2 channel advice

[hifitommy]

first, i would save significant money and not sacrifice sound quality on the cd player. an oppo bdp93 listing for $499. it does cd, sacd,dvda, bluray disc, and dvd:

http://www.oppodigital.com/proddetail.asp?prod=BDP93

they are available from other sources than oppo. this frees up more money for your other electronics. if you decide to buy an sacd, dvda, or bd for music, you will benefit from the high rez recording plus sacd players upsample rbcd and they sound better than most CDPs.

i have been enamored of the vincent amps and other products and they have been well received in the legitimate print press. $2k for 150wpc hybrid amp seems a bargain to me.

http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo...mber=VISV236MK

i see the van alstine integrated is $1500 for 90wpc hybrid. also worth looking into.

i have not connection to any sellers, i just linked the products so the approx prices can be evaluated. who knows, maybe those prices are negotiable. it would be best if you could find an actual store so you could put hands and ears to those products.

have fun.

[02audionoob]

I'd get a competent disc player and spend the rest of my digital budget on a DAC.

[Mash]

Actually the OPPO 95 would be more killer for audiophiles than the exemplary OPPO 93..

But OP does not do internet/mailorder.

Heck, I bought my Futtermans by phone/mailorder. In 1974 & 1977. I still use them.

[RGA]

Mash

You will need to provide real world examples of speakers with Servo-Controlled feedback and what specific model beats what non servo-controlled feedback specific model - the mackie 450 while not bad doesn't cut it - you need to give me something to work with where there are established speakers where people actually concur with this notion. The majority of the pro market and the audiophile market have resoundingly made their choice. Meyer might be there but Mackie certainly isn't.

You dismiss the "entire" high end speaker community and most of the professional speaker community most of which could incorporate this and choose not to. I hope you have more here than a $500 Mackie as the pinacle of music reproduction?

The example with ARC is spurious because it may not be the distortion of the amp that was the issue - for what it's worth I have yet to hear an ARC amplifier that I have liked for the money and that includes their most famous $10,000 Ref 3 preamp. In defense of ARC - they make a lot of products and not all of them are as highly thought of against others. I preferred the Rotel RC 1082 Solid State preamp in direct comparison to an ARC. So I certainly don't view tubes as automatically being superior by virtue of using tubes. Some amps incorporating tubes use tubes as glorified tone controls which can sound pleasing in some ways but it's hardly transparent.

Despite the praise ARC get I don't love them and every system they were in at CES dissapointed me - I kept thinking the sound would be better with something else - so I agree with you on on that count.

Having said that however the best amplifiers BY FAR that I have heard are Single Ended Triode amplifiers which have horribly high distortion but are FAR BETTER than ANY solid state amplifiers on Transients and Decay (the two aspects of sound reproduction that is most noted as a SET strength in fact) - it's not even remotely close. And the Solid State amps that does get there runs at stupid price points. Granted amps are usually meausred at high levels which put SETs at a disadvantage and they often measure great at low levels but still on the measurements they do wind up losing out looking at spec sheets and measured response - but anyone who has a decent ear will conclude that no feedback yet high distortion amplifiers like SETs blow the best solid state to the weeds. Even the designers of the best SS amps choose no feedback tubes in blind sessions.

And several designers of speakers out there attend many live symphonies and have musicians and backgorunds in music that go back 40+ years. And they are also making comparisons to what they heard at concerts and recitals. Plenty of speaker makers will babble on about the technology they incorporate in their loudspeakers or amps or whatever - the end result is what I am interested in since many years ago I discovered that the correlation with great measureing gear and great sound was hardly lining up.

And there is no way to replicate what you hear at concerts and recitals since the room plays a massive factor and if your room is not identical to the concert hall there is ZERO chance you can replicate that no matter what DSP/EQ you are using - and it would only be remotely possible if the recording was a perfect live copy of music played in that specific concert hall. Which it never is (and even if it could be done which it can't it could not account for the numerous possible seats in the concert hall - first row, mid seating, rear seating - left or right etc (and forget about it if the musicians are in the pit). The room acoustics of your room are what they are. The best the stereo system can do is to aproximate as close as possible the sound of the instruments themselves (timbre tone dynamics, transients decay and capturing the "room" the recording was recorded in). A piano for example versus having the same piano in your room. Can the stereo reproduce an instrument the same as if it was actually played in your room. One test I use to get the room down is to play music through reasonably high quality headphones (which have no room acoustics issues) such as the Sennheiser HD 580/600 (since they're most used in the classical recording industry) and directly compare in an A/B session against the stereo at the listening position. Headphones are limited in many ways but not with clarity. A system is doing pretty good too if it blows the likes of the HD 600, Stax Omega II, AKG 1000 out of the water. Most stereos don't.

And the biggest problem see with every active system is the amplfier is in every case some sort of very high feedback power amplifier - which pretty much rules it out from being a high quality product. Active speakers always use amps with negative feedback - and speakers at $500 are using low grade ones since something has to give at these price points.

Having said the above - I would not rule out a speaker on the design choice - I keep an open mind to audition anything, but we need to discuss specific examples of specific speakers and models - and IMO it needs to be something more credible than Mackie.

[poppachubby]

From the list of brands available through your local dealers I think you should most definitely have a listen to the Marantz SA 8004 as a reference for your search. I also think you should listen to Creek and Arcam for CDPs as well. All 3 of these companies make superb disc players which are extremely engaging for digital products. Creek are a fantastic company, the Evolution CDP does NOT upsample. They basically admit what so many companies will not...upsampling is not a simple process. For that alone they get all of my respect. Most companies have a list a mile long of everything their player does, the thing they don't tell you is that it does everything really poorly.

As for an amp, my advice is to take advantage of the stores available to you and audition. Don't rush this process. Listen to as much as you can so that you can discern your own opinions. I am thinking a good ratio is 1/3rd source 2/3s amp. If you buy a CDP with variable output you may be able to avoid an integrated and buy a more simpler designed (better sounding) power amp.

[Mash]

The Mackie 450 is a sound reinforcement speaker that emphasizes sound power level (SPL) over frequency extension and response smoothness, and it also emphasizes enclosure damage resistance over enclosure sound qualities. I never considered these Mackie 450's as being suitable for in-home use. The specification response graph of the Mackie 450 is a rather lumpy +- 2 dB from 70 Hz to 4000 Hz, and above 4000 Hz it is a ragged +- 5 dB. This looks unappealing for in-home use.

The Tympani are great in-home speakers but I question how well they would survive if routinely set up by roustabouts for sound reinforcement. Not well, I would guess.

This all comes down to Design Intent.

I also am not enthusatic about blended speakers, i.e. horn-loaded combined with direct radiator.

All engineered products involve compromises which are driven by the Design Intent.

A servo-feedback system properly implemented will optimize the performance of a speaker, but that performance optimization will be confined within the limits imposed by the physics resulting from that speaker's Design Intent. [ Forbes actually proved you could make a "silk" purse out of a sow's ear, but it was not easy!]

An automotive example: You are tooling through the Swiss Alps in your turbo Porsche which you drive with expertise. You round a turn and find that the roadway ahead is covered with 48 inches of snow. You will go no further no matter how excellent a driver you are because that snow would completely exceed the Design Intent of the Porsche. OTOH a one-ton 4WD pickup truck would not be my choice for commuting to work- if I were still working.

The two Certificate of Calibration response graphs that I am now looking at are for two *specific* HR824 Studio Monitor S/N's I own, and they were recorded with a B&K 4133 Calibrated Mic and Audio Precision System One, showing the speaker's 4Pi anechoic response. Again, these graphs are *specifically for* two speaker S/N's that I own. The less-good response graph is a smooth line that is +- 1 dB from 40 Hz to beyond 17,000 Hz. Do your high-end guys provide a Certificate of Calibration for EVERY speaker they sell?

About why or why not "the other guys" do or do not use servo-feedback: so what? This is a specious point. They make their choices, and then they live with those choices. I know well too many horiffic airliner crashes caused by design and procedure decisions that were made by highly-regarded people. These decisions were considered sound at the time they were made, and were later proven by events to not have been sound at all. Be careful whom you worship.

[RGA]

So the answer is no you can't list say 5 loudspeakers that people can go out and buy that have Servo-Control Feedback and that you have directly compared to speakers that don't use it.

Sorry but your case here is thin. Citing airline crashes to make a point here is ridiculous and the car analogy also makes little sense. Many speaker designer of "home audio" products such as my speakers are designed to factor in several listening distances of a room volume "window" in mind and designed to take rear, floor and side walls into account - not designed for free standing quasi anechoic response as gospel. That's a choice to make for "real world" applications and not to look great on measurements bench in ways or conditions that no one who buys them actually would use or listen to them. They were also designed by L.L. Beranek, an opera house designer, and speaker designer that is pretty much cited in every book on loudspeaker design that has ever been published.

If you want people to buy Servo-Controlled Feedback speakers for home use then you need to tell people specific model numbers and websites. Meyer ar $50,000 is all well and good but few people have that kind of money and they're not really catering to home users. There is also more to the game than frequency response despite what gets doled out on forums. Few speakers have the ability to pressurize a room to provide a sensation of real instruments in room. Three speakers at CES 2010 did it and ONLY three. Acapella High Violoncello II with Plasma tweeter at $80,000, Trenner and Freidl RA Box $25,000 and Audio Note E $51,000 and $7,500 respectively. And it is absolutely critical to get that "thwack" and incredible transient decay behaviour with the "breathy" quality to cello. That is what real unamplified music sounds like. There maybe other speakers too that do it and even some of the speakers I heard no doing might do it in different set-ups and rooms - but none of these speakers necessarily have the frequency reponse ruler flat full bandwidth - but plenty of those others with flatter response don't even remotely come close to possessing the "pressure" of instruments in room required for remotely believable presentation of instruments. Quite often the frequency measurements on the bench and at the actual listening position are not remotely the same - it's whether the speaker is balanced at the listening chair in room that matters - not 1 meter in a anechoic chamber which tries to take the room out of the equation.

[02audionoob]

Hi everyone,

Thanks all for the advice. Yes I will be keeping my PSBs.

I have a total of 3 audioshops here in Ottawa.

1) sells: audio research, perreaux, audiolab, creek, marantz
2) sells: cambridge, classe,krell, rotel
3) sells: mcintosh, integra, anthem, arcam, bryston,nad

Ajani: To answer your question: my DVD player is a Yamaha DVDS-700 (12 years old), built like a tank. The only DVD player I've owned.

Feanor: thanks for the Cambridge idea

Rotel: I find it pricey, and they have the RA-1520 but it's only rated at 60W.

I have never bought on-line, so I don't know what I'm getting my self into without listening it before hand.

Keep the suggestions coming, appreciate it.

I would definitely check out the Marantz gear, considering this budget. The disc player already mentioned and their integrateds are pretty nice. I also think there's some merit to keeping this DVD player in service and getting the PS Audio Digital Link III that was mentioned earlier. I'm intrigued by the Rega DAC, too, but it isn't quite the bargain that the PS Audio is.

[giofer69]

Hi everyone,

Listen to a few more:

It's been awhile since I've heard Marantz but was very impressed.

My first receiver was a Marantz back in 1985.

Anyway,
Listen to SA8004 and scary enough the SR4023. My wife still likes radio, which I don't but she listens to the music as well. I was quite impressed. I thought the SR4025 was better than the PM8004. SR is 80wpc while the PM was 70wpc. Would the SR feed the PSB nicely even though it is a receiver.

By the way, I find the Marantz much smoother than the NAD, Rotel and Cambridge. Or am I out to lunch.

Thoughts?

Thank again

[Mash]

Why should I run around comparing loudspeakers? I do not have the time to play audio equipment reviewer. You make no sense.

[All of these Mackies are readily available, even from many local music stores. Look around.]

Mackie offers the two following home-friendly speakers and anyone who is interested can compare these two speakers for themselves:

COMPARE

HR824mk2 8” woofer, servo controlled, Ti tweeter

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...4mk2&x=18&y=10

and Guitar center has a chain of retail stores- one is 45 miles up the interstate from here-
http://www.guitarcenter.com/Mackie-H...62-i1512403.gc

To

MR8mk2 8”woofer, non-servo, silk dome tweeter

http://www.mackie.com/products/mrmk2...v=&p=1475&c=us
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MR8mk2

The other Mackie servo speaker is the HR624mk2

The Mackie MR8mk2 and MR5mk2 are not servo-feedback controlled.

“They [RGA’s speakers] were also designed by L.L. Beranek…” I have his book Noise and Vibration Control - Leo L. Beranek. I have worked with acoustics & vibration/forced response problems. ….Even dealt with those early noise problems of high-bypass turbofans… we changed their noise from a head-splitting scream to a low rumble. I do know that to solve any problem one must first fully and explicitly define that problem, because those pesky equations all require specific inputs. BS_in = BS_out.

[02audionoob]

Mash and RGA,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but you're off topic and you're writing such long and frequent posts we can't follow the original topic.

02

[02audionoob]

Hi everyone,

Listen to a few more:

It's been awhile since I've heard Marantz but was very impressed.

My first receiver was a Marantz back in 1985.

Anyway,
Listen to SA8004 and scary enough the SR4023. My wife still likes radio, which I don't but she listens to the music as well. I was quite impressed. I thought the SR4025 was better than the PM8004. SR is 80wpc while the PM was 70wpc. Would the SR feed the PSB nicely even though it is a receiver.

By the way, I find the Marantz much smoother than the NAD, Rotel and Cambridge. Or am I out to lunch.

Thoughts?

Thank again

I agree. At a show that poppachubby and I attended this past year, we agreed the Marantz room was one of the best. They do sound smooth to me, too. We have very little audio gear around my town, so I haven't heard some of the brands mentioned here, but what I've heard of modern Marantz gear seems more pleasant and engaging to listen to that what little I've heard from NAD, Rotel and Cambridge. One anecdotal example for me...a Craigslist seller's system with a Rotel preamp put me off of a pair of Focal speakers that I later found I actually liked in a different system.

[Mr Peabody]

There's no right or wrong, if Marantz is the one that pleases you then that's definitely the one to get. A local dealer matches Marantz HT receivers with Dynaudio Audience, and now Excite and DM, based on that I'd think Marantz could handle the PSB. If your wife is into radio check to see if any of the Marantz stereo receivers have HD tuners. There are stations on the HD side you can't get with a regular analog tuner and the HD stations at this point are still commercial free. My Marantz preamp has a HD tuner but I'm not sure if they put them in any of the receivers.

[giofer69]

Hi everyone,

I've made my decision.

I'm going with the Marantz SA8004 and PM8004.



Mr. Peabody, I convinced my wife not to go with a radio.

If someone thinks that the PM8004 won't handle the PSBs, please let me know.

[Mr Peabody]

Let us know how the set up sounds. Maybe down the road you can make points with the wife by buying an HD tuner, the Sangean runs around $100.00 or so, or, a Slingbox that will stream internet radio/music. Won't sound as sweet as the new CDP but a lot to be said for keeping the wife happy

[hifitommy]

its the sony thats a hundred and its been well received in the press as a bargain. i paid $159 for the sangean and its OK but i would rather have paid $100.

[lreinstein]

It is clear from reading this thread that there are many many good choices. But if I am limited to a single box, that is, an integrated amp to drive my KEF XQ40's, and if I need more power than my Marantz PM7001 IA provides, and if I do want to buy new so as to avoid the risk, and if my price limit is $1500, then ... given all that ... is the NAD 375BEE a good choice? I only can find on review so have no idea how the sound will be for Classical, Jazz and Blues.

[bobsticks]

It is clear from reading this thread that there are many many good choices. But if I am limited to a single box, that is, an integrated amp to drive my KEF XQ40's, and if I need more power than my Marantz PM7001 IA provides, and if I do want to buy new so as to avoid the risk, and if my price limit is $1500, then ... given all that ... is the NAD 375BEE a good choice? I only can find on review so have no idea how the sound will be for Classical, Jazz and Blues.

Have you listened to the amp? I ask that not to be an internet wiseguy but because the answer to that question might be complex.

On paper the NAD might seem very attractive---good current, lots of watts, the availability for a phono pre, and the sub outs all provide some excellent options and user utility---but in my humble opinion and experience, KEF and NAD make a horrible sonic match...almost "brittle" and a real world example defining "meh".

A couple of thoughts:
--I can think of few speakers this side of a panel for which room placement and room treatments are more critical. In a reflective or untreated room, the top end sizzle and the supple midrange bias of the KEFs can be out-of-balance at best, offputting at worst.
--By insisting on purchasing new, you vastly limit your gallery of options.

Btw, the tone of the Marantz and the KEFs go well together but I recognize your concern from the standpoint of power. Depending on your listening preferences and aformentioned room you may be fine with the PM7001. Give it a fair chance before unconsciously willing the pairing into failure.

Good luck and happy listening!

[Baniebs]

Go with Mackie!