|
I have a turntable and computer. I can make CD-Rs from my phonograph records. Why should I pay you for this service?
It is popular to believe that if you have the required basic equipment that it’s easy to make high-quality CD-Rs from your phonograph records. I ask that you take a trip down memory lane for a moment. Try to honestly recall how your records sounded when you played them many years ago. Noisy, scratchy, and distorted might be a few of the many appropriately descriptive terms. CD players replaced the turntable for these and other reasons.
Have you ever known a true audiophile? Do you remember how dedicated they were to extracting the very best sound they could from their stereo system and how much time and effort they expended to pursue that goal? Well I assure you that many people have forgotten how difficult it was to afford, setup, and maintain true state-of-the-art record playing and cleaning equipment. You should not assume that you can dig out your old turntable, plop it on a desk, make the connections, fire up your computer, and burn CD-Rs of respectable quality. It just does not work that way!
I have spent many years studying with intense dedication just what it takes to play records with precision and reasonable financial outlay. By necessity, I had to design my own turntable to accomplish this. This was because no turntable possessed all the qualities I was looking for except the $70,000 plus Rockport Sirius III. I have spent time with a Rockport Sirius II, and I assure you, there IS a significant audible difference between the average turntable and a Rockport!
The turntable I use to make CD-Rs weighs in at a very respectable 140 pounds. It utilizes a highly respected coreless 16-pole direct-drive motor, a tangential tracking air bearing tonearm, and is air suspended at a subsonic resonant frequency. The phono cartridge I use is superior to every other cartridge I have tried including a $1,000.00 Koetsu Rosewood moving coil. Every precaution has been taken to insure this turntable would outperform the competition.
Other equipment includes a 24-bit professional sound card, digital editing software, Digital Audio Workstation computer, and electrostatic headphones to monitor the recordings. Records are immaculately cleaned with our unique 4-step process to a degree that our competitors do not seem to practice.
Commitment to a job well done with the help of great equipment and fair pricing. I think that’s the difference, and I’m confident that you will be able to hear the difference.
Back to top
I have a lot of phonograph records that I would like to hear again. Would it make more sense for me to have you tune-up my turntable, or should I have you convert these records to CD-Rs?
If you are on a tight budget, or you enjoy the ritual of playing records properly, you should have your turntable tuned up. If you are not interested in the time consuming ritual of playing records, want your collection to be portable, or would like to have your record collection loaded onto your MP3 player, you should consider the CD-R option.
Back to top
Why do you charge, at minimum, $11.00 for converting an LP to CD-R? That seems high to me!
I can only assume that comments like this are made because heavily discounted CDs and DVDs can be found in the isles of large department stores and the like. Please remember that for me to provide this service to you, I must devote large amounts of time to each and every project. I don’t just throw your LP into some magic machine and it does the rest.
There are significant costs involved for styli replacement, audio electronics, DAW computers, AC power conditioning, monitoring equipment, record cleaning equipment maintenance, blank CD-Rs, advertising, my website, job time, repair time, administrative time, research time, electricity, rent, etc, etc.
A custom service like mine cannot be compared to mass-produced discounted CDs in some mega-store with who knows what kind of shady promotional motivations behind it. It’s apples and oranges. Making music CD-Rs of superlative quality is certainly not the up and coming investment to watch out for on Wall Street.
Back to top
I notice you don’t always use digital noise reduction. Will my CD-R have pops, clicks, and noise?
My standard transcription service does not use digital noise reduction, but my deluxe service will utilize this only if necessary. Noise is diminished significantly by immaculately cleaning the record and using a top quality turntable. I don’t like to process the signal any more than absolutely necessary.
There may be a very slight amount of noise left on my transcriptions, but I believe it adds just the right amount of nostalgia to your listening experience. Also, there are those that feel a little bit of noise is good for the bits.
Back to top
You custom fabricate turntable bases, or as you say plinths. Why?
I can custom fabricate turntable plinths from exotic wood, carbon fiber MDF composite, and metal MDF composite. This is a wonderful way to significantly improve your turntable’s performance and looks.
Mass, rigidity, and internal loss are very important in a turntable plinth. The plinth must serve as an effective mechanical ground and rigid platform for the rest of the turntable’s parts. Without mass, rigidity, and internal loss in the plinth, the turntable is susceptible to feedback from the environment, will amplify vibration from its own operation, and will resolve musical information poorly. A turntable with a mediocre plinth will sound noisy and confused compared to one with a good plinth. A properly designed plinth will have a much blacker, silent, dynamic, and refined reproduction quality to the music.
Many turntables that had respectable motors, platters, and tonearms, had mediocre plinths that prevented them from reaching their full potential. Take for example the Pioneer PL-4 direct-drive turntable made in 1981 that commonly sells on Ebay for about $20.00. Most audiophiles would not even consider this turntable mostly due to this table’s cheap plastic plinth. But let us take a closer look because we have an open mind and want to learn something.
Pioneer made extraordinary turntables once upon a time. The PL-70L II direct-drive of 1981 being a good example. So they did know how to make great tables, they just had to compromise somewhere on their low-end models. Anyway, back to the unpretentious PL-4 and why it might be considered a good table to modify. This table had what Pioneer called a Stable Hanging Rotor motor. This simply meant that the rotor part of it’s direct-drive motor hangs or is at a position lower than it’s rotational bearing point, or to put it differently, it’s axial bearing. This is known in the audiophile community as an inverted bearing and Pioneer was the only manufacturer to use it in direct-drive tables.
This bearing design serves to raise the axial bearing vertical support point closer to the center of gravity of the rotational mass of the platter. Unlike common non-inverted turntable bearings, this minimizes a bearing’s rocking moment (does not want to flop from side to side as much). This will result in a quieter running bearing because it is inherently more stable and has less tendency to rock, rub, and scrape. If you’ve ever spent any stethoscope time with turntable bearings, you will appreciate the Stable Hanging Rotor for its smoothness and tolerance of lubricant qualities.
Next up is the motor itself. PL-4s use a direct-drive 4-pole coreless servo controlled DC motor. Admittedly, this motor would be a little smoother if it had more than four poles, but at least it’s a coreless design. A coreless motor will have no iron attracting the magnet cogging issues because its stator windings have no iron core, just air. So at least a big part of the cogging equation is addressed. The motor uses a Frequency Generated servo controlled feedback system for its speed control. Some audiophiles have criticized the newer quartz lock tables for having a sterile type of sound. The older (or in some cases, less expensive) direct-drive tables like the PL-4 did not have quartz lock speed control.
The PL-4 had a graphite tonearm. Carbon fiber and graphite has been shown to be a wonderful material for audio applications. The bearings in this tonearm are decent, but not excellent and it does have a plastic base, but I still feel this table is a good example of what I’m saying about the improvement a good plinth can make. Don’t even get me started on the Pioneer PL-L1000!
So use one of our plinths on a table like the Pioneer PL-4 and take advantage of Japanese technology, but circumvent the weight and cost compromises that were made in that era. It’s the smart thing to do, and it won’t cost you nearly as much as one of those pricey modern belt-drive turntables.
Back to top
How do you feel about direct-drive versus belt-drive turntables?
I believe that direct-drive, if properly implemented, can outperform belt-drive because even the best-belt drive implementations can have inconsistencies in the belt, belt whip resonance’s, stick-slip-slap pulley-belt-platter effects, belt compliance platter mass resonant interactions, belt characteristics changing with time, etc. If a direct-drive motor is properly designed and the platter is heavy enough it can work very well. I would rather live with a very good direct-drive than a belt drive table. It is just a more pleasant experience.
Back to top
Why should I let you work on my turntable?
I’m always astonished when I learn someone has taken his or her turntable to the local TV repair shop for servicing. If only they knew about the conscientious and specialized work I do. I’m sure you realize after reading what I’ve written here, that I take turntables seriously. I know the physics and I care about extracting the best performance from them. I always diligently apply my 33 years audio experience to every project I undertake. It is very likely that your turntable will not be treated the same way at your corner repair shop.
Back to top
Tell me about these crazy tall speakers you build!
I manufacture a wonderful, approximately 7.5-foot tall line array speaker based on the reasonably priced Hi-Vi B3S extended range driver. Without a grill, the width is only 3 inches, and the depth is only 8.5 inches not including the base, making for an extremely slick and compact speaker form. I feel the Wife Acceptance Factor has been addressed nicely.
It is constructed of MDF and is completely open with no cabinet to trap and color the sound of the driver’s rear radiation. The driver’s attach to the structure at their magnets, elegantly addressing mechanical grounding and reactionary forces at their source. This approach allows the drivers rear radiation to breathe freely. No method using standard flange mounting of the driver to a baffle can compare to this design.
This speaker is a true dipole radiator. Dipole speakers radiate sound from the rear of their speaker drivers that is 180 degrees out of phase with the radiation from their front. The rear radiation serves to cancel the front radiation directly to both sides of the driver. The benefit of this is much lower sound levels to either side of the driver. This means less detrimental reflection of sound from, and less energy shaking the side-walls of the listening room.
Additionally, very tall line-arrays like this one radiate very little energy above and below the speaker. Thus very little energy will be sent to the floor and ceiling. This translates into less room acoustic problems and a much lower chance of disturbing neighbors. These characteristics make this design, by far, the best choice for apartment or townhouse dwellers. Because there is no bulky cabinet, one person can carry these comfortably making it easy to setup as well.
Listening to this speaker is very pleasing to the ear. It sounds the same whether you sit down, stand up, or dance. Because of the small 3-inch drivers used, it has extraordinarily good horizontal off-axis characteristics. This means that the sacrifice in sound is almost imperceptible when you move outside of the center position or sweet spot. This design is exceptional in its ability to sound great whether you are in the listening room, kitchen, bedroom, or even behind a closed door. There are not many speakers that can make this claim. This is an indication that the power response characteristics are very good indeed.
I quickly realized that no electrostatic, ribbon, or planar magnetic transducer 3 inches wide could outperform a line-array of twenty eight 3-inch conventional drivers due to the superior excursion capabilities of a 3-inch conventional driver. A line array utilizing non-standard drivers would have to be much wider and therefore suffer horizontal off-axis issues that I have found to sound very unnatural and make the speaker very difficult to place in a room.
The B3S drivers are very nice for the price. They incorporate a lightweight dished or concave magnesium/aluminum diaphragm and an FEA designed and magnetically shielded motor. Even when playing loud, the 56 drivers barely break a sweat at their crossover frequency of 150 Hz. The speaker can be wired with several different series-parallel configurations taking advantage of your particular amplifier’s abilities.
These speakers are intended to be bi-amplified through a digital loudspeaker management device such as the Behringer DCX2496. Devices like this allow you to custom tailor all factors necessary to operate this design to it's full potential and are very reasonably priced. This speaker should be crossed over at 150Hz and 24dB per octave. Therefore you will need to use a woofer or woofers that can successfully operate into this range. I found that a pair of old 3-way sealed speakers with ten-inch woofers worked surprisingly well as temporary woofers when setup properly through the Behringer.
Back to top
Why are your speakers so tall?
They are tall because when you try to use a single small driver (like the drivers we use) to reproduce a wide frequency range, it overloads. Therefore you have to use a multiplicity of them to achieve the desired sound levels. Multiple small drivers can be arranged into many geometric shapes. The most sensible in terms of performance, space saving, and aesthetics is the vertical line-array.
Back to top
Why do your speakers need to be used with at least one woofer?
Our vertical line-array speakers do not use a cabinet so as to sound as clean as possible. As the drivers attempt to reproduce lower and lower frequencies, the sound waves from the front and rear develop an acoustic short circuit. There comes a point when the short-circuiting is such that a handoff must occur to a woofer or woofers.
Back to top
You use the Hi-Vi B3S driver for your speaker. Are there not better drivers available?
Yes, there are better drivers, however the B3S is an excellent value. I wanted to make a vertical line array that was very high performance, but also one that most people could afford. The B3S was a natural choice. I felt that the unique and intriguing characteristics of the floor to ceiling vertical line-array should be promoted more vigorously, and the B3S could help me do that.
Back to top
Do you plan to introduce new vertical line-arrays that use drivers other than the B3S?
If there is interest, we will accommodate that interest. As always, if you would like us to custom build speakers for you that utilize a different driver; we will be happy to help you.
Back to top
Why do I have to biamplify these line-array speakers?
The drivers in this speaker are open to the rear. They need to be crossed over and equalized to perform properly. Biamplification is the intelligent way to implement this requirement.
Back to top
What extra equipment do I need to run these line-array speakers and how much does it cost?
These speakers will require at least one woofer capable of operating smoothly up to 150Hz, one digital loudspeaker management device, a three or four channel power amplifier, a preamp, a CD player, interconnect cables, XLR to RCA adapters, etc. You can use your existing speakers for the bass, or you can purchase or build your own. You can use one woofer, but two is recommended. The Behringer DCX2496 digital loudspeaker management device retails for only $250.00. If you already have an extra power amplifier, you can use that for the line-arrays. We recommend an amp that can output about 200 watts into 4 ohms as this speaker will require about 10dB of mid-bass EQ and is 4.5 ohm in it’s standard configuration.
Back to top |
