have to say I've never felt the need. I notice that a few newer amp's don't have balance controls either; the Cyrus has them but they are relegated to the remote control.
Tone controls are for bootleg cassettes of concerts. I always leave the treble and bass flat out of respect for the producer on properly recorded music, although loudness can come in handy for late night, low volume listening. But I have headphones so can't remember the last time I switched the loudness on. Balance is useful depending on the layout of my lounge (I like to change the location of the sofa and armchairs)... i wish it was on my remote control unit.
 

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
Of its kind, that's a very fine thing indeed.
yeah but the sound does lack a little verve and insight :whistle:
 
I was on the look out for a new amp - the old NAD 3020i was sounding a bit dated - and after demoing likely replacements I eventually found one that was the perfect balance between affordabilty and sound quality and also miles better than the NAD.

537865


These are the TDA8932 boards - left and right.

Enough power to deafen next-door, great bass and generally very easy on the ear - all for princely sum £3 the pair (they do need a couple of laptop power bricks and a volume control Pot as well).
 

captain nemo1701

Space cadet. Deck 42 Main Engineering.
Location
Bristol
Christ, HDMI is digital. It either sends sufficient data to be successfully decoded, or it doesn't. Should have locked the fellow up for attempted fraud.
My set up has a fairly ordinary HDMI cable, not your gold-plated ones built by NASA for the ISS which can process data at warp speed, just an ASDA cheapie. Picture is fantastic, sound equally good and I have just basic cabling from Richer Sounds (nice bloke let me have final few metres free as it was almost the end of the reel). So I've concluded that the upper-end stuff is marketing BS for people with more cash than sense.
 
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