Would I benefit from a new cd player....

[PENG]

To tame the BE tweeter?? Is it because you think it is "bright"? I ran those speakers with a small Emotiva x-100 integrated, my rotel processor and amplifier and then the mac and never thought they were bright. I don't know if it's because the room is treated, but I never have gotten the impression that they were bright. I tell you what though, in my untreated family room, my Monito Audio S6 and the rotel processor / amp combo sounded bright to me.

I bought the amp for many reasons. I like the way it sounds, looks, feels and brand name.

No I don't, or I wouldn't have bought them, but I read about people who thought so and I think I may know the reason why those people felt that way. I have also read enough about people labelling certain amps, such as McIntosh ones as warm sounding. I don't believe in those things but I thought you might, sorry I asked but I didn't want to assume.

 

[flyboylr45]

O no worries. I also read the same comments. Now I'm curious about your "trick"!!! just curious what system you have since you don't have a signature. I guess you can always use cables specifically designed to tame BE tweeters.

Just kidding!!!!!! Lol lol

 

[Irvrobinson]

O no worries. I also read the same comments. Now I'm curious about your "trick"!!! just curious what system you have since you don't have a signature. I guess you can always use cables specifically designed to tame BE tweeters.

Just kidding!!!!!! Lol lol

I thought for a moment I was on an Audiogon forum...

 

[Josuah]

I understand about digital and analog. So in essence, on any given cd player or digital source, what you're really hearing is the difference in DACs and their implementation. Correct? That is what brought me initially to this question. In a 16 year period of time, will the advances in DAC technology be audibly noticeable in a revealing system?

Yes, there have been significant improvements in DAC chipsets and the circuitry built to support them over even just the past 5 years. There are many companies that offer 30-day trial periods so you can easily give it a try yourself without breaking the bank.

16 years ago a CD player would have had a coaxial input, possibly a poorly designed one for consumer gear, and an older DAC implementation with poor filtering. Some people still prefer NOS chips and earlier slower filters to decrease the high frequency energy. The newer chips are oversampling and have better brick-wall filters, but there's still variation in the sound between chips, and sound between DACs especially due to the analog output stage.

Newer DACs are likely to buffer or at least reclock the incoming S/PDIF signal, but some still don't have the best coaxial input designs.

 

[mtrycrafts]

... The newer chips are oversampling and have better brick-wall filters, ....

You may want to check into this from authoritative sources.
After all there is no reason to over sample if you are using brick wall filter
Oh, may also want to check older CD players and see if they over sampled or not. But, only if facts matter in audio you need to check.

 

[Josuah]

Oversampling allows a steeper digital filter to be implemented more easily and to better effect than without oversampling.

Many older DACs have DAC and filter implementations of poorer quality, oversampling or not.

 

[PENG]

O no worries. I also read the same comments. Now I'm curious about your "trick"!!! just curious what system you have since you don't have a signature. I guess you can always use cables specifically designed to tame BE tweeters.

Just kidding!!!!!! Lol lol

I have no 'tricks'. I think the reason some people felt they were 'bright' could be one or more of the following.

- The speakers are in fact revealing. I don't doubt their creaters do want the speakers to reveal everything in the recording and probably succeeded to a large extent. The end result is that the Be tweeter can sound hurtful if the source media has a little more imperfections/distortions built in.

- Those people may be used to the so called 'warm', 'lay back' speakers. As such, unless they are frequent live unamplified concert goers they may not like the more 'transparent' speakers that I think the Focals are.

- This one is unlikely but I'll mention it anyway, that is, the dealers they visited might have used subpar source media without being noticed. When I was shopping for speakers, a couple of dealers had expensive high end electronics in their demo room (the Paradigm S8,6 came to mind) but their source media suck. One actually was using a Panasonic BD player to demo their S8. When I asked to listen to a violin concerto as the one I brought with one was just the empty case). He did not have one but tried to be accomodating so he went on line, hooked up an Ipod so I could hear it from YTube. Again, I think this is just an isolated case and most people would discount such unusual experience and would not blame it on the speakers anyway.

The HTM graphs does show the 1028 Be is about +1.5 dB at around the 5K mark but I doubt that little smooth crest would hurt people's ears unless the electronics, recordings, room acoustics all just happen to contribute to a crest converging in that area. So my 'trick' is simply to use them on good recordings that have inaudible distortions. That's the main reason I started a thread to capture what others consider good quality recordings, be it Flac, CD, SACD, DVDA, BD, Vinyl. Anything less than what I consider good recordings from my existing collection I will play on my HT system that has the less revealing speakers and any addition to my collection will be picked from the list I collected from that thread. Problem solved!!

 

[flyboylr45]

I agree with you. These speakers are very revealing. I do the same thing. I listen to subpar recorded music in my home theater system and leave the well recorded stuff for the music room. I have some vinyl records that sound a lot better that some cds. I am waiting for the Esoteric cd player to come in to audition it at home. We'll see.


As for the brick filters, wall filters, steep filters etc., is that English?!?!? I have no idea what you guys are talking about and the influences that these filters have on the end analog signal and how it manipulates the overall sound.

 

[Irvrobinson]

I'd go through the trouble to explain the relationship between how digital audio works and filtering, but there's a great explanation already done on this site:

Upsampling vs. Oversampling for Digital Audio — Reviews and News from Audioholics

 

[Josuah]

A 15 year old CD player's capacitors probably aren't operating all that great anymore either.

Likewise, I'm pretty sure advances have been made in op-amp linearity; plus many DACs today don't use op-amps in their analog output stage.

As for filtering, basically because the digital signal is a representation of the analog signal, those 1s and 0s need to be converted back to analog. When our current technology does this, it creates artifacts or incorrect analog values at high frequencies.

So to get rid of those high frequencies, and output an analog signal that looks more like the real original signal, a low-pass filter needs to be applied. Same idea as when your receiver splits audio to send low frequencies to your subwoofer and high frequencies to your main speakers.

The ideal filter is one that passes everything untouched up to 22.05kHz (half the sampling frequency of 44.1kHz). But physics gets in the way. So there is a roll-off instead of a hard vertical line.

Many people try tubes or non-oversampling DACs with a more gradual roll off to tame high frequency fatigue. Alternatively, you can look for a DAC that doesn't introduce artificial high frequency distortion and uses a very steep "brick-wall" filter, so the 18kHz data in your music is at full volume. (Of course distortion can also be added by the other components in your chain, including the speakers. But the types of distortion can differ, and may be by design.)

Many times Vinyl sounds better simply because it was engineered differently. Less processed. But vinyl can also sound better through the same gear because the digital conversion in your chain isn't so great and is introducing distortion when playing music (even though it may measure great for sine waves).

 

[flyboylr45]

Interesting article. I was looking at the manual for the cd player I'm considering and if I understand it correctly, the filter/upsampling settings can be modified. You can choose between no up conversion (original), 2fs, or 4fs. Also, the digital filter can be set do FIR, S_DLY, or none. There are many more settings that I'd have to sit down with my dealer and at home experiment with the changes it has on the sound. Basically, everything comes down to what sounds good to you. Even the article explaining the pros/cons of each, didn't really say if it changes the sound in a positive or negative way. I guess we'll see.

PENG,

What kind of gear are you using to run the 1028BEs? How far apart are they from each other, how far back are you from them, do you have them toed in, how big is your room, is it treated? Sorry for all the questions, it just seems that not too many people around here have these. ;-)

Guys,

I really appreciate all the feedback on this thread.

 

[PENG]

What kind of gear are you using to run the 1028BEs? How far apart are they from each other, how far back are you from them, do you have them toed in, how big is your room, is it treated? Sorry for all the questions, it just seems that not too many people around here have these. ;-)

Guys,

I really appreciate all the feedback on this thread.

I am not telling you.. just kidding.. No I don't have high end electronics like you do. I drive them with a 4B SST/Azur 840E combo. For CD/SACD/Flac I use the Oppo 95, Denon DVD-3910 and an old 25 lb Kenwood CD player, all sound pretty much the same. For vinyls I have a low budget Pro-ject Xpression III to do the job. So the speakers are the single most expensive piece I have in my 2 channel system.

The speakers are about 8 ft apart, listening position is about 10 ft in a 12 to 15X19X8 slightly irregular shape room. I toed them in pretty good for a while and now I found a slight toe in seems to work better. Again, with good recording material they sound as bright, or warm as my Veritas 2.3i, nothing special, just slightly more transparent. With poorer recordings, they could sound borderline on being unlistenable.

 

[mtrycrafts]

Oversampling allows a steeper digital filter to be implemented more easily and to better effect than without oversampling.

Many older DACs have DAC and filter implementations of poorer quality, oversampling or not.

Not according to this:
http://www.simaudio.com/pdf/Upsampling.pdf
or this
http://www.analog.com/static/imported-files/tutorials/MT-017.pdf
or thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversampling
Anti-aliasing
It aids in anti-aliasing because realizable analog anti-aliasing filters are very difficult to implement with the sharp cutoff necessary to maximize use of the available bandwidth without exceeding the Nyquist limit. By increasing the bandwidth of the sampled signal, the anti-aliasing filter has less complexity and can be made less expensively by relaxing the requirements of the filter at the cost of a faster sampler. Once sampled, the signal can be digitally filtered and downsampled to the desired sampling frequency. In modern integrated circuit technology, digital filters are much easier to implement than comparable analog filters of high order.

 

[PENG]

I forgot to mention that my room is not treated but it has the kind of furniture in it that I doubt there is much need to treat it. think some audiophile may want to tell me my gear are all on the cool sounding side hence poor match for the Focal Be tweeters blablala...but I would ignore all such opinions. So hopefully no one would bother offering such opinions to a non believer.

 

[mtrycrafts]

...

Many times Vinyl sounds better simply because it was engineered differently. Less processed. But vinyl can also sound better through the same gear because the digital conversion in your chain isn't so great and is introducing distortion when playing music (even though it may measure great for sine waves).

Oh, really? Vinyl has less distortion? Oh, such poor conversions Give us an example? And, it doesn't measure so well with music as it does with sine waves? Really? Where do you get this nonsense?

 

[PENG]

Oh, really? Vinyl has less distortion? Oh, such poor conversions Give us an example? And, it doesn't measure so well with music as it does with sine waves? Really? Where do you get this nonsense?

I doubt he understands music signal waveforms are in fact composed of sine waves of foundamental and harmonic frequencies. He may though if he knows something about Fourier.

 

[flyboylr45]

Well, the unit came in and I listened to it with the dealer's demo equipment which consisted of mega $$$$ (Pass Labs amp/pre amp combo and HUGE Montana speakers. I brought the unit home to listen to it with my setup and I loved it. Is it a huge difference?? No. Is it noticeable? Yes. How? Listening to music that I'm very familiar with just sounded more "transparent", specially in the high frequencies. I still have to play with the filter settings and such, but overall, I really like the unit. Not just because of the sound quality and input flexibility, but because of the overall build quality and look. I'm keeping it and think I didn't do too bad on the price. I paid $900 less than retail.

I've been playing with the USB input and listening to iTunes with regular compressed music and it sounds pretty good. I'm going to start doing some lossless and see how big the difference is.

 

[Irvrobinson]

I suspected this would happen...

 

[DS-21]

Well, the unit came in and I listened to it with the dealer's demo equipment which consisted of mega $$$$ (Pass Labs amp/pre amp combo and HUGE Montana speakers. I brought the unit home to listen to it with my setup and I loved it. Is it a huge difference?? No. Is it noticeable? Yes. How? Listening to music that I'm very familiar with just sounded more "transparent", specially in the high frequencies.

The only way to know that, really, is to match levels between the two players and compare. What you describe is consistent with nothing so much as a small broadband level difference.

Then again, one could make the argument that you're happy, so ultimately the actual reason for it (be it real or illusory) is irrelevant.

 

[Josuah]

Oh, really? Vinyl has less distortion? Oh, such poor conversions Give us an example? And, it doesn't measure so well with music as it does with sine waves? Really? Where do you get this nonsense?

Here's a paper I found with a quick Google search. It contains experimental results.
A New Method for Measuring Distortion using a Multitone Stimulus and Non-Coherence

This is one of the reasons IMD measurements have been gaining popularity.

The disadvantages of single-tone sine wave measurements are mentioned on many audio measurement company web sites, including Audio Precision: Audio.TST July 2008 Multitone theory & Using your AP to do a Power Supply Rail Health Check.

I doubt he understands music signal waveforms are in fact composed of sine waves of foundamental and harmonic frequencies. He may though if he knows something about Fourier.

There is also the fact that feedback influences the introduction of distortion. A large number of devices utilize feedback and have different feedback designs. Here's a white paper from Nelson Pass: Audio distortion and feedback.