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Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

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Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#191

Post by JoachimS »

bjt wrote: post #118
irrational wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some questions. My son has been taking guitar lessons using a classic guitar. Using the advice of his instructor we are getting him a begginer's electric guitar for christmas. We also need to get him an amp. Is the amp in this article the same kind of amp that you could plug an electric guitar into? I know nothing about music or instruments, but I do know about electronics so I was thinking it might be fun to…

I would go with one of the new generation of solid state guitar amps like the Boss Katana. These are Class D amps like the one in the article, but voiced for guitar, and with distortion and reverb effects built in. They're very reasonably priced, and get good reviews from enthusiasts (much better than the solid state amps of 10+ years ago).

Not very cheap and probably outside OPs range. But the Boss Katana Air is an amazing little amplifier, Bluetooth speaker, pedal modelling device etc. And it allows you to connect your guitar to the amp wirelessly. It really works fantastic.

https://www.boss.info/us/products/katana-air/

I'm but an amateur guitarist. I can't detect any latency caused by the radio communication. But I have not been able to find pro muscicians trying out the Katana Air and complaining on the latency. It really works. Over quite long distances too.

The only thing I would have wanted in the Katana Air is rechargable batteries in the Amp itself (the transmitter is charged by the amp). But that is not a major issue.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#192

Post by Tor3 »

modzu wrote: post #124
mbell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your generalisation is unfair. Most Audiophiles just want to listen to music the way the artists intended. That is not my experience at all. Audio gear that is 'flat', in that it outputs as close a representation to the recording as possible is largely shunned in audiophile circles. They mostly want to listen to something that 'sounds good', with all the psychoacoustic baggage that comes with such a statement. As a…

generalizing what "audiophiles" want is like trying to generalize what the "blacks" want or what "canadians" want. it makes no sense. what sounds 'good' entirely depends on the source and the listener. so immediately you can see there is no right answer. if you want to listen to old elvis records maybe they sound best on old 60s gear. theres supposed to be some noise. all the girls goin crazy listening to it back in…

> listening to classical though[]

Yeah.. I vastly prefer a real concert. But some people prefer their home audio setup instead. Even my old aunt.. I heard a guy (self-certified audiophile) complaining about the "bass response" when (apparently for the first time) he went to a classical concert. According to him the orchestra's "bass response" (whatever that means) was sub-standard. I prefer the real concert though (although I mostly go to small avenues). I should add that I have a tiny hearing problem in my left ear - normally I'm not bothered about it at all, but that ear is extremely sensitive to harmonics and quickly turns it into distortion if there's anything not quite right (whatever that is. I have no idea. But I noticed at one time that I can listen at much louder levels with certain high-end speakers. Of the type I could never buy.) Real concerts are bliss though. My ear never complains.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#193

Post by Tor3 »

fermienrico wrote: post #102
mbell wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are objective reasons to favor vinyl even today. The 'audio quality' if measured in terms of SNR is objectively much worse than any modern medium, however the mixes used for vinyl tend to not be compressed to death so the dynamic range can offset this shortcoming.

You have a good point and I've heard of this before. The problem is that it depends on the artist/mixing engineer and production process. There is no guarantee. It is ironic that higher quality mastering is done on a vintage outdated (barring recent resurgence) and objectively lower fidelity medium. It'd be nice to see CD's having great mastering and may be some of them do?

A little OT, but in my little home town the last CD shop disappeared a year or so ago. But you can still buy vinyl in town..

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#194

Post by Tsiklon »

mmaunder wrote: post #154

Google audiophile headphones. Then go to sweetwater and search for studio headphones. If the price of source gear is a quarter of the price of gear attempting to reproduce source, something is broken.

I like to look on high end headphones as I would any other luxury item - I'm willing to pay for nice materials of a higher quality or a better experience, if the item is right.

That could perhaps explain some of the price - plus I think we're at the point where many of the headphone companies have discovered that there is an ultra-high end market for some of these products.

You can see this in the prices of many top brand flagship headphones - the majority of the well regarded brands have been gradually putting out exceedingly expensive flagships in the past 2-3 years.

10 years ago - then the Sennheiser HD650 was seen as a flagship at $400, now look at the Sennheiser HD820 released earlier this year at $2200.

You aren't going to find too many people who will say that the sound improvements between the two justify an $1800 increase in MSRP.

However if you reframe the perspective to that of a luxury good, given the perception of headphones (regardless of use case) has changed somewhat in the interim and are seen as a fashion accessory and there's a larger enthusiast pool - you can see that manufacturers would be willing to push new boundaries when it comes to price.

However I think it's only the lunatics, or the conspicuous consumers who are ignorant to the law of diminishing returns when it comes to headphones and audio in general.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#195

Post by nerdponx »

sjwright wrote: post #143
S_A_P wrote: post #123

Audiophilia is a study in contradiction. The ask is a flat "uncolored" accurate sound. The gear that sells for ridiculous prices is usually tube gear with limited bandwidth and makes ~15 watts at 5-10% (admittedly usually even order harmonic) thd. Hardly uncolored. That said, and Ive mentioned this before on HN. My (now late) uncle had a bunch of audiophile friends in Dallas. He hung around folks who had spent upward…

The three critical paths for high end sound reproduction are: loudspeakers, speaker placement, room acoustics. Of course all parts of sound reproduction matter, but those three are the ones that affect real systems in practice. Most other factors are rarely an issue and/or inferior parts have a much lower magnitude of impact on sound quality. Sufficiently good source material (256kbps AAC or better) is widely availab…

Apparently the iPhone 6 has a surprisingly high-quality DAC: https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/22843-how-do...

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#196

Post by crispyambulance »

S_A_P wrote: post #123

Audiophilia is a study in contradiction. The ask is a flat "uncolored" accurate sound. The gear that sells for ridiculous prices is usually tube gear with limited bandwidth and makes ~15 watts at 5-10% (admittedly usually even order harmonic) thd. Hardly uncolored. That said, and Ive mentioned this before on HN. My (now late) uncle had a bunch of audiophile friends in Dallas. He hung around folks who had spent upward…

It's very easy for an audiophile to start going down the slippery slope into madness.

It usually starts with amplifiers, then speakers, then source equipment... and then they start rearranging furniture, tearing out drywall and putting absorbers everywhere, and then it starts all over again in a cycle.

I find it best to stick with a nice comfy pair of headphones and keep expectations low for everything else. If you're only managing the volume of air between your ear drums and the headphone cups-- that can be done to an obsessive level for vastly less cost (and without divorce) than if we're talking about a whole living room.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#197

Post by superflyguy »

dejv wrote: post #178
superflyguy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built the cmoy. It was easy. But I know nothing about how it works, and I remember reading warnings on associated web pages like "this is not a guitar amp" etc. I'm curious to know a little more about how these (amps generally) work, why they're seemingly non trivial to design at a reasonable quality level etc.

Guitar amps are very different beasts. If you want to build something simple there is "1 watt guitar amp" project[1] with many different variations. [1] https://www.electrosmash.com/1wamp

Yeah thanks but it's not that I want to build a guitar amp; I'd just like to read a little about the difference between guitar and headphone amps, different design decisions for headphone amps generally, things like that.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#198

Post by rcxdude »

aidenn0 wrote: post #73
comboy wrote: post #18

Any DAC chip and some usb interface for it that you could recommend to go with this? And slightly OT, but does anybody know any ABX test of balanced input/output signal? I find it hard to believe that there is a single person who can hear the difference.

There are cases where the difference is huge; particularly when you have very long runs between the preamp and the amp. This is on reason why you usually see XLR inputs to monitors. Any noise induced is amplified and a long unbalanced wire is a big antenna. I've heard of cases where you could receive AM radio stations from such a setup; I lean towards "urban legend" for that though. While it seems theoretically possi…

It's not as far-fetched as you might think. While you aren't likely to see the classic AM demodulator circuit appear in an audio signal path, the nature of AM is that any non-linearity will cause some degree of demodulation to occur, so it can appear in all kinds of places unexpectently (especially if a powerful transmitter is nearby).

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#199

Post by scns »

S_A_P wrote: post #184
scns wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weakest "link" in the "audio-chain" (if you exclude the room) are passive speakers with distortion above 1% The best speakers i heard to date are from a german company called Backes & Müller. Active crossovers, each speaker has its own poweramp and a sensor attached to the membrane. The signal of the sensor is fed back into a comparator which calculates the difference to the music signal, this is then used to for…

Those look intriguing. I would like to hear them. One of the things I’ve lamented as time and technology march on is how high fi seems to have lost it’s mainstream appeal. It seems like when I was growing up there was a wide continuum of commodity grade to mid grade to prosumer to high end gear available. There was always ridiculous high end stuff but even companies like Sony pioneer and technics had a higher end lin…

Its like cinema for the ears. Once started talking normally and i could not hear the music anymore because the volume was so low yet all the details and bass were still there. When i heard them for the first time there was opera playing, felt like the orchestra was in the same room. It was a small 2-way system.

Re: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap

#200

Post by egeozcan »

S_A_P wrote: post #179
sjwright wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three critical paths for high end sound reproduction are: loudspeakers, speaker placement, room acoustics. Of course all parts of sound reproduction matter, but those three are the ones that affect real systems in practice. Most other factors are rarely an issue and/or inferior parts have a much lower magnitude of impact on sound quality. Sufficiently good source material (256kbps AAC or better) is widely availab…

You’re absolutely right about that. I didn’t even mention how all of the drywall was replaced strategically with acoustic wall board. The entirety of the living room was gutted and refurbished to be the ultimate listening room, complete with stadium seating. Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he could…

> Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he could properly condition the power feeding his audio gear

In my limited experience, "clean power" (I know nil about this so I'm just repeating what I hear) was the most important difference people would "hear". My uncle used to have a Hi-Fi shop and I helped him sometimes. People hearing distortions in their existing setup used to make up for 90% of his customers. In those cases the number one step was to make sure that the power that comes to the system is clean. Being a certified electrician, he used to do his thing and you would almost always hear the "aaah" from the customers the moment you hit play. To me also the difference was generally night and day.

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