Listening In A Meadow? Exaktly.

I quite like pizza.  And red wine.  Generally, these are consumed indoors – either at home, or in a restaurant.  Occasionally (it would be summertime), it might be on a terrace overlooking the Med, or perched on a stool outside a tent.  It’s not normal to be consuming these treats in a field, but that might’ve been what was happening the other night, accompanied by Dire Straits playing in the background on a pair of Linn Exakt 350s. Maybe I just have an over-fertile imagination.  It’s strange though, as in reality, we seemed to be sat in a large top-floor room which was as real as the pizzas, and the red wine.

What is this opening ramble?  What does it mean? Was the wine too strong?  Were there too many glasses consumed?  Let’s start back at the beginning and work through to what that opening paragraph is all about.  Maybe.

Cards on the table.  I’ve heard lots of Linn 350 speakers.  And Linn Exakt systems.  Some were combined together.  I tend to like Exakt systems, when they’ve been set up properly (not a given), but tend not to like 350s.  When I’ve heard them both together, they’ve been in inappropriate locations, like a massive double storey hard surfaced furniture shop (not a great approach to showing off your systems Linn), or in the factory in a ballroom with 200 people, etc.  So Exakt and 350s have not been a great experience so far, but then they’ve not had much of a chance either, with the best I've heard them being in the main dem room at HoL - my preference still being for the Akubariks or Komris.

One of the more enjoyable systems featuring 350s belong to Linn Forum member (let’s call him “A”) and uses a Renew DS/0, Akurate Kontrol/0 and a non-Dynamik Twin.  That system still features their special feature – a slightly “disconnected” bass.  A and I meet up from time to time with music and hifi always the excuse – be it at shows, dealer demos or in the listening room.  A lives down South, I don’t.  So we get together when it makes sense.  Through A, I met P, also a forum member and living down South, and we tend to meet up at either of their houses when there’s a good excuse to listen to some music, or compare the effects of software changes and other bits n pieces of new kit.

The 2 guys down South have recently added another member into this happily sceptical band of middle aged music listening blokes.  For simplicity, this new bloke, also a forum contributor, will be called N.  This week was the first time I’ve had a chance to join in, with another trip to London being necessary for work purposes.  Logistics sorted, pizza orders confirmed for the 3^rd time (sorry P) and all was set for a bit of Exakt 350 listening.  It even all went to plan.  Decent pizzas, great red wine and we settled into the listening room to munch over the background Dire Straits.

And what a listening room.  Perched on the top (2^nd floor) of a substantial place, approx. 6m by 4m and with a sloping wall / ceiling down one long side as it tucks under the roofline.  A pair of rather tasty looking Linn Exakt integrated 350s in piano black stand guard either side of powered grey screen on one of the shorter walls, with a TAG MacLaren centre speaker stood on a pedestal stand.  A venerable Linn Melodik and associated Exaktbox sub are in one front corner. That’s all you see from the listening seat – side / rear speakers are multi-driver MK units flush fitted into the side walls.  There’s a large L-shaped sofa for 5 or 6 and a vast footstool big enough for all.  This is a very comfortable place to settle into for tunes and movies.  Across the back wall there are 2 built-in cupboards.  One houses the very large SIM2 projector (watching movies with all the lights on is no problem), the other the equipment rack.

Piano Black Linn 350 Exakt.  Tasty. And old skool Linn Melodik sub

And what a rack this is.  Much of what’s in there will be on the wish list of many an audiophile / music lover.  Perched on traditional Quadraspire are (from top to bottom): an SME 30 turntable equipped with series V arm and Koetsu Red; Linn Klimax Exakt DSM; Tom Evans Audio Design phono stage, Anthem processor and multi-channel TAG MacLaren power amp (for centre and rears).  Music is normally held on a 4 bay QNAP NAS, but with some currently stored on a Melco N1A and some on a Melco N1Z whilst the resident A is being compared to a demo Z.  All connectivity to the main stereo system is with standard Cat 5 ethernet cables.  Exakt links included, with one cable from the KEDSM to each speaker and the sub daisy-chained from the right hand 350.

Main Quadraspire Rack,  Untidy Cables Due to Experimenting with NAS Storage (see later pic below)

SME 30 / Series V / Koetsu Red

It’s gonna be good, right?  

The 350s are stood very close to the front wall, to enable them to be positioned either side of the off-centre screen (off-centre due to the sloping ceiling).  This is possible due to Linn’s SPACE Optimisation+ feature.  During set up, the room is measured, the speakers are manoeuvred until they’re at the point they sound best in the room (the ‘ideal’ position measurement), then their position is also measured.  The speakers are then moved to their practical position and measured in this position, relative to nearby walls.  All this data is then entered into Linn’s Konfig software, algorithms are crunched and the signals sent to each speaker allow for their compromised position in the room.  I’ve heard this demo’d a few times and its very impressive.  It doesn’t perfectly recreate the sound generated in the “ideal” position, but its very close, considering what it allows in terms of much more physically discrete speaker locations.

What about the sub?  Well Linn have just added subwoofers to their Exakt system with the Exaktbox Sub which is designed to take the Exakt signal to a sub with built-in power amps.  N had just hefted the sub into the room a couple of days before (his and his mate’s back are probably still recovering – its not exactly lightweight), and it hadn’t been set up.  We had it powered up to start with, but then chose to shut it down and come back to it later.

Pizzas done, music was loaded up into a playlist on the iPad Mini (or the iPad, or the Macbook!) and we got on with some listening.  It was very quickly clear that there’s only one sweet spot in the room – the intended listening seat.  Being elsewhere in the room was a real compromise – even just one seat to the right of the hotspot.  Not to worry, that’s not at all unusual.  We listened to some classical organ music (vague, sorry about that, it’s not something I know much about), some Clapton on video and some Seal.  We settle into focused listening with something we’re all very familiar with – Daft Punk’s Georgio Moroder from the Random Access Memories album.  It has an interesting opening with a narrative by Georgio, underpinned by background chatter and some bass meanderings.  Then of course it kicks in with some driving bass lines and electronic tuneage.  It’s very good for understanding system resolution and tunefulness.  Tune dem anyone?  We don’t discuss that, as everyone has their own way of listening for what they like, but we all do try to figure out if we’re just enjoying the flow of the music and if it’s causing foot tapping or not.

It was difficult to establish what’s going on away from the hot seat, so we take turns to try it out.  For me the sound was OK, but not overwhelming.  I suppose I was expecting something special, and to hear that from the off.  We mess about a bit more with some more material – including a great scene in the film Fifth Element.  I’d forgotten just how quirky and amusing that film is – must get around to watching it again sometime very soon.  Having got used to the sound, we start thinking about tweaking a few things and start with the QNAP and Melco options.  Various combinations were tried – each Melco on its own, then with the QNAP fed through one of them.  I think I heard some small differences, with a very slight preference for the N1A Melco, but there was nothing there that was making the system sing, nor were any changes (real or imagined) very significant.  Another aspect was a serious lack of imaging – there was no single point for the singer’s voice and London Grammar’s album just didn’t shimmer and fill the space in the room.

To the left, QNAP NAS main storage and a couple of Melco NAS boxes, the N1A being resident, the N1Z being a demo unit

I think it was P who finally bit the bullet and we cranked up Konfig on the Macbook.  We switched SPACE Optimisation on and off a few times, but I really couldn’t hear it making any real difference.  Strange, it’s normally very obvious.  We checked the SPACE filter graph and found a straight line.  Those familiar with looking at what SPACE does, will know that this is unusual.  Essentially, the software calculates where the room is likely to give bass humps (due to the dimensions of the room) and then feeds a signal to the system that has very narrow, often quite deep, notched attenuation filters – the idea being that the deep notches in the signal cancel out the humps created by the room.  Most rooms have 2 to 4 nodes.  Yet here we have a completely flat profile.  And a room map with no speakers or furniture identified.  Now, there have been some recent software updates that have had odd effects in Konfig, such as completely shutting down one speaker, forgetting which speaker models are in use etc., all fixable by restarting the software and the system, although forgetting the speaker model did actually need the model to be re-input.  So maybe a software bug has caused the problem, but it’s not really possible to track down what’s happened here.  The cause of the lack of filtering was soon obvious and I hope it’s been down to an error somewhere along the line as N clarified that there had been notches on the graph previously.  Perhaps a software or hardware change had caused the problem.  One for owners to check back on from time to time (rather like I discovered that my speaker model had been dropped from the standard SPACE config in my own system – noticed one day after a software upgrade seemed to have degraded the sound a bit).

Anyway, thinking back to some stuff I’ve read on the Linn forum, the problem was soon identified.  The room dimensions are supposed to be entered into Konfig in metres.  Here they had been entered in cms.  So a 6.3m long room becomes a 630m long room, as far as the calculations are concerned.  And when that room is also recorded as being 410m wide and 255m high, the speakers imagine they are living in a field.  And when a set of speakers live in a field, they don’t create any bass humps as their field is too big to have bass humps.  So SPACE sets a correctly flat profile.  Except we weren’t in a field, we were definitely in a room.  The measurements were quickly corrected to metres, and we entered a rough position for the subwoofer.  But when we did this by roughly guessing its distance from the room boundaries, the Konfig diagram showed the subwoofer was half outside the room. Hmmm.  Something not right there.  A quick run of the optimisation software delivered 4 notches and we were clearly starting to head in the right direction.

N quickly dug out the laser measure and we got to work stepping through Konfig’s measurement requirements.  Even when converted from cms to metres, some of the dimensions were out – the room width was recorded as 4.1m, but turned out to be 3.66m – an error of 0.5m is quite significant.  About 15 minutes of measuring, checking and entering the data and we had a new optimisation ready, with 3 notched filters – the lowest frequency notched to about -29dB with the other 2 much further up the frequency range and much shallower.  Due to time restrictions, we just converted the speaker’s “ideal” location from the cms already in the system.  With much more time it would be worth revisiting the ideal position data too, but that involves removing speaker spikes and shuffling the speakers about in the room – there wasn’t time this evening.

Daft Punk went back on, Leonard Cohen, Seal and some London Grammar.  Some listening, some small tweaks on the depth of the optimisation notches.  We dial in a +1.5dB treble shelf to compensate for the heavy soft furnishings between speakers and listening position.  I think we ended up with the notches back to the SPACE recommended settings in the end – quite unusual.  This was quite some improvement.  Bass lines are now tuneful, and there’s real imaging going on – still a little shallow front to back (possibly an effect of being so close to the front wall of the room), but very wide left to right and instruments and voices easily pinpointed as individual parts of the whole.  The opening to the Georgio track had a stable, central voice, the background noise was recognisable as chatter and the quiet underlying bass line is playing a clearly distinguishable tune. Excellent.  What a difference a few measurements can make (although, to be fair, changing from cms to metres isn’t exactly a subtle tweak).  Next we mess about with some cables and the system really starts to sing.  Now, we’re listening to the best pair of 350s I’ve heard.  The bass lines are even in time with the rest of the music, which is not a 350 forte – Exakt must be doing its stuff, and perhaps the latest 4^th order bass roll-off changes have been really fundamental to getting the best from the 350s.  This system is now really enjoyable – something quite special, given my previous challenge with enjoying 350s.  Sitting position in the room is now much less critical, although still best from the hot seat of course.

N then played Porgy and Bess Summertime, Procol Harum performing A Whiter Shade of Pale with the Danish National Concert Orchestra, Eva Cassidy Fields of Gold and some of his other favourites (he has a very extensive and eclectic music collection) which all sounded very engaging.

There’s probably more to come.  Given that we have relied here upon the “ideal” speaker positions that were existing in Konfig (but converted to metres), there’s probably scope to go right back to the beginning and determine the “ideal” speaker position again.  If that’s not right then the SPACE Optimization+ facility for positioning the speaker into the practical position will be based on some incorrect calculations.  If that is the case, then this system really could move on from excellent to truly stunning.  That’s the work of at least half a day.

Now I’m hoping to get back again soon (probably in early 2016) to spend the evening listening to music, to give that SME a good listen and to put that fantastic screen and projector to good use. Hopefully, over the next few days and weeks, N can enjoy settling into some serious music listening too.  Thanks for your hospitality N, a very enjoyable evening.

(with thanks to P for a contribution on the tracks played and correction of some of the details).

Chester Acoustica Show March 2015: Chord Cables

Here Chord were running step by step cable changes - climbing up the range of streaming network cables and interconnects.

System is:

Naim NDS streamer with 2x 555PS DR power supplies
Naim 252 or 282 pre-amp with Supercap
Naim 250 power amp
Focal Diablo speakers
Melco SSD NAS (with direct connection to the NDS - not using a network switch between the 2
Bennec mains unit
Chord cables (network and interconnects varied, speaker cables are Sarum tuned array throughout)
Quadraspire racks with the new phosphor bronze top shelf spikes

A track is played and the Diablos sound suprisingly good - I've heard these 3 or 4 times before with a variety of electronics and have not enjoyed them - to brittle, edgy etc.  Better sounding today on the first couple of tracks which are being fed music via a standard commodity ethernet cable sitting between the Melco and the NDS.

Focal Diablo with Chord Sarum Tuned Array cables

Naim streamer and pre-amp with the Melco SSD NAS drive.  Quadraspire rack using the new phosphor-bronze spikes

Next up is the removal of the commodity cable and in goes Chord's lowest cost C-Stream cable in its place.  It is worth noting (for the demo police) that the pre-amp was muted for this process, then un-muted.  The point here is that the volume control was not touched.  The C-Stream seems to give better control over the music, with more nuances as voices and instruments decay, imaging stabilises and the band sounds as though they've been practising a bit more.  There are no dissenters in the room.

Then incomes the next up the range, the Anthem and a similar improvement follows, and again with the Sarum.  I think the biggest changes comes from C-Stream to Anthem.

There's some discussion with our room host being disarmingly honest about what's going on.  Its all about rejecting interference which Chord thinks gets into the DAC (probably the clock) and messes stuff up (technical terms!).  They use shielding, but this is not actually connected to any grounding at either end of the cable.  They talk about dialectric properties and the speed and machining quality of the cable extrusion processes.  The smoother the surface of each strand of cable is said to improve flow.  But, and this was the most interesting bit for me, they really don't know what's going on.  They try stuff and decide which sounds better.  Some of it they think they understand the science, but much of it they don't.  They just listen - even to different brands of solder in the plugs.  Its a bit disarming, but there are a good few people in the room that hear the differences, just like last year.  Might have to take this stuff home for a try in the Musings system.

Similar effects with the interconnects, with the new as yet un-named top of the range cable using machined Teflon plug outers and Talon diaelectric.  Apparently Teflon causes frequency dependent phase shifts (dunno, could be true I suppose) but Talon doesn't and that's why its used in military systems that use radar arrays to track incoming missiles where phase shifts would be highly undesirable.  Not sure that £3.8k can ever be said to be good value for a pair of cables though.

But still there were tracks where the Diablos were edgy, brittle and unpleasant to listen to.

First listen to Troy Campbell's song Killing Time In Texas - really enjoyed that, will be investing further.

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How Leaky Is A HomePlug Network?

I've been using HomePlugs to feed my Squeezeboxes, TVs, DS etc. for approximately 3 years and they've been completely reliable to date. I use a mix of TP-Link single plugs and Zyxel multi-port units.
Just in the last week I've started to have reliability issues with my network - weird stuff was happening like the wifi recycling every 2 to 3 minutes and having trouble logging into my EE router from my PC. Re-setting the router to factory default seem to resolve the problem for up to half a day or so then everything started going wobbly again.
Then, just yesterday, I did a factory default reset of the router and as I was trying to log into it, the router suddenly flipped from an EE log in page to a Huawei log in page. Weird as I don't have an Huawei router in the house, never mind plugged in. Access to the internet continued OK, but the devices plugged into the HomePlugs were not connecting properly with the network and the DS started doing that fading then coming back thing every couple of minutes which happens only when there's a network problem.
Removing all the HomePlugs and running only on wifi made the whole thing stable, but the hifi very quiet of course. I decided on a process of elimination by plugging in one HomePlug at a time to see which one was causing the problem. But this wasn't consistent - sometimes the problem arose with one device, then with another.
Then, the weirdest thing happened - McAfee on my PC popped up with a warning that I had about 10 devices on my network that "are not protected by McAfee". One of these was a laptop named "CHRIS". A Chris lives over the road from me! This only happened when a HomePlug was connected up - any of them - but not when only running wifi.
A bit of Googling later and I find that the general concensus on "leakage" of HomePlug signals beyond the house circuit breaker box / consumption meter has changed significantly compared to 3 years ago. When I first started with these things, leakage beyond the consumer unit was "extremely unlikely". Now, its reckoned to be virtually certain in an apartment block, and "fairly likely" in houses.
In order to make these devices "plug and play" they all present themselves to a default network grouping of HomePlug devices called "HomePlugAV". So any of these devices that stick with this default name will talk to each other. I think one of my near neighbours must've recently decided to use HomePlugs when they haven't before, and our 2 networks are talking to each other. And because many routers default to the same network IP address, I was getting access to my neighbour's Huawei router. For some reason, that was "over powering" the IP address of my own router.
So not surprising that my HomePlug devices and the rest of the network was getting confused - the DHCP server and default gateway were probably flipping between my own router and that of my neighbour.
So the resolution was to install the HomePlug management software on my PC and rename the network name on all the devices away from HomePlugAV and to something unique to my own house.
Now all seems to be well and stable - across HomePlug and wifi. Will keep an eye on how it goes and I have a list of the MAC addresses of the outsider HomePlugs so I can go and advise whichever neighbour they belong to to secure his/her own network.
So there you go. Take note and make the changes to your own HomePlugs before things start to go a bit wobbly in your network too.TP

Chester Show 2014 - Chord

 

Here we heard some cable comparisons, at prices in the stratosphere.  And yes, the upgrade from 3rd from best to 2nd best to the Sarum arrays was there to be heard.  But I still can't get my head around a pair of speaker cables that cost £2500.  Its difficult to justify and the changes weren't of the magnitude that a good Naim power supply can bring, or an upgrade from a mid-range DAC to a top-end DAC.

 

And now for the controversial bit.  Chord are now making Ethernet cables.  Except they're not.  They claim they make streaming system cables - by focussing on the "downstream" flow of bits of data with the "upstream" being untouched as its just about control instructions, not the music.  How you can differentiate is beyond me, but I'm not a network engineer, nor am I a cable engineer, just passing along the explanation from the man from Chord.

 

Anyway, using a Naim NDX into what I think was  SuperNait and then along to Kudos Super 10 speakers, the only thing to be changed in the comparison was the Ethernet cable.  The volume control was not touched, the track was the same track, the NAS and network components (router and switch) were not changed.  The NAS was connected to the switch by a Chord Sarum Tuned Array streaming cable, then the 3m or so length between the switch and the NDX was swapped from £ patch cable to ££ Chord C-Stream and then to ££££££ Chord Sarum Tuned Array streaming cable.

 

Here I am, probably one of the most likely people to say that this will make no difference to the music at all.  And pretty determined to be very very sceptical about any demo.  But there it was, all looking above board and also very distinctly audible (going both ways by the way - up and down the cost spectrum).  I treated reports of differences being heard with a great deal of caution and I expect you to be doing exactly that.  Most impressive of the demos was a Jake Bugg track that sounds like its recorded using some really cheap equipment in a bathroom (it might be that they intended for it to sound like that?) but it really was virtually impossible to listen to, so harsh and gritty it is.  With the Chord Sarum, it became easier to listen to for a little longer, with Jake's voice easier to hear and the instrumentation being more distinct too.  Its still an awful recording, but we managed to listen to about a minute of it rather than 10 seconds!  It was still very rough.

The cable was then swapped back and the track became horrible again. I often find going back in a change is more telling because there's always the risk that familiarity with the music means you're more likely to start hearing subtleties missed in first hearings.  Of course, if the apparent improvement in sound was purely down to familiarity then it would seem to get better again when listening one more time on putting the system back as it was. 

As for the so called 'expectation bias', well, if it exists then my expectations that there would be ababsolutely no change at all would've been borne out. But weren't. 

There were about 6 others I

in the room, all of whom thought they could hear a difference. 

I'm stumped to explain it, and the man from Chord was very apologetic for the ridiculous pricing, but there it is.  Very surprising.  I don't think the differences remotely reflect the price of the cable (£1,600 for 1m!) but it is very interesting that an effect can be heard.  It'll be great to find someone who can work out what's going on here and can reproduce the same cable effect for a tenner or so.  Will need to give the C-stream a try at home, to see if the effect can be replicated in a more independent context with different networking components, and to compare direct cabling to just the last bit of cable from mains over Ethernet.

 

I didn't think I'd ever be typing a report like this, but there it is. Bizarre.

Cyrus Streaming On Tour

Since the February 2011 school half-term holidays and my brother's visit with his Cyrus DAC-X and PSX-R, life hasn't been quite the same.  With my own versions of these components now firmly in place in the main system, Cyrus has become a topic of interest.

Recently they announced their streaming range and I'm looking forward to hearing their offerings.  It will be interesting to hear what the Stream-X does for its £1500 in comparison to a Squeezebox Touch being used purely for Ethernet streaming.  It looks like I'll have to book my own session with the local dealer, but for those who are fortunate enough to live near one of the tour date locations, Cyrus are on the road to demo their new kit between now and late May.  Book a place if you can:

http://www.cyrusaudio.com/register-for/cyrus-digital-music-tour-2011

Why?

I'm sure there must be a reason for this product to exist, but I'm really struggling with the way Bryston have gone with the BDP-1 digital music transport.  It's reviewed in the March 2011 edition of HiFi Choice magazine, page 64.
There are 3 main ways in which digital file based music is being delivered into hifi systems at the moment - one is the PC / Laptop / Mac feeding through USB into a DAC, the second being streaming from a PC / Laptop / MAC over a network, be it Ethernet, Ethernet over mains or Wifi and finally we have music servers which contain an internal hard drive in addition to the control elements and DAC (and sometimes pre-amp / power amps).  The latter one has a further option of adding other "clients" to the system - examples being SooLoos and Sonos.
So the beautifully built Bryston chooses another route - to only play music directly from direct attached USB storage - be that solid state or a hard drive.  So you have to get your music off your computer, onto some kind of USB attached media and then plug it into the Bryston.  It then scans the storage and builds an index - every time you connect.  So you add one more ripped CD to your portable USB hard disk storage and when you re-connect to the Bryston, it re-scans your collection of 1000 CDs (or whatever your numbers are).  Bryston claim that streaming over a network is messy and hard.  Interesting - and see my next post about the Linn Akurate DS, also reviewed in the same magazine edition (coming soon).
All of that seems unusual, to say the least.  Personally I'm not convinced of the merits - putting a CD in a player seems somewhat easier to me.  So having got all the media onto the hard disk, you just plug the £2200 device into a system right?  Wrong.  All this device is doing is taking the digital file, providing some control over the content (selection, playlists etc.) and squirting it to a digital output.  You need to add an external DAC, which, of course, Bryston can supply, as can many other manufacturers.  The outputs use a choice of electrical connections (no optical, good) which use either a BNC connector or XLR.  And we used to think Naim were a little odd with their choice of connectors!  The Bryston DAC has an asychronous USB input, but this device has no equivalent output.  Hmmm.  With a decent DAC this device is competing with the Linn Akurate DS on price but is no comparison on capability.  Sound quality might be a factor of course, but I doubt I'll be lucky enough to have the chance to make that comparison.
HiFi Choice give the device a good review for sound quality but pronounce the device low on features.  That seems to be a bit of an understatement.  I just don't see a place for this, but perhaps you can correct me?  There may be a market out there for those who find Windows Explorer or Mac Finder enough from the computer side and don't want to have a computer close to their listening system, or don't want to mess about with networking I suppose.  And here is the final oddity - the device has an ethernet port on the back - to allow you to connect to your network which enables the use of an Apple device to provide control over wifi.  Bizarre.

A relevant thread at Computer Audiophile can be found here.