Yes mate, I have which is why I'm grubbing around junk shops! There's a guy on the bay that totally restores them, from what I can see he does about 5 or 6 a year. He always sticks them on a no reserve auction & they always go for well over a grand. Granted, there may be an element of shill bidding going on, but still there must be people willing to pay the final price. I used to love junk shops, but they're getting so hard to find these days.
That's not all of them! But no, no list unfortunately. Im going to go out on a limb and assume you wouldn't like 95% of it and the 5% you do like, you'd frown upon what I do with it. I'd love to be wrong though.
That is intriguing. What do you do with the 5%? Can you give examples of artists / genres in either the 5% or 95%?
The 95% is hardcore/underground hip hop. The 5% is so varied there HAS to be some stuff you like in there. And this is what I do with it...
Not sure if chemical Ali was the greatest, or if I picked up the underlying message. I hope this does not sound like being damned by feint praise, but your stuff is not too bad! (Don't forget I am an old fart). Keep up the good work.
the thing is, with the high end stuff from the 80's, it will still kick the arse out of virtually anything thats ever been made. I read a hifi mag review a few years ago where they blind tested Naims old 'chrome bumper' mid range amps against its equivalent black face models. It lost, but only by 6 votes to 4..the old kit cost £450 from ebay, the new stuff was over £10k. i think if you have a narrow range of music, or music that doesnt explore the limits of your system, then theres no point going balls out on your hifi..for instance if your tastes are for very produced music or relativeley unsophisticated music (no intention of sounding elitist so sorry if i do), like Ministry of Sound, chart pop, or most current music that is vastly over produced, effected, Eq'd and compressed within an inch of its life, then a revealing hifi will expose the unnatural processing and artificial boosting of frequencies and added harmonics and result in a very fatiguing, unnatural sound. Some music on my hifi sounds horrible-usually the above, but other tracks sound sublime, even if theyre a poorly recorded piece from the 50s and 60s..yes they have distorted vocals, tinny snare drums, thin bass, but they also sound real, analogue and live.. Guitars sound like guitars...on saxes i can hear the player inhaling or keys clunking down on the pads, on pianos i can hear the hammers hitting the strings...wonderful..its like being there, except i can go for a slash when i want and top up my glass without queing. One of the most intimate recordings ive ever heard is 'We Get Requests' by Oscar Peterson...recorded in the late 60's, but utterly involving... Modern digital recording techniques, the misuse of computer technology, the sheer simplistic compositions, monotonous repetition and the current fashion for removing every single human element of music performance (listen to ANY top 40 vocal) have squeezed the life, nuance, expression and communication out of music so that it has become a caricature. This has been lead by the need to mix for the pop radio culture, MP3 and car stereo..boomy bass, processed treble and synthetic tone..sounds great on poxy in ear phones (when youre not really listening anyway), sounds shit on a truthful, revealing hifi. Eventually studios will bin their expensive mics and engineering techniques, as its almost become an irrelevance to all but the 'connoisseur'.
You've got a good point there Funky. I was listening to music with my eldest Little Monster today, kind of taking turns to play each others stuff, and her stuff on CD or MP3 (The Wanted, One Direction & fuck knows what else on those horrible "Pop Princess" or "Pop Party" compilations) just sounded bloody awful on my none-too special kit. I was very careful not to be judgemental about her musical choices, we all have to start somewhere after all, and she's only 10. I played her some of my less weird stuff, and especially on vinyl she loved the sound, she said it sounded more real. Now, I'm under no illusions about how much processing even stuff from the 70's & 80's went through before it hit the streets, but she definitely had a point. She's quite musical, not a prodigy by any means, but she can pick stuff up really quickly, and especially rhythmic stuff. Last year they did ethnic drumming in school & she got picked out as "gifted" & went to workshops & really enjoyed it, so I put on Paul Simon's Graceland and she loved it, even picking up on the fingers sliding up & down the strings on the bass & she bloody well knew that that riff by Bakithi Kumalo on You Can Call me Al was reversed, not played! She's learning Keyboard this year & has already finished the book that was meant to last all this academic year, sussed out chords by herself by listening to the CD that came with the book. She might be one of those kids that even you wouldn't mind teaching!
I also have an early michell hydraulic reference deck(with the 3 round feet) with sme 3009 which I bought as a spare, thats for sale too.
A lot of truth in all that. We sell some high end hi-fi in the Mac shop too - you are talking CD, speakers and amp for CHF 50'000, say £30k. I sometimes bring in a CD to listen on a system, but more often than not, rather than revealing untapped pools of tone, it just sounds disappointing. I am still baffled but strangely encouraged that all the old valve amps and guitars from the 50s and 60s seem to be what sounds best in that field. So progress in the last 50 years has been minimal. I'm not convinced either that there has been monster, noticeable progress in hi-fi in the last 20 or 30 years - maybe more, which is all great. Means you can just buy a system, keep it decades and forget about it - which is precisely what I try to do, until some component goes phut.
Like the world of guitars and particularly guitar amplication, the HiFi world is largely smoke, mirrors, voodoo and bullshit. Of course, to fully appreciate a real HiFi one must have a proper acoustic environment, but that rules out 99% of us. Basics, such as decent interconnects and speaker placement can be the most cost effective upgrades in the world of diminishing returns. Companies such as Naim still support all of the products that they have ever made, the notable exceptions being certain CD transports that are no longer in production. Naim did however, purchased all of the stocks of available transports when Philips announced a cessation in production. My CDS had a small component go 'ping' a few years ago. It was a small ADC inside the player. The Naim rep came round to my actual house and collected the player FOC..not bad service for saying that it was a 17 yr old 2nd hand player. It was repaired and returned to me in 2 weeks for about £70 and is still going strong. Guitar valve amps, particularly stuff like the Mesa Boogie Triaxis have pushed valve amplification onwards, marrying the best of both valve and transistor technology, rather like digital SLR cameras have in the world of photography. The biggest advances for these amp are there implementation of MIDI and such like. im not into upgrading as a hobby. I think if you have a setup that meets your needs and is cost effective then thats what its all about. Sure, its great to have the latest stuff, but im not interested in pub bragging rights. I remember a Hifi dealer once saying to me, that if you bought Naims entry level CD player from 15 yrs ago, you will still have a player thats in the top 2% of any player ever made. The same can be said for Linn and other similar brands. naims top end CD player and power supply will set you back IRO £35k...wonderful as it is im sure, its something of a white elephant when you consider that the world is moving into streaming, and that the back end of the system will require similar investment to justify the player..then theres the value of you media (whose going to spend £££££'s when they only have a modest music collection), plus it is essential to have a controlled and tuned listening environment in which to exploit the system... im certain these systems will be truly awesome, but there also comes a point when you cant chat with friends in your hyperbaric chamber over the background music, and you will almost certainly end up listening to the HIfi rather than the music on everything you ever play. No, if you have something that gives you pleasure and an emotional involvement, why preoccupy yourself with 'moving on'? This is why is still covet my 916...it aint the best by any means, she's still better than i'll ever be, but whenever i swing a leg over Bella the Bitch im in 1996 again....until i reach a fuel pump or tickle past a government money box.
Re streaming - and keeping this as short as possible (because I should be doing something else and cant' be bothered anyway): In the Mac shop we have been doing hi-fi evenings for about 5 people at a time. Good quality CDs are ripped via a Yamaha (I think it is) Paranoia compatible CD drive, using XLD (not iTunes). A CD will take about 30 mins to rip in this fashion, rather than the 8 mins your Mac CD drive will take with iTunes. You then play the track back over a good system (Nagra amp, or Classé is what we have available) into B&W 801s or 802s, using a Macbook Air 11" running on battery and using XLD (itunes only being used as the music filing system). You compare this with the original CD being played by the Nagra CD player (a CHF 20k handmade in Switzerland player). Result? The Mac sounds better. We have conducted this test now with about 70 different people, with lots of different music (mainly classical and jazz). The verdict is always the same. The Mac sounds better. You have to bear in mind that the Mac costs about CHF 18k less than the CD player. I could tell you why this is (and I will if people really want to know). Of course, it's not chalk and cheese, and stuffing a CD into your CD player is a lot less hassle than ripping your entire CD collection. But if you're a hi-fi nut, or can't afford a high-end CD player (but have good amp and speakers) then I suppose it's worth it. As the Funkmeister points out, yes, streaming will replace CDs in the not-too-distant future, or you'll just get your music on a USB stick. CDs are now compressed, so I suppose the original files weight several Gb, rather than the 700Mb you can get on a CD. But at the end of the day, Aretha Franklin still sounds better through a tranny radio than Christoper Cross does on the best hi-fi.
Glidd, im interesting in this post...how does the software 'improve' the original file? does this have any effect on the neutrality of the original source or does it add harmonics and overtones to the material? I know in the studio/recording world we have psychoacoustic processors, such as the BBE sonic Maximiser, Aphex etc which use various electronic techniques (which i cant be bothered to explain), to add sparkle, thicken bass, or remove booming or harsh trebles to a recording..which im not necessarily a huge fan of btw, although they do have their place. Also could this process be used via analogue to digital conversion to copy vinyl?
Well, I think I'm going to disappoint you Funky. As we all know, the job of the source is to give you all the info that is on the original disc, be it vinyl or CD. The amp is supposed to amplify the sound without colouring it, the speakers will be bound to colour it in some way, as the size, shape and performance of the cones and cabinet are bound to have some influence. In the case of a CD, you have a load of zeros and ones that will be converted to your music. The CD player has to convert all this in real time. If there is a pop or a click or a scratch, the reading head will render this too. It also is not a perfect process and a CD player only has time to make one pass over the disc in order to hand over your music immediately. Ripping your CD means that the machine has as much time as it wants. In the case of a Paranoia-compatible CD drive, it will perform up to 16 passes over tricky bits of the CD in order to glean all the information. It compares the checksum with an internet database to find out what the total of the zeros and ones should be. if it fails to come up with the correct answer, it will in fact extrapolate the missing information to get as close to the answer as possible. This means that imperfect pressings are perfected and extraneous noise eliminated. The result is a rip that is as close to the perfect CD as you can get. Once all the info is ripped in this manner, the Mac only has to deliver this to the amp. It uses a gold-plated USB cable for the purpose. This is why even a top CD player cannot deliver such a faithful information transfer as the Mac in this instance. XLD is a very clever (and cheap) piece of software that makes this possible. It is used both for the ripping and the sound out. Vinyl is another kettle of fish. Here I am only talking about a faithful rendition of a CD, but the database will contain an average of the checksum of all the rips that have been supplied to it, unless the record label (few and far between) has actually uploaded the checksum of its golden master disc. So this means in practice that even if your CD is in lousy condition, such that a regular CD player will refuse to play it, the ripping process will recover all the information and fill in the missing information in most instances. But naturally, you can't do better than the best digital encoding of the sound. If you don't like digital encoding, this process isn't going to help you. Also, the information compression of the sound which has occurred in order for all files to total a max of 600 Mb (or thereabouts) still holds good. The ripping process can't give you better than what is on the best CD. Streaming will, on the other hand, give you access to the complete files. There are already hi-def files available for purchase for some CDs (though I see that you have to live in the US to get access to some of them).
I like vinyl too, but got a decent CD player also. system at present Dunlop Systemdek 11x with acrylic platter, Roksan Corus blue Speedbox 11 power supply Dino phono stage with power supply Audiolab 8000C control amp 2x Audiolab 8000m mono blocks Audiolab 8000cd transport Audiolab 8000Dac Proac studio 140s all the Audiolab is the old stuff from the 90s, my turntable 23 years old, but all of it sounds amazing. am interested in streaming but can't get my head around all the jargon. Like what isthe difference between a client and a server when both need a NAS?
I agree with many of above comments - they don't make the quality stuff like they used to. Check out my very rare top-notch system made a few years back. Still in full working order. Although I'm going to have to sell it sometime in the future when I move (along with around 200 records). :frown: - 1930's by the way. .
Wrecked That's a top notch piece of equipment you have there. This is my Bush valve radio, from the 40's I think, takes longer to warm up than my 749!
i'd like to hear it but im not entirely convinced. Essentially what youre saying is that the software 'cleans up' the source signal. Suppose the source signal from a high end external CD player was better than that from the Mac? Supposing the external player could extrapolate more information from the disc than the Macintosh CD drive/software or the external player? However, the internal CD drive will add jitter, capacative coupling noise and magnetic interference (particularly from a computer). Im more familiar with Naim than other brands, but they use a totally seperate power supply to circumnavigate many of these issues, with the use of numerous discreet regulators. The players have very advanced interenal clocks (with totally seperate power supplies) to reduce jitter and timing issues caused in the ADC process. The internal chips are all shielded against external and magnetic interference which is inevitable in a CD player, 7 pole output filters, very high mass casings, suspended transport mechanisms, post digital filter jitter circuitry, low infra red reflective coating around the CD to prevent 'eye pattern' interferance and noise (essentially, the most accurate scanning technology available) and it goes on and on and on. I would be very surprised if the drive inside my Mac was able to extract anything like the information that my player could, and if it could, then it certainly does not have the engineering and superlative componentary of the Naim. I would be very interested to hear it. Irrespective of how many passes the rip makes, its limit may well be lower than the single pass of a high end player. There is also a very grey area in terms of the USB cabling, but thats an issue for another day. Im tempted to nip down to my Mac store and check this out.
Be my guest. Haven't checked the relative performance of a Nagra CD player vs a Naim, but you'll be in the same ballpark. Nagra is very high-end stuff. I'm sure you can read all sort of reviews and comparative listenings if you're sufficiently interested. Note that I didn't say the CD was ripped with the Mac's internal drive. It isn't used in the process at all. Interestingly though, if you do some net research you'll see that some of the best drives were Matsushitas, which were what came standard in Macs a few years ago. The actual drives for ripping aren't expensive at all. You already seem to know far more about all this stuff than is healthy. Still, if you want to know about Paranoia compatible ripping with XLD, I'm sure there are many happy hours to be spent surfing the web. I can only tell you what my experience has been. Frankly, from a commercial aspect, it's a bit of a pisser. I'd far sooner we sold CHF 20k CD players than CFH 1.5k Macs.
