Your system is basically revealing what is on the recording. The vast majority of CDs were poorly recorded to begin with, it is not amazing that your system reveals that. It might be an interesting experiment to break out the old LPs and a record player (Rega 3 and a decent cartridge and a used tube phono section for starters) and see that analog has a lot going for it...there's less fatigue and often more information, and therefore more listening pleasure.

tacs July 17, 2001 02:40

That's alot of money to spend to discover that you can't buy the music you'd like to. I'm not that familier with soem of the components listed in your system but I do know that "expensive" doesn't always translate in to "good". Try some Spendors or Harbeths with some midlevel British electronics and go out and buy whatever music you desire. Then just listen to some music.

nlglass@traverse.com July 15, 2001 17:46

Also, Illuminations can sound bright in some systems. It`s great for the systems lacking resolution.

gvatchna July 13, 2001 01:55

Marantz can not sound bright. I have no opinion on MSB sinse I never heard it, but I had one of Music Fidelity`s SS disign for home auditioning. It did everything well except even after brake in it was so bright that I returned it. Could it be your problem? Try a different amp.Maybe it will help.

gvatchna July 13, 2001 01:52

Hang on to those speakers, they are not the problem!! I suspect your problem is in your wires - the Analysis Plus have been described as uptilted and thin. I would highly recommend spending $89.95/pr. on Music Metre Signature interconnects (closeout from hcmaudio.com), and insert them between source and pre, and pre and amp. I'd also try a TG Audio HSRi power cord on the amp. Believe it or not, you are almost there. Hang in there and good luck! Good luck.

johnnybravo June 26, 2001 22:12

Your comment that "some" recordings sound brighter and have more sibilance suggest the possibility that your system is actually fairly accurate at reproducing the recording. I do not know what kind of music you prefer, but I find the wide range of variation in the "quality" of recordings to be a problem. I hate having to choose between the quality of the music and the quality of the recording. By the way, congratulations on the system. Very nice! I agree that source (CD) is a nice unit, but is not in the same class as the rest of your gear. Good luck and enjoy the music! Regards, Brady

bbroussard June 26, 2001 18:45

For an amazingly warm, analog-like sound from even brightly recorded CDs, try the Electrocompaniet EMC-1 (available used on Audiogon for around $2300-2500). I have been listening to this player in my solid state system for 6 mos now and am still startled by how LP-like it makes CDs sound, even badly recorded ones. I also agree w/ the beauty and warmth of the sound out of the Ah! New Tjoeb player, available new for $579 from Kevin at Upscale Audio.

sc53 June 25, 2001 14:22

v From The Absolute Sound Issue (127) Room Treatment & Speaker Placement: Eight Easy Ways To Improve Your Sound by Robert E. Greene The listening room, as we all agree, has more influence on the sound of our systems than any single component. Here are some easy "fixes" for room problems. Life would be simpler if more of a good thing were always a better thing. But in room acoustics, there can be too much of some good things. A little damping is good - nobody wants to listen in a tile bathroom. But too much damping can deaden the sound. A little diffusion is good - a diffusing surface spreads reflections all around and prevents "flutter" echoes. But a room with all diffusing surfaces allows only imprecise stereo imaging. The sound would go every which way and no precisely focused image could emerge. The subject of small room acoustics is complicated. Books have been written about it without saying the last word. The subject is full of controversies, too. Different experts have different ideas on what ought to happen in stereo or surround playback. Still, we all know that room acoustics and the placement of speakers and listener within the room have big effects on what we hear. In this article, I'll skip the complicated theory and the more exotic forms of room treatment, and present some practical, simple, and cheap things you can do. In later installments, I'll talk about the more extreme measures. But these basic items will get you surprisingly far: 1. Cover the floor with thick, padded carpet. The first and probably biggest sound reflection is the one off the floor. There is not much you can do about the low-frequency part, and I'll come back to the midrange later. But you want to get rid of the high-frequency part. This early reflection arrives in the first five or fewer milli-seconds after the direct sound, and becomes part of the direct sound, as you hear it, especially since the reflection comes from almost the same direction. You want to avoid cluttering your clean speaker sound with a high-frequency floor bounce. And since you are unlikely to pad your ceiling, an unpadded floor will give you two hard, flat, parallel surfaces, so the sound bounces to and fro between floor and ceiling, up and down, on and on. This is awful to hear. Figure 1a. Response at the listening position to an impulse through the Harbeth Monitor 40 speakers. Note the spikes 2-3 milliseconds after the initial pulse arriving directly from the speaker. No acoustic treatment here except carpeted floor, bookcases on sidewalls. Figure 1b. This situation is identical to 1a except that 4-inch thick 2 x 2-foot foam pieces have been placed at the tweeter's "mirror points" on floor and ceiling. Note that the sharp spikes at 2-3 ms are eliminated by the foam's absorption. 2. Cover the windows with curtains. Some concert halls get away with a certain amount of glass. But in audio rooms, where the surfaces are close to you, glass sounds terrible. Make the curtains retractable, if you must, but cover the windows when you are listening. And eschew glass-front bookcases and cabinets, no matter how elegant they look. 3. Break up reflections off parallel walls. Parallel walls, just like the floor and ceiling, create the potential for sound reflecting back and forth almost indefinitely. The result is that sonic disaster known as "flutter echo." Clap your hands hard. If you hear a "boing" after-sound, you are in trouble. Bookcases, especially if the books are arranged irregularly (no good housekeeping here, please) are quite good at breaking up sound, acting as "diffusers." Of course, you can buy mathematically designed diffusers, but the bookcases do a remarkably good job. 4. Unless you have a cathedral ceiling, stick a piece of foam at the "mirror point" of each tweeter. The mirror point is the place where a mirror placed flat against the ceiling would let you see the tweeter from your listening position. You can figure out its location by geometry - or just use the mirror! This is not as critical as the floor treatment, usually, but it is worth doing. Look at Figure 1's measurements to see how well this floor-plus-ceiling treatment works. The foam pieces can be no larger than about a foot square and a few inches thick to take the edge off the highs from above. 5. Don't over-damp. Small pieces of foam at mirror points won't do much to the overall room sound, but indiscriminate application of big foam pieces and heavy curtains can make the sound too dead. Fairly thin absorbing materials soak up higher frequencies. But not low frequencies. The rule of thumb is that the material has to be on the order of a half-wavelength thick to do anything. So two inches of foam will kill highs (10 kHz is a little over an inch in wavelength), but 200 Hz, with its five-foot-plus wave won't even notice it. Clearly the potential for seriously unbalancing your room exists. Much of what you hear is reverberant soundfield and absorbing higher frequencies but not low will make it bottom heavy. Many rooms are too bright, untreated; moreover, losing the extreme highs in the reverberant field will give a sound that is like that in a concert hall. (Concert halls have almost no high frequencies in their reverberant field: See my "Records and Reality: How Music Sounds in Concert Halls," Issue 37.) But if you get carried away with damping and begin to damp upper-midrange and "presence range" frequencies (2-6 kHz), you can end up with unpleasantly and unnaturally "dead" sound. Figure 1c. Waterfall representation of 1a. Strong delayed energy is present in the 1 - 8 kHz region. Figure 1d. Waterfall representation of 1b (foam on floor and ceiling at "mirror points"). Note the far superior clearing of the treble and the elimination of the 3 kHz bump and ridge. 6. Listen close to your speakers sometimes, as an experiment. Many people listen so far from their speakers that they are really hearing the room. This may be agreeable but it is unlikely to be as truthful to the source as the direct sound of your speakers. As an ear-calibration, listening close is invaluable. And it gives you a target to aim for in your normal listening position. (Inci-dentally, almost all recordings are "nearfield" monitored - the direct sound is what the folks making the recording had in mind, for better or worse.) 7. The floor reflection is a source of coloration. We have already talked about soaking up the high-frequency part of the really early reflections off the floor and ceiling. "Really early" means "arriving in the first five milliseconds after the direct arrival." According to Kates' landmark 1984 paper [James M. Kates, "A perceptual criterion for loudspeaker evaluation," Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vol. 32, pp. 938-945, December 1984], the reflections that arrive that soon are lumped in with the direct sound tonally. And while the top two octaves or so of such an early reflection create only a kind of tizz, the midrange parts give a tonal coloration. Look at Figure 2, with the floor reflection and then with that reflection removed by radical room treatment. Without the reflection, there is something very like perfect neutrality across the midrange. With the reflection in - would you buy a speaker with that kind of frequency response? Now you can see why line-source speakers fascinate people. There is no delayed floor reflection (or more precisely, the floor plus ceiling and the speaker combine to produce the effect of no reflection). So the speaker has lower coloration intrinsically, at least as far as the reflection coloration goes. But you can get the low coloration with point-source speakers, too: Look at Figure 2b. The trouble is that you have to put some hefty foam pieces on the floor to get this high fidelity. Still, you can use them when you listen, and store them afterward. Thick stacks of foam or pieces leaning against each other like a little roof at the mirror points will do the trick. Side-wall reflections are another story: Some people like them because they add "spaciousness." We all like them in concert halls, where these reflections arrive after a considerable delay. But in listening rooms, they arrive too soon for most tastes. I damp the mirror points and use bookcases on the side walls for diffusion. But there is controversy here, and you should experiment. Note that if you use strong side-wall reflections to make the sound spacious, you need a speaker with excellent off-axis response. Figure 2a. Frequency response of the first 5 ms at the listening position, impulse through Spendor SP 1/2 speaker. Foam on ceiling mirror point, floor untreated except for carpet. Note roll-off in bass from 5 ms window, treble droop with distance. Look at 400 Hz - 8 kHz. Figure 2b. 2a set-up with substantial foam treatment on floor (1-foot thick; 4 x 2-foot long, at mirror point). Note improved midrange smoothness. Something like the neutrality of the speaker itself! 8. Experiment with speaker placement for the most even bass. A few words on a complex subject: There are two factors involved here, the interaction with the room's resonances (room modes) and the radiation resistance loading of the speaker by the room boundaries (the Allison effect: When a boundary is one quarter wavelength from the driver, the driver is unloaded by the reflection from the boundary so that the speaker radiates less acoustic power at that frequency). There are computer programs that attempt to tell you the best places for speakers and listener, at least for strictly rectangular rooms. But a few hours fooling around will get you close. Remember the Allison rule that the distances from woofer to floor, side wall, and back wall should be as different from each other as possible and, as a rule of thumb, the middle-sized distance squared should be close to the figure you get by multiplying the largest and smallest. Then moving the speakers closer to the corner will bring up the bottom. It helps to measure with "warble tones" and an SPL meter. What you see there is pretty much what you hear, below about 300 Hz. (Higher up, life is much more complicated). If you have access to an RTA spectrum analyzer, that is even quicker to use. Don't give up - it can be made to work: Look at Figure 3. This method, overall, takes work and thought, but not much money. This is one time in audio when capitalism does not apply. At the end of your experiments, you will be surprised at how good your equipment really is and how little of its sonic potential you have been hearing. Acoustics is (almost) everything. Figure 3. Steady-state response of Harbeth Monitor 40 at listening position, after careful placement. With patience and good speakers, you can make things work! All measurements done with Liberty Audio Suite.   [Send Feedback to the staff of The Absolute Sound] © 2001 Absolute Multimedia. Subscription Inquiries U.S. 888-732-1625 / Outside U.S. 973-627-5162

mikec June 24, 2001 23:30

v From The Absolute Sound Issue (127) Room Treatment & Speaker Placement: Eight Easy Ways To Improve Your Sound by Robert E. Greene The listening room, as we all agree, has more influence on the sound of our systems than any single component. Here are some easy "fixes" for room problems. Life would be simpler if more of a good thing were always a better thing. But in room acoustics, there can be too much of some good things. A little damping is good - nobody wants to listen in a tile bathroom. But too much damping can deaden the sound. A little diffusion is good - a diffusing surface spreads reflections all around and prevents "flutter" echoes. But a room with all diffusing surfaces allows only imprecise stereo imaging. The sound would go every which way and no precisely focused image could emerge. The subject of small room acoustics is complicated. Books have been written about it without saying the last word. The subject is full of controversies, too. Different experts have different ideas on what ought to happen in stereo or surround playback. Still, we all know that room acoustics and the placement of speakers and listener within the room have big effects on what we hear. In this article, I'll skip the complicated theory and the more exotic forms of room treatment, and present some practical, simple, and cheap things you can do. In later installments, I'll talk about the more extreme measures. But these basic items will get you surprisingly far: 1. Cover the floor with thick, padded carpet. The first and probably biggest sound reflection is the one off the floor. There is not much you can do about the low-frequency part, and I'll come back to the midrange later. But you want to get rid of the high-frequency part. This early reflection arrives in the first five or fewer milli-seconds after the direct sound, and becomes part of the direct sound, as you hear it, especially since the reflection comes from almost the same direction. You want to avoid cluttering your clean speaker sound with a high-frequency floor bounce. And since you are unlikely to pad your ceiling, an unpadded floor will give you two hard, flat, parallel surfaces, so the sound bounces to and fro between floor and ceiling, up and down, on and on. This is awful to hear. Figure 1a. Response at the listening position to an impulse through the Harbeth Monitor 40 speakers. Note the spikes 2-3 milliseconds after the initial pulse arriving directly from the speaker. No acoustic treatment here except carpeted floor, bookcases on sidewalls. Figure 1b. This situation is identical to 1a except that 4-inch thick 2 x 2-foot foam pieces have been placed at the tweeter's "mirror points" on floor and ceiling. Note that the sharp spikes at 2-3 ms are eliminated by the foam's absorption. 2. Cover the windows with curtains. Some concert halls get away with a certain amount of glass. But in audio rooms, where the surfaces are close to you, glass sounds terrible. Make the curtains retractable, if you must, but cover the windows when you are listening. And eschew glass-front bookcases and cabinets, no matter how elegant they look. 3. Break up reflections off parallel walls. Parallel walls, just like the floor and ceiling, create the potential for sound reflecting back and forth almost indefinitely. The result is that sonic disaster known as "flutter echo." Clap your hands hard. If you hear a "boing" after-sound, you are in trouble. Bookcases, especially if the books are arranged irregularly (no good housekeeping here, please) are quite good at breaking up sound, acting as "diffusers." Of course, you can buy mathematically designed diffusers, but the bookcases do a remarkably good job. 4. Unless you have a cathedral ceiling, stick a piece of foam at the "mirror point" of each tweeter. The mirror point is the place where a mirror placed flat against the ceiling would let you see the tweeter from your listening position. You can figure out its location by geometry - or just use the mirror! This is not as critical as the floor treatment, usually, but it is worth doing. Look at Figure 1's measurements to see how well this floor-plus-ceiling treatment works. The foam pieces can be no larger than about a foot square and a few inches thick to take the edge off the highs from above. 5. Don't over-damp. Small pieces of foam at mirror points won't do much to the overall room sound, but indiscriminate application of big foam pieces and heavy curtains can make the sound too dead. Fairly thin absorbing materials soak up higher frequencies. But not low frequencies. The rule of thumb is that the material has to be on the order of a half-wavelength thick to do anything. So two inches of foam will kill highs (10 kHz is a little over an inch in wavelength), but 200 Hz, with its five-foot-plus wave won't even notice it. Clearly the potential for seriously unbalancing your room exists. Much of what you hear is reverberant soundfield and absorbing higher frequencies but not low will make it bottom heavy. Many rooms are too bright, untreated; moreover, losing the extreme highs in the reverberant field will give a sound that is like that in a concert hall. (Concert halls have almost no high frequencies in their reverberant field: See my "Records and Reality: How Music Sounds in Concert Halls," Issue 37.) But if you get carried away with damping and begin to damp upper-midrange and "presence range" frequencies (2-6 kHz), you can end up with unpleasantly and unnaturally "dead" sound. Figure 1c. Waterfall representation of 1a. Strong delayed energy is present in the 1 - 8 kHz region. Figure 1d. Waterfall representation of 1b (foam on floor and ceiling at "mirror points"). Note the far superior clearing of the treble and the elimination of the 3 kHz bump and ridge. 6. Listen close to your speakers sometimes, as an experiment. Many people listen so far from their speakers that they are really hearing the room. This may be agreeable but it is unlikely to be as truthful to the source as the direct sound of your speakers. As an ear-calibration, listening close is invaluable. And it gives you a target to aim for in your normal listening position. (Inci-dentally, almost all recordings are "nearfield" monitored - the direct sound is what the folks making the recording had in mind, for better or worse.) 7. The floor reflection is a source of coloration. We have already talked about soaking up the high-frequency part of the really early reflections off the floor and ceiling. "Really early" means "arriving in the first five milliseconds after the direct arrival." According to Kates' landmark 1984 paper [James M. Kates, "A perceptual criterion for loudspeaker evaluation," Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vol. 32, pp. 938-945, December 1984], the reflections that arrive that soon are lumped in with the direct sound tonally. And while the top two octaves or so of such an early reflection create only a kind of tizz, the midrange parts give a tonal coloration. Look at Figure 2, with the floor reflection and then with that reflection removed by radical room treatment. Without the reflection, there is something very like perfect neutrality across the midrange. With the reflection in - would you buy a speaker with that kind of frequency response? Now you can see why line-source speakers fascinate people. There is no delayed floor reflection (or more precisely, the floor plus ceiling and the speaker combine to produce the effect of no reflection). So the speaker has lower coloration intrinsically, at least as far as the reflection coloration goes. But you can get the low coloration with point-source speakers, too: Look at Figure 2b. The trouble is that you have to put some hefty foam pieces on the floor to get this high fidelity. Still, you can use them when you listen, and store them afterward. Thick stacks of foam or pieces leaning against each other like a little roof at the mirror points will do the trick. Side-wall reflections are another story: Some people like them because they add "spaciousness." We all like them in concert halls, where these reflections arrive after a considerable delay. But in listening rooms, they arrive too soon for most tastes. I damp the mirror points and use bookcases on the side walls for diffusion. But there is controversy here, and you should experiment. Note that if you use strong side-wall reflections to make the sound spacious, you need a speaker with excellent off-axis response. Figure 2a. Frequency response of the first 5 ms at the listening position, impulse through Spendor SP 1/2 speaker. Foam on ceiling mirror point, floor untreated except for carpet. Note roll-off in bass from 5 ms window, treble droop with distance. Look at 400 Hz - 8 kHz. Figure 2b. 2a set-up with substantial foam treatment on floor (1-foot thick; 4 x 2-foot long, at mirror point). Note improved midrange smoothness. Something like the neutrality of the speaker itself! 8. Experiment with speaker placement for the most even bass. A few words on a complex subject: There are two factors involved here, the interaction with the room's resonances (room modes) and the radiation resistance loading of the speaker by the room boundaries (the Allison effect: When a boundary is one quarter wavelength from the driver, the driver is unloaded by the reflection from the boundary so that the speaker radiates less acoustic power at that frequency). There are computer programs that attempt to tell you the best places for speakers and listener, at least for strictly rectangular rooms. But a few hours fooling around will get you close. Remember the Allison rule that the distances from woofer to floor, side wall, and back wall should be as different from each other as possible and, as a rule of thumb, the middle-sized distance squared should be close to the figure you get by multiplying the largest and smallest. Then moving the speakers closer to the corner will bring up the bottom. It helps to measure with "warble tones" and an SPL meter. What you see there is pretty much what you hear, below about 300 Hz. (Higher up, life is much more complicated). If you have access to an RTA spectrum analyzer, that is even quicker to use. Don't give up - it can be made to work: Look at Figure 3. This method, overall, takes work and thought, but not much money. This is one time in audio when capitalism does not apply. At the end of your experiments, you will be surprised at how good your equipment really is and how little of its sonic potential you have been hearing. Acoustics is (almost) everything. Figure 3. Steady-state response of Harbeth Monitor 40 at listening position, after careful placement. With patience and good speakers, you can make things work! All measurements done with Liberty Audio Suite.   [Send Feedback to the staff of The Absolute Sound] © 2001 Absolute Multimedia. Subscription Inquiries U.S. 888-732-1625 / Outside U.S. 973-627-5162

mikec June 24, 2001 23:29

Totalfreedom, I'm 52 and also a "newbie" to high-end. I have a Creek CD-43 (not really high-end) and felt my system was also bright. I replaced the stock power cords on the cd and integrated amp (Plinius 8150) with Shunyata PCs. It made a HUGE difference in my system - so much that I am no longer eager to upgrade my modest CD player. Good luck and happy listening!! Joel

joeldoss June 24, 2001 18:12

TF, glad that you're having fun and learning along the way. Just passing on some "generic" comments / suggestions, so take them for what they are worth. I'll take it "piece by piece" for sake of clarity. Not familiar with the Marantz. I'm sure that you can do better though. LOTS of reasonable transports available. MSB as a general rule can be somewhat bright / forward / hard sounding. Not familiar with Full Nelson mod though, so may not apply. Monarchy Dip tends to make the signal sound "cleaner & clearer", but can become "etched" and tends to lean out the bass somewhat. Musical Fidelity integrated: While i am not familiar with this piece, i do know the Musical Fidelity "house sound". Even though this piece has tubes, i have to wonder if it varies drastically from their SS pieces ??? As such, i've always found the MF gear to sound very quick and clean, but slightly on the lean side. I've always liked it, but wished for something a little bit fuller. Hales speakers tend to sound somewhat bright in my experience. Could have just been a poor match with the rest of the system though. Kimber's tend to sound quick, clean, open and somewhat lean. Don't know about this specific cable, just another "generalization" about the "kimber house sound". Cardas is typically on the warm and smooth side. I doubt that this has anything to do with the problem that your describing. Not familiar with the Analysis Plus interconnects, so i can't pass on any info about them. I did find the AP Oval 9's to sound very bright and "tizzy" in several of my systems. Needless to say, i did not keep them for long. From what i've been able to find out from other sources, this cable seems to be VERY system dependent. I may be one of the select few that had poor overall results with this cable. Monster power line filters seem to be generally liked. I use one in my HT system and one in my bedroom system. Tried using one in my puter room system and it was horrible (tuns of hum). Obviously, results may vary from system to system. Hope this helps and gives you something to think about. You might try running the transport right into the DAC and see how that works. Sean >

sean June 24, 2001 06:26

You are absolutely correct in feeling that the problem is in the CD player. I would look at a Cary 303 or the new AH! Tjoeb. Personally, I would get rid of all 3 CD pieces and replace them with a better quality "one box" CD player. This eliminates complexity and should also reduce jitter. Check out audioreview.com for other CD player possibilities. Good luck and best wishes.

rogerroger June 23, 2001 23:39