The *NOT BORING!* Hi-Fi faff chat and sales

Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

I lusted after an alpha 7 in my teens when they came out, bought an alpha 8 in the end with matching alpha 8 CD player and bought an lp12 for £100 (those were the days!) Great sound, started me off on a slippery slope, gave them to my dad and he still has them.

In fact sat here listening to 5 grand of "sonic attack/air drill " Naim kit I'm wondering if perhaps I should've kept the arcam stuff!
 
Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

I like Naim's mil-std level of build quality.

For me, the object of design is accuracy - however, this may or may not be a 'nice' sound. I''ve listened to quite old stuff which measures not so well, but sounds 'nice'. Is this hi-fi? Nope. Hi-Fi is by definition as close as possible to what the mix-down engineer put on the master tape. It may not sound as 'nice' as a coloured, gently distorted version in a domestic setting.

I prefer to aim for as accurate as possible and throw the ball back into the recording engineer's court. One can always go some way towards correcting a duff recording, or making the sound more palatable for a domestic setting (the 'in your face' sound you describe isn't always welcome) by use of tone controls, but IMO you should always start with as near perfect a transcription as possible.

Naim's philosophy used to be similar, not really sure what their latest gear is like. Other than 'expensive' - though they did pander to the hifi press by leaving out tone controls. Are they saying they couldn't design a decent variable filter? I doubt it - that's marketing men for you. :D
 
Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

I always found the standard tone control a bit blunt so left them off. Graphic equalizers however... Absolutely love them for tweaking the sound. The more sliders the better!

The TAG McLaren AV192R ended up with a parametric equalizer option ranging from 20Hz to 22kHz. Although entirely software based, you could, if you had the time, tweak every frequency... Quite exciting for 2003. It was used to set up room eq, now pretty much standard on most decent home theatre processors/ receivers. It even appeared on car stereos for a while - microphone on the drivers headrest, press start and shut the door!.

Mission had something similar on the all in one home cinema thingy that appeared around the mid 1990's. Large LCD display to show speaker information, microphone input and so-on. Sadly being based on Dolby Pro-Logic, there was no digital option to explore the then AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS from the still popular laserdisc (USA) or the new DVD format.
 
Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

Was the EQ done in the digital domain on the TAG? I guess that's much easier than trying to do it in the analogue stage, which gets really hard if you want closer than an octave spacing, and no interference between them.
 
Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

I couldnt tell you but there are online papers still around that would. I should imagine it was all done digitally via the main SHARC processors but then, the TMA stuff was very good at its job so it could have been a surprise analog job!

http://www.iaguk.co.uk/tag/AV192R_LEAFLET.pdf

TMREQ is a comprehensive, 8-channel, 96kHz/24-bit
audio equaliser that allows to compensate for the
detrimental influences of room acoustics, producing a
sound field that is far more natural and faithful to the
original production.

*Edit: hell of a bit of kit for 2004. The actual physical sound quality of the thing was better than most of the higher priced US stuff it was aimed at. If McLaren hadnt have pulled the plug on the company when they restructured from TAG McLaren, it would probably still be about.
 
Re: The Hi-Fi Chat and sales thread

legrandefromage":3rmtyl2a said:
I couldnt tell you but there are online papers still around that would. I should imagine it was all done digitally via the main SHARC processors but then, the TMA stuff was very good at its job so it could have been a surprise analog job!

http://www.iaguk.co.uk/tag/AV192R_LEAFLET.pdf

TMREQ is a comprehensive, 8-channel,

There's the clue - '96kHz/24-bit'. If I knew how to do that sort of stuff digitally, that's the way I'd go too. I'll bet Doug wasn't involved with that bit though!

Posted your stuff yet?
 
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