why tweak?

[BMCG]

For me, the biggest thing is lowering the noise floor which allows all of the quality components to show what they are capable of. Power and grounding seem to be the most powerful formula here.

Indeed, I am increasingly of the opinion that without a well constructed foundation (electrical and mechanical) that the capabilities of quality components never get properly unleashed/ understood

And by mechanical I include room acoustics and component isolation / damping

Echoing Marc’s (spiritofmusic) sentiments, there is a remarkable yield from one’s existing components for thoughtfully, carefully and agnostically constructing the foundation upon which they work.

 

[microstrip]

Micro, yes it looks like you want to engage me in a semantical discussion, which I will be avoiding as much as I can
That we do not understand clearly the psychology of music perception doesn't mean we are completely blind. Simple physics and common sense are

OK, now it is not semantics anymore - it is very different opinions. We understand the psychology of music perception, or at less much of it. What we do not understand completely is the connection between the physical aspects of our equipment and what we perceive. It is why technology, common sense and simple physics are most of the time misleading and abusively used in marketing - not in your case, I must say.

If I take a powerline disconected from a household lines, where all the noise from switching PS-es, LED and fluorescent lights, washing machines, microwaves etc etc is damped, then I call this line clean. Although you'd probably better call it a "first approximation to clean". Take arroz marisco and put there sea shells from let say the Porto harbor. They will have probably most of the Mendeleev table. You don't have to understand how a particular heavy metal or oil residue acts on your body to know it is not good. Similar with vibrations, if I put eq on a simple platform made of a kid bike tire, than I already cut big deal of LF vibration and come closer to a vib clean operation.

We are far from understanding the effects of the "etc etc" in our equipment - if things were so simple we would all have a battery power system and perfect sound forever. The same for vibration - designers created equipment using the intrinsic vibration properties of materials, changing their objectives modifies sound, but does not improve it every time.

Try reproducing the sea conditions with clean water and ultra pure chemicals in your home pool and grow sea shells there - IMHO it is not the receipt for a perfect arroz de marisco. Probably many people will tell you the arroz de marisco cooked with sea shells from the Porto harbor will taste better. BTW, arroz de marisco needs tweaks!

Try moving from Mediterranean to Northen Europe and you will define that v quickly
/I did it few years ago/

Cheers,

You should also try seafood from the Azores islands!

 

[microstrip]

(...) so hold off on tweaks until you feel like you are really happy as things are. then tweaks will become a net gain, instead of a band aid clouding the problem.

when people ask me about grounding boxes and Herzan's I ask them where they are in their level of total system satisfaction. these are cherry on top products, not fundamental building blocks.

if you need a tweak to make the system listenable, then re-group and consider what the real issue might be.

Although I agree in general terms with your perspective, real life is seldom like our theoretical models.

For example most of us will consider cables (power and signal) as a tweak - but IMHO evaluating equipment in a top system without the proper cables will be misleading.

 

[Stacore]

OK, now it is not semantics anymore - it is very different opinions. We understand the psychology of music perception, or at less much of it. What we do not understand completely is the connection between the physical aspects of our equipment and what we perceive.

So we don't understand it If we know the phenomenology of the perception but very little about the mechanisms then we don't understand it properly. At least to me.
I suspect we mean something similar: We know how the hearing mechanism works, we know several psycho-physiological hearing processes (masking, various THD spectrum perception to name a few) but we cannot correlate how a given stimulus (say a rumble profile of a TT) affects our perception. Then I call it poorly understood.

We are far from understanding the effects of the "etc etc" in our equipment - if things were so simple we would all have a battery power system and perfect sound forever. The same for vibration - designers created equipment using the intrinsic vibration properties of materials, changing their objectives modifies sound, but does not improve it every time.

Etc etc here meant all possible household equipment, damping trash into the powerlines. Of course I'm speaking out of my experience only, but anytime I clean power and vib I get consistent results. Batteries are not the answer, they have their issues with the load capability and the internal resistance behavior. Anyway, as I said I don't have to understand how exactly household equipment interacts with my audio to see that if I limit this influence I get better sonics. With vibrations, of course a design of e.g. a cartridge or a speaker rests crucially on various resonance control patterns but I speaking of something else: Cutting the equipment from both seismic influence and the acoustic feedback. And both of those vibration influences are pretty random as they change from room to room so it would be v difficult to design around them.

Try reproducing the sea conditions with clean water and ultra pure chemicals in your home pool and grow sea shells there - IMHO it is not the receipt for a perfect arroz de marisco. Probably many people will tell you the arroz de marisco cooked with sea shells from the Porto harbor will taste better. BTW, arroz de marisco needs tweaks!



You should also try seafood from the Azores islands!

I'm now vegetarian I'd skip eating heavily polluted seashells even if they tasted fantastic. Because in my analogy it was not the taste (which you mixed in here very smarty ) but the condition our body is presented with that was important. You can eat seafood with a Mendeleev table in it but your body is then put into suboptimal conditions.

Cheers,

 

[Stacore]

For example most of us will consider cables (power and signal) as a tweak - but IMHO evaluating equipment in a top system without the proper cables will be misleading.

I claim the same with the vibration control

 

[microstrip]

So we don't understand it If we know the phenomenology of the perception but very little about the mechanisms then we don't understand it properly. At least to me.
I suspect we mean something similar: We know how the hearing mechanism works, we know several psycho-physiological hearing processes (masking, various THD spectrum perception to name a few) but we cannot correlate how a given stimulus (say a rumble profile of a TT) affects our perception. Then I call it poorly understood.

Etc etc here meant all possible household equipment, damping trash into the powerlines. Of course I'm speaking out of my experience only, but anytime I clean power and vib I get consistent results. Batteries are not the answer, they have their issues with the load capability and the internal resistance behavior. Anyway, as I said I don't have to understand how exactly household equipment interacts with my audio to see that if I limit this influence I get better sonics. With vibrations, of course a design of e.g. a cartridge or a speaker rests crucially on various resonance control patterns but I speaking of something else: Cutting the equipment from both seismic influence and the acoustic feedback. And both of those vibration influences are pretty random as they change from room to room so it would be v difficult to design around them.

I'm now vegetarian I'd skip eating heavily polluted seashells even if they tasted fantastic. Because in my analogy it was not the taste (which you mixed in here very smarty ) but the condition our body is presented with that was important. You can eat seafood with a Mendeleev table in it but your body is then put into suboptimal conditions.

Cheers,

I see we are mainly addressing different perspectives of use - you focus yourself on turntables, I was mainly considering electronics - the effects are orders of magnitude lower. Surely high quality pneumatic platforms have a great importance in electro-mechanical analog devices. My current main interest is digital , so I am effectively biased to electronics.

My situation is probably different from yours - my listening room is ground floor in a quiet zone, and there are layers of sand, gravel and concrete bellow the wood floor.

As I said mains influence is even less understood - if we get better sound when you disconnect the freezer or TV does not imply we must "clean" (whatever it means...) the mains of everyone else. Particularly as each "cleaning system " will also have adverse properties. Remember that tweaks we systematically call "grounding" are not "grounds" at all.

Concerning vibration I think that there is a lot more than just seismic influence and acoustic feedback. Otherwise the problem would be easily researched, published or patented and considered solved.

My apologies, I could never guess I was discussing sea shells with a vegetarian - I really like seafood, although I have it only exceptionally.

 

[Stacore]

I see we are mainly addressing different perspectives of use - you focus yourself on turntables, I was mainly considering electronics - the effects are orders of magnitude lower. Surely high quality pneumatic platforms have a great importance in electro-mechanical analog devices. My current main interest is digital , so I am effectively biased to electronics.

Not exactly so. What I described few posts above was my experience with my home system. Then came the Stacore experience.. we have tested probably all possible elements of the audio chain in almost all possible variations. I was shocked two times: When I decoupled a CDP and a SS amp. I was sure I will hear zero difference. I was very wrong. Actually, with CDP's we consistently observe the biggest delta, bigger than with TT's (which I attribute to TT having some vibration filtering mechanism in the form of the arm-cart compliance filter).

My situation is probably different from yours - my listening room is ground floor in a quiet zone, and there are layers of sand, gravel and concrete bellow the wood floor.

Most of the listening rooms we visit (plus Stacore's Bogdan listening room) are like that - residence houses or audio showrooms. Recently in Sopot we decoupled a CA Innovation for a customer from Finland. If Kari is here, please speak up

As I said mains influence is even less understood - if we get better sound when you disconnect the freezer or TV does not imply we must "clean" (whatever it means...) the mains of everyone else. Particularly as each "cleaning system " will also have adverse properties. Remember that tweaks we systematically call "grounding" are not "grounds" at all.

I agree that the mains is much less understood, but what kind of adverse property can have a dedicated power line, separated from the household?

Concerning vibration I think that there is a lot more than just seismic influence and acoustic feedback. Otherwise the problem would be easily researched, published or patented and considered solved.

You bet! I don't think there are another vib paths than the two mentioned. Isolating seismic and LF vibs is not too difficult but the trick is not to spoil the rest of the spectrum or better yet improve there too

My apologies, I could never guess I was discussing sea shells with a vegetarian - I really like seafood, although I have it only exceptionally.

Nothing to apologize for Micro! I changed to vege when I first left Mediterranean Before I was eating seafood in tons (I tried arroz de marisco in Tavira)
Cheers,

 

[spiritofmusic]

Well, I report on my tt isoln on Stacore Adv hopefully early Dec.

 

[microstrip]

(...) I agree that the mains is much less understood, but what kind of adverse property can have a dedicated power line, separated from the household?(...)

Semantics again. Usually a dedicated power line does not clean power, it simply avoids corrupting it too close to your equipment. But for example, I have three dedicated power lines in my room and most of the time I prefer the sound when running the system from a single line, even with balanced equipment that does not show any change in the spectral audio analysis of the electrical noise at the output of the amplifier.

People often think about the distribution board as being an ideal source of power. However its internal equivalent impedance versus frequency is a complicated matter - something more like the graph of the impedance of an artificial mains network (AMN) I attach. I am not an expert in these matters, but some people refer that in audio the mains wires have three functions - supplying energy, filtering the mains noise and damping the noise generated by the equipment itself. Balancing them and predicting mains effects is not an easy job, particularly because we are addressing very diverse systems.

 

[Stacore]

Yes, now its semantics Of course, a line taken from the distribution box, or better yet directly from the electricity meter (this is what I did in my apartment, installing old-style fuses instead of the modern electronic circuit breakers) is by itself not ideal.
But at least it avoids possible additional pollution from the household devices.

Cheers,

 

[spiritofmusic]

My reason to tweak?
After my first decade of serious upgrading, I started to get the sound I was most attracted to.
After discovering tubes, full range driver/uber high efficiency spkrs and rim drive tt/linear tracking arm analog front end, I found the sound I’m happy to never move beyond.
Now I’m looking to properly maximise this sound and push the limits of my system. The room has been a blessing, no exaggeration.
And efforts on Westwick balanced power, Oyaides dedicated lines, Furutech duplexes, SR Black fuses, Entreq grounding, Sablon cables and Stacore isolation platforms, are wringing so much out of my sound that
1- I feel totally vindicated I’ve made the right choices on components.
2- Zus especially can be so much more transparent and neutral than poor setups (like my previous room) portray.
3- more and more I feel correct in feeling money spent on tweaks is far better VFM than just chasing the “next” component up the line, or ditching gear and going crazy elsewhere.
That’s why I tweak.

 

[853guy]

My reason to tweak?
After my first decade of serious upgrading, I started to get the sound I was most attracted to.
After discovering tubes, full range driver/uber high efficiency spkrs and rim drive tt/linear tracking arm analog front end, I found the sound I’m happy to never move beyond.
Now I’m looking to properly maximise this sound and push the limits of my system. The room has been a blessing, no exaggeration.
And efforts on Westwick balanced power, Oyaides dedicated lines, Furutech duplexes, SR Black fuses, Entreq grounding, Sablon cables and Stacore isolation platforms, are wringing so much out of my sound that
1- I feel totally vindicated I’ve made the right choices on components.
2- Zus especially can be so much more transparent and neutral than poor setups (like my previous room) portray.
3- more and more I feel correct in feeling money spent on tweaks is far better VFM than just chasing the “next” component up the line, or ditching gear and going crazy elsewhere.
That’s why I tweak.

Hello Spirit,

We tweak to refine and optimise the performance of a given component (or components) within the context of a specific system in a specific room. That all tweaks are therefore component and/or system dependent and asymmetrically weighted suggests any benefit conferred via a tweak will not and cannot replicate the benefit reaped by replacement of a component (or components), no matter how beneficial that tweak may be.

In optimising any system of complexity and ameliorating weak links, it’s important to know what the weak links are, and whether they need tweaking or replacement. A tweak is not a band aid that magically solves problems inherent in the design and implementation of a given component, system or room. A footer or rack or grounding box won’t do anything to fix a transformer that saturates, or an output stage that’s under-driven. Having attempted to roll various turds in glitter in the past (1), I personally don’t consider tweaks and components to be interchangeable, nor of equivalent value.

Best,

853guy

(1) This was never more obvious than realising I was attempting to solve problems during the mix that should have been rectified when miking the source, or that during recording I was trying to solve problems via mic selection/placement that should have been rectified in the performance.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Hello Spirit,

We tweak to refine and optimise the performance of a given component (or components) within the context of a specific system in a specific room. That all tweaks are therefore component and/or system dependent and asymmetrically weighted suggests any benefit conferred via a tweak will not and cannot replicate the benefit reaped by replacement of a component (or components), no matter how beneficial that tweak may be.

while in practice I agree with you, as I turn to tweaks when my upgrade path for better gear (from my personal perspective, of course) has ended, I do not agree with your generalization. and that is because not all upgrade performance levels are not attainable by tweaks. too many shades and types of upgrades and contexts. your statement is too broad and absolute. if you look at many different upgrade paths within various brands, that step can sometimes be found in other ways. and also, tweaks can provide overall better performance while maybe coming up short in specific areas of performance offered by an upgrade that may be less desirable to the user. you get into personal preferences.

so tweaks can offer reasonable alternatives to upgrades. and as I have repeatedly written, a system needs a certain maturity to focus on tweaks. but that maturity is accessible without tip top levels within brands of gear.

again; in practice I agree with you since I tend to own 'top-of-line' end game gear. and then do also continue to upgrade when offered the opportunity.

In optimising any system of complexity and ameliorating weak links, it’s important to know what the weak links are, and whether they need tweaking or replacement. A tweak is not a band aid that magically solves problems inherent in the design and implementation of a given component, system or room. A footer or rack or grounding box won’t do anything to fix a transformer that saturates, or an output stage that’s under-driven. Having attempted to roll various turds in glitter in the past (1), I personally don’t consider tweaks and components to be interchangeable, nor of equivalent value.

Best,

853guy

(1) This was never more obvious than realising I was attempting to solve problems during the mix that should have been rectified when miking the source, or that during recording I was trying to solve problems via mic selection/placement that should have been rectified in the performance.

completely agree that it is rare to blindly apply a tweak and get much ROI. typically they need to be carefully integrated with understanding of what is doing what, or net loses can occur.

 

[sbo6]

I tweak because I'm always looking to improve my system and its sound and I believe little improvements add up over time. Some of the best bang for your $ improvements are often not very expensive. It also keeps me incentivized on a quest for ever - better sonics especially when funds are low.

 

[853guy]

while in practice I agree with you, as I turn to tweaks when my upgrade path for better gear (from my personal perspective, of course) has ended, I do not agree with your generalization. and that is because not all upgrade performance levels are not attainable by tweaks. too many shades and types of upgrades and contexts. your statement is too broad and absolute. if you look at many different upgrade paths within various brands, that step can sometimes be found in other ways. and also, tweaks can provide overall better performance while maybe coming up short in specific areas of performance offered by an upgrade that may be less desirable to the user. you get into personal preferences.

so tweaks can offer reasonable alternatives to upgrades. and as I have repeatedly written, a system needs a certain maturity to focus on tweaks. but that maturity is accessible without tip top levels within brands of gear.

again; in practice I agree with you since I tend to own 'top-of-line' end game gear. and then do also continue to upgrade when offered the opportunity.

completely agree that it is rare to blindly apply a tweak and get much ROI. typically they need to be carefully integrated with understanding of what is doing what, or net loses can occur.

Hello Mike,

Yes, it probably is too broad.

My point (perhaps inelegantly articulated) is that we should avoid conflation of variables and their impact on the whole. I’ve yet to hear a footer or rack that is the equivalent of an upgrade in AC distribution (and vice versa). That both may indeed provide clear sonic benefits does not mean how they provide those benefits in musically meaningful ways can be thought of as directly comparable nor interchangeable.

Even in the most highly-evolved systems (of which an upgrade in component seems redundant because one's preference is already matched), there seems to be a clear delineation between what each individual variable contributes in a way that’s not necessarily replicable by another. The arrival of your American Sound will be interesting to observe, because my experience leads me to suspect the changes it brings will be of a fundamentally different nature than say, the addition of the Tana, even in the case in which the Tana confers a positive benefit to the component it supports, and the system overall, even acknowledging that both are "upgrades" over existing pieces of gear and the fact their purpose (to spin vinyl/to ameliorate vibrational energy) is explicitly different. Like you say, it’s a matter of understanding of what is doing what, and how it's doing it.

Best,

853guy