Hi there,

The kit I've got at the moment is OK, but my speakers double as a cat scratching post and my amp is getting very old and the pots are very scratchy. I was originally going to buy some relatively high-end stuff, but I'm wary of ending up paying vastly over the odds for something that adds nothing more than a shiny box and a fancy name.

Is there anything in the high-end audio world worth buying? I was thinking of Revel M22 speakers and Bryston B100 SST amp, the former because it has a tailoring control (one speaker will end up in free space, the other very close to the wall) and the latter because they come with a 20 year guarantee and that strikes me as being at least somewhat trustworthy (I tend to keep stuff for decades). I'd love to find some information about these things aside from manufacturers brochures, but most of the tests online or in magazines just seem like the manufacturer's brochure with some added fluffiness.

Am I just wasting my money?

As far as I can figure, spend more money on speakers. You don't have to spend much on an amp or CD player before the returns diminish at a very fast rate.

Take a look at professional/studio gear.

The Revel speakers are expensive but not priced in audiophile territory in any major way. If you like the way they sound and they suit your placement needs then buy them. I would probably buy something cheaper (such as in the Pro Audio market) as .halverhahn pointed out, but speaker purchasing is not as easy as electronics purchasing.

As for the Bryston, I think it's expensive. A 20 year warranty is interesting, but the amp costs nearly $4000. You are also assuming Bryston will be around for 20 years.

Wouldn't it be easier to just by a HT receiver for $500? You can probably get a 3-5 year minimum out of any decent (Denon, NAD, Cambridge Audio, HK, etc...) receiver and even if you had to change it 4 times in 20 years you'd still only spend $2000. I think Cambridge Audio stuff has a five year warranty.

Let's do some funny math. Assume you budget $4K for the Bryston. Buy a $500 amp and put $3500 in the bank at a 2% interest rate. That's $70 a year. Assume your amp will break in 5 years. Ignoring compound interest, you'll have $350 towards a new amp without spending any of your initial capital.

Yes this is a good point. I don't know whether Bryston will be around for 20 years, but any company that puts a 20 year guarantee into their products expects them to last the course. But yes, it costs big. Probably too big.

Saying that you have a 20 year guarantee is cheap, backing it up is not.

It doesn't have to last 20 years at all. Let's say that I build an amp for $50, sell it for $1000 and provide a 20 year warranty. Internal testing shows the amp will typically fail within 5 years. Even if a consumer decides to stick with the same model amp for 20 years, I'm still out only $200 over 20 years. I'm guessing Brystron is also assuming many audiophiles have a gadget fetish and after a few years they'll sell it to somebody else or simply replace it with a new model if it breaks. So much for needing a 20 year warranty.

L.L.Bean (clothing and outdoor goods company) has a lifetime warranty everything they sell. Trust me, they are very good at exchanging stuff years after you have purchased and destroyed something. One could theoretically buy clothes and send them back every year for new stuff. But consumers aren't doing that. They throw out the old stuff and buy new stuff.

Where will audio be in 20 years? Will you still want that 20 year old amp?

You (the OP) don't seem to have a problem with dropping some money. So if you are out for some (very likely) not perceivable but at least measurable headroom, just because it feels better, look out for a NAD C 375BEE or C355BEE plus Benchmark DAC 1 combo. That's commonly accepted state of the art engineering, but without snake oil price tags. That gives you additional $2000 to put into good speakers. Even if I had a higher income than I was ever able to spend, I would not want a more expensive amplifier/DAC combination than that. It just would not make any sense to me.

Hmm, that seems eminently sensible, as does the Cambridge Audio option. Deprogramming the audiophile in me (where you throw cash at a dealer in order to fix a problem that doesn't exist) is going to take some time, I guess.

Thanks!

One step at a time....

+1

You've got a lot more tolerance for high end snake oil than I do.

$1300 for a receiver whose oputput stage current regulation is so bad that the 4 ohm max power = 8 ohm max power strikes me as being pretty strange. Would it win an ABX test with a Behringer A500 or a Sherwood RX-4105?

Similarly, $1000 for a simple stereo DAC is again way out in the stratospere. Would it out perform a < $200 surround receiver in an ABX test? I doubt it.

Yep. The DAC1 is definitely a top of the range studio DAC, but audibly better than the DAC built into any decently engineered receiver? I'd have to test it, but previous ABX on DACS would lead me to say...

1. I had added the following:



2. A DAC that actually measures more than a 100 times better than common consumer gear is not snake oil, but actually delivering a measurable performance improvement for its price. $1000 cables are snake oil, the latter is just way overshot requirements. Snake oil is fraud, more performance than perceivable is just more than necessary, there is a difference.



What are you talking about?

It's 2x250W at 8 ohm, 2x410W at 4 ohm, and 2x600W at 2 ohm. You would be the first person ever that I would have seen complain about the technical specs of a NAD amp. Your verdict must have been final before even looking at the data.



BTW, the DAC1 is the only device if have found until this day, where my 119 dB/mW Westone UM2 don't expose a slight hiss at very quiet parts and digital silence. >96db SNR at full volume in consumer DACs is one thing, absolute minimum noise level is another and seldom published.

What's the justification usually provided for multi-thousand-dollar power amps, when modern receivers at a fraction of the price do so much more? It can't just be power. It can't be technology, even top-of-the-line Class D Rotel amps aren't that expensive I think.

The same justification for $25 per bottle for water?

Audiophiles have a lot of biases. Many hate opamps, hate this type of wire, want these types of caps, volume pots, etc. You name it, they can find some objection to it. By catering to this stuff you can sell just about anything at any price. Many people hate HT receivers because they feel that if you cram too much stuff in one box it'll spoils the overall audio quality.

When you combine this with engineers who believe the same stuff you create a market for engineers who are willing to build anything for consumers who are willing to pay anything for this stuff.

Then, of course, you have engineers who don't believe in this stuff working for business people who see a huge market for profit.

$500 Ethernet cable? http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp
Read the comments on Amazon. Hilarious http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicate...6883&sr=8-1

We all need some audiophile capacitors in amplifiers. Regular capacitors just won't do.

First off, 100 times better what?

Secondly, a difference has to be sonically signficant to be off *my* snake oil list. For example, let's say that the wooden case of a certain amplifier is finished with varnish that is 100 times smoother than the varnish on the case of a typical mid-fi amplifier. Is the smoothness of the varnish a relevant difference, or is it fluff?



I'm talking about the NAD specifications for the NAD amplifier that you mentioned, taken off of the NAD web site:

http://nadelectronics.com/products/hifi-am...rated-Amplifier

Its an amplifier that you mentioned, right?



Nope.

If NAD does not know what their amps do, then who does?



You're playing games with numbers - the typical golden ear game of setting equpment up incompetently to demonstrate an alleged superiority. You're probably listening to digital black to complete the unrealistic operating environment.

If you want zero audible hiss with extremely sensitive headphones, match them to their source, don't gold plate it.

What you're doing is no more sensible than hooking headphones across the output terminals of a 5000 wpc amplifier and then complaining about the hiss, that's only just a little more extreme than what you are doing with your westones.

Just my two cents on the benchmark dac1:

I had one on loan once, and me and a few friends compared it to my own sigtone NOS Dac (cost me about 200-250USD). We were hard pressed to hear a difference in sound quality, and if anything the nos dac sounded better as it had a warmer and less fatiguing sound. The actual differences between neutral sounding DACs are hardly audible.

Put most of your money in good speakers, then find an amplifier that has sufficient headroom to drive them properly. You should probably consider both your taste in music, what tonal qualities are most important to you and the size of your room etc before you decide on which speakers to buy.

I think the best choice is a good receiver with pre-outs supplemented by as many channels of pro audio amplification as you need. I'd look at QSC and Crown for the amps, HK for the receiver. Marantz has a fairly low price model with pre-outs, too. The advantage of HK is that it's conservatively rated, so you may get good results even without the outboard amp. I tend to look at the weight with these AV receivers, because something has to give.

At the time when I bought the DAC1 my mainboard's onboard chipset was a "C-Media CMI9880 HD Audio". It has a THD of 0.034 % (today you probably get 10x better easily with modern ICs). The DAC1 has 0.00045% which is 75.556 times better than my onboard solution at the time. 100x was a rough calculation, because as there are better there are probably also worse solutions than that.



Yes, if it doesn't fit your reality it must be playing games. I bought the UM2 a couple of years ago for my iPod and I'm still very happy with them. I haven't found a more balanced while bass capable in-ear solution until this day and like the sound pretty much. The only issue I'm having is that they slightly hiss, anywhere at my iPod, headphone amp, integrated amp, notebook, and my PC's soundcard, because they are so sensitive. The only unit where they don't hiss is the DAC 1. Sadly its dimensions don't match the iPod's for portability. If you call that "the typical golden ear game" than very many basically sane people at HA are probably playing it.



Regular iPod, regular 2x60W integrated amp, regular headphone amp, common IEMs (in the >$200 price range), plus, well, a DAC1. What's so extreme about this setup that I'm not allowed to make this claim?

I repeat that I haven't claimed anywhere that you need 0.00045 % THD values, or that they would even be audibly different for human ears. But if somebody wants to drop some money anyway, because he can, and is rather interested in engineering at its best than snake oil at its best, the propositions I have made, aren't completely wrong.

Now show me headphones that won't add at least 50 times more THD or loudpseakers that won't add at least 1000 times more THD on top of this.

And what is human THD perception threshold?

That's kind of why I put Bryston on the short-list; the company was recommended to me by my BBC pal. The rest of the studio world is out of the plan, tho'. Combine the word 'wife' with the phrase 'you are not having that in my house' and you might see the problem.

Don't need an AV receiver. I have one of those already in another room. It spends its whole life playing Madagascar and Beverley Hills Chihuahua over and over again. I play music in my study/office, and it's too small to use multichannel, which is why I'm staying stereo. HK could be a good idea, though.

I seem to be going round in circles...

Onkyo A-9555 for the amp. At a recent audio group meeting the members listened to 3 set ups in different price ranges (the Onkyo at the low end) and everyone there came away very impressed with the $700 Onkyo. I missed the shoot out but did get a chance to listen to it for a bit on a couple of different speakers and liked the sound. To me amps do make a difference in sound - I can hear the difference between a $700 amp and a $7000. Do I hear $6300 worth of difference? Not really, but when I finally win the Power Ball I will.

The Revel's I heard a while back and remembered liking them. When I went looking for speakers the local dealer only had the lower end ones, the Concerta's which sounded awful. I really wish I could hear the M22's again as the M12 and F12 left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since you have some room limitations (as I also had to deal with) you may want to also check out some front ported speakers.

Honestly, there is WAY too much focus on the AMPs and DACs. Anybody claiming differences between amps better have an ABX test to back it up and needing more than one amp is just pointless for what you want. The Behringer Reference Amp A500 is inexpensive and can destroy your ears with it's power output. If you feel the Behringer is ugly or feel Behringer is not reliable (some people feel Behringer stuff is cheaply made) then you have any number of other relatively inexpensive amps from the major consumer manufacturers (I've already mentioned them) to use with an attractive design.

Finally, my spouse would probably gag at the look of Pro Audio speakers as she can barely stand mainstream consumer speakers. Go to a Hi-Fi store, listen to a bunch of speakers with a nice finish and buy the ones you giving you audible pleasure that fit your requirements. If you care about accuracy in any way (many people do not and that is fine) then write down the speakers you like and search for measurements online.

It's really not much more complicated than that.

Please be aware on this forum you need to backup such claims with a blind test. It's part of the Terms of Service. Number 8 on Terms of Service

The pro audio market has been a long-term area of interest and involvement for me. I think I can say with consederable experience and some authority that virtually nobody in the audio production market considers Bryston to be relevant to them. Just plain way too expensive. High end for pro audio might be something like Lab Gruppen. As pricey as they are, Lab Gruppen are still about 3:1 cheaper than Bryston on the dollars/watt scale.

I don't really know if it's a good price, but form all the figures getting thrown around here it seems so. You can get a stereo Rotel Class D amp (I think like 60W @ 8 Ohm) for $500. It's VERY small, VERY light, and VERY efficient. No esoteric claims about sound needed.

Indeed. You are receiving a mixture of good and poor advice which I guess is pretty much inevitable. Are you confident you have a means of distinguishing the two?

Can I suggest you post your requirements which are only vaguely apparent. For example, you do not seem to be constrained significantly financially but in your original post you suggested a pair of small 2-way speakers. Small speakers will be compromised in terms of sound quality but may be the only acceptable option due to circumstances.

If you lean towards neutral sound from your loudspeakers (many audiophiles do not) the suggestion of considering proaudio is a good one because the technical performance is generally higher at a given price point.

At your apparent price point, almost all high performance speakers are going to be active with one amplifier per drive unit. This not only has a range of small performance advantages but also makes a neater package (unless displaying lots of big shiny boxes on a rack is a requirement). Given that the system is for the office, perhaps a 3 way system but with the woofer on the side (e.g. K&H 0 300, ADAM S3X-H, etc...). Unless you require "mechanical" sources, I would also suggest considering something like a squeezebox or similar to control the music sources.

In answer to your original question, woo is a fundamental part of the high-end audio sector and if you choose not to sign up for it then the products will appear poor value and often a bit silly.

You're playing games again. I cited a surround receiver as a reference point for economical performance, and you're substituting something that is not only cheaper, but also out-of-date.

I have some measrurments of both very recent on-board audio interfaces and line outputs of surround decoders such as are used in inexpensive surround receivers that show THD of around 0.0025%, or more than 10 times better than the bogus standard that you are using.



You're being unfair again.

There are a simple inexpensive solutions to the problem of too-sensitive headphones. YOu don't have to buy kilobuck DAcs to apply them.

Which would that be without modifying the headphone's frequency response? They are two way with a passive crossover. A simple resistor would not work.

The comfort of a $1000 DAC can be that you don't need to hack around stuff like that. It just depends on how much money such is worth to you. Having enough knowledge to calculate a simple circuit and use a soldering iron is always less expensive than buying a commercial product that is so overspec'ed, that it works perfectly with any headphone out of the box.

You are quite correct in identifying my main constraint is one of space rather than budget, although I'd rather not throw cash at a solution unecessarily. The room isn't that small by UK box room standards (10x12x10', two brick and two stud walls, mostly lined with books and papers), there's an iMac in one corner that will connect to system, ideally with me relaxing at the other end of the room.

I selected the Revel speakers because one speaker will have to be against the wall (or I'll knock it over every time I sit in my work chair) and one has to be free space (narrow bookshelves on the other side) and the M22's allow both kinds of placement. The downside to these speakers is their specifications suggest relatively low sensitivity (85dB/W/m) and I tend to cane it with old rock tracks, which is why I started out with the Bryston amp. My musical tastes are far too catholic to live with non-neutral speakers.

K&H is not available in the UK, and most pro gear suffers from being fugly.

Revel is a Harman Internation company. Harman is a holding company which own a very large number of pro-audio brands.

Adam (makers of very fine studio monitors) also have a range of products aimed at the home market, which are actually quite similar to their studio gear with features such as balanced connections removed, being for the home market they make both active and passive versions. See http://www.adam-audio.de/hifi/english/index.htm in particular the classic series.

At least some setups seem to use something like http://www.gracedesign.com/products/m902/m902.htm used as a DAC feeding active monitors and headphones. Again Grace Design primarily make professional studio monitor controllers.

Ever considered AVI ADM speakers? They are active so you can wipe amps and dacs from your mind.

http://www.avihifi.co.uk/

I've never heard them so I have no review to give. People who have met the maker of the speaker say he does not support the usual audiophile nonsense. They are not priced into audiophile land. I mention them because you are in the UK an this is a UK brand.

quote name='Gag Halfrunt' date='May 31 2009, 23:17' post='638257'
> The downside to these speakers is their specifications suggest relatively low
> sensitivity (85dB/W/m) and I tend to cane it with old rock tracks,

Small speakers are not only inefficient they do not play loud a clean. It is another reason to look at loudspeakers with the largest drive units that meet your space requirements.

> K&H is not available in the UK,

Klein and Hummel was bought by Sennheiser a few years ago and is distributed by them in the UK.

> and most pro gear suffers from being fugly.

Looks are for you to decide. If you build them in rather than put them on display then looks can be whatever you want.

I was trying to point you in the direction of the kinds of woo-free products that may meet your needs at semi-justifiable prices. Both brands I mentioned are conservative choices and a bit pricey because of this but there are others. It was not intended as a recommendation but a category of products to consider. ADAM will probably supply the same speaker in a wooden box at twice the price (audiophile price) but I haven't checked. K&H are more industrially orientated but will have plenty fixtures and fittings for mounting.

Size has very little to do with efficiency or harmonic distortion. In fact it is far more difficult to make large drivers due to the trade off between rigidity of the cone and mass. If the cone is insufficiently rigid then it will flex as it is moved by the voice coil introducing distortion into the sound. However if the cone is too massive then it will accelerate more slowly in response to the force provided by the voice coil introducing phase errors and other aberrations into the signal.

Most 'hifi" quality full range drive units don't go beyond about 8" due to these issues. The biggest cones used in subs for use with line arrays tend to be of the order of 18". TurboSound used to make a sub with a 24" cone but they discontinued it and reverted to 18" cones. Also the bigger the enclosure the more difficult it is to design it to be rigid and not to colour the signal via unwanted resonance and other effects.

The digital loudspeaker management systems used with large systems provide active crossover and delay per band to increase power handling by removing passive crossover networks from the systems and to compensate for phase errors due to the both placement of drivers and in some cases reaction speed.

Perception of "loudness" is also influenced by the frequency of the signal and distortion. A slightly distorted signal will actually be perceived as being louder than a completely clean signal. Where the sound energy is concentrated in the spectrum also has an effect, ever noticed how adverts are perceived to be louder than program material? In fact the average energy is the same but the signal has been processed to concentrate the energy into the frequency bands that human ears are most sensitive to.

I appreciate your aim is to post useful information but your reasoning is not correct.

A headphone drive unit, playing quietly near the ear, can produce low distortion sound over a wide frequency range. It cannot produce room filling sound because it is too small to compress sufficient air. To play louder it needs to be larger (e.g. an electrostatic speaker) or the displacement needs to be larger to compress the air more strongly. In practice both are used but note that for the same SPL a large cone will have to move a shorter distance than a small cone. The shorter distance means the voice coil remains in the more linear part of the magnetic field and that the air is compressed less strongly. Compressing air is a nonlinear process but if the compression is small it will be approximately linear.

Cone break up and mass limit the high frequency end of a drive unit but it is not what determines the performance over the working range.

You seem to be missing the point, you appear to be recommending you buy speakers with the largest cones regardless of anything else. At the same cost in terms of bill of materials it is probable that up to a point a well designed smaller cabinet with a smaller drive unit will be better than a lower quality drive unit in a lower quality cabinet. If you look at the vast majority of two way designs on the market the largest cones are 8" and more usually 6.5". Going larger than that compromises the HF response and requires a 3 way design to cover the full range which is more more difficult and more expensive again to get right.

For a given target SPL and all other things being equal I take your point about the linear range of the voice coil but all other things are rarely equal.

Chelgrian, I agree that large cones aren't necessarily the way to go. But nothing prevents you from putting several medium sized cones into a large cabinet. Actually, the best speakers I have heard were build that way. So it's not small speakers vs. large cones, but small speakers vs. large speakers (with maybe multiple mid/bass drivers). The latter usually have a much better low end.

Especially active speakers can be equalized to extreme levels. So it is possible to build small speakers with excellent bass response just by driving the lower end with substantially more energy. Working around physical limitations electronically like this doesn't come free. To increase frequency response you usually have to trade some other parameter (as phase accuracy). Going larger can reduce the need for this.

I did consider AVI speakers. Then I went to the Gadget Show, where the company was exhibiting. It seems like the boss of the company is more concerned with starting his own anti-audiophile cult. I'd rather he discussed the relative merits of his products instead. He seems to have a lot of willing cult followers in the UK, too.

This kind of puts me off.

It's sorted, BTW. The Revels are in place and I have a huge HK 990 integrated amp with a built-in DAC. I probably overspent by a large margin (but not Bryston margin), but I can't quite separate myself from the need for products to be built like a brick shed.

I'm not buying much of this. Very few speakers have diaphragms that are sufficiently rigid to avoid flexing. Just because a diaphragm flexes doesn't mean that it will necessarily produce excessive nonlinear distoriton.

The irreducable problem with large diaphragms (large SD) is their directivity. Large pistons are directional at high frequencies, and that is that. The circumvention is to have a large diaphragm that breaks up smoothly. That's hard to do.



Hi fidelity full range drive units don't really exist. The ones that are claimed to exist fall have issues with directionality and smoothness of break up.



This is all about costs and benefits. The purpose of a subwoofer driver is to move air. Moving air is dependent on Xmax and SD. Due to geometric limitations, large Xmax and small SD are mutually exclusive. The ready alternative to large SD is simply to use multiple drivers. Tooling costs apply. Large tools cost more money. The cost of tooling is divided by the number of items produced. Right now very large Xmax times SD can be obtained with drivers in the 13 to 18 inch range.



Cross-bracing and more modern approaches like carbon fiber reinforcement and foamed plastic construction address the resonance problems. In the end concerns with size issues during the final installation and shipping costs come into the discussion.

Furthermore, large drivers don't necessarily demand large enclosures.



You were doing really good up until the "reaction speed" thing.



Agreed. That's one reason why some think that vinyl sounds "more dynamic".




Also agreed on all points.

The big problem with multiple small drivers is that it is hard to get Xmax really up there for good bass, if SD is small. One large driver can move as much air as a really large number of small drivers. Then the economics of using so many small drivers comes around and bites you.




I've seen this done very effectively. However, the "small drivers" were 15" to get the Xmax*SD product up. They speakers were still small as the boxes were only big enough for a tight fit around the drivers. Heavy equalization and lots of amplifier power were used to extend the bass, given the small boxes. Distoriton was low.




Phase accuracy is about the last thing that most people are thinking about at low frequencies. The standing waves in most listneing rooms do terrible things to phase response - to the point where speaker phase response is almost moot.