Playground for practical listening exercises

[Discodave]

Shouldn't matter as both clips are in the same boat i.e. Googledrive. Just because it is less tuneful than Dropbox won't prevent you from telling the difference musically between the clips if Googledrive is used. Just may not be as enjoyable a comparison. But then again you won't know. Unless of course you duplicate the recordings for both but then you'd be comparing between download facilitators when the point is to assess the musicality of the tunes.

[tpetsch]

AAA

vs.

BBB

If the difference is between google drive and dropbox then dropbox (BBB) wins. If there is something else different there are two differences which makes the comparison less worthwhile.

Nope, that's it in a nutshell and I thought I would share the links/results thinking that some here would find it interesting. I was making a few system recordings -for the first time- and I uploaded this file to Google Drive and was disappointed with the result, just sucked all the Tune and fun or "swing" out of it. I then opened an account with Dropbox and downloaded the same exact file there and was surprised how much better it sounded, still no where near to the actual experience but definitely more "In Tune" than the Google Drive version. ...So, in short, people posting here on "Playground" should take this into consideration.

Hmmm so what you are saying tpetsch is that you can't make a good comparison with GoogleDrive because Dropbox is more tuneful !?That really doesn't make any sense to me .

What I am saying is that people should take this into consideration. ...If your goal is to make A/B "Tune" comparisons than uploading the same files on Google drive as compared to Dropbox will put them all at a disadvantage from the get go. And this disadvantage may be enough of an issue for listeners to just dismiss the overall performance as "sounds Terrible" or "just a mess" as I have said in the past, and I will not do that anymore. Yes, you will still be able to tell which track is more "In Tune" from a Google Drive comparison, but you may not get to the potential issue as easily.

[lindsayt]

I'm more interested in what you hear when you listen to your clips, lindsayt.

I hear saturation on all of them.

With the worse sounding recordings being more saturated.

Saturation is terrible from a tunedem point of view.

The saturation on these recordings make them unlistenable for pleasure. It's a masochistic exercise for me to listen to these recordings. Especially when compared to hearing the same records on the same vinyl sources with no saturation.

Please rank them from best to worst. If you can't enjoy them, then rank them from least bad to worst.

I am not sure that I would give you a fair and unbiased ranking of the recordings. Because I know which recording is which vinyl source. And because I know how each vinyl source sounds in my hi-fi system,

On top of that, the ranking of the recordings depends more on which recording has more saturation than it does on which vinyl source sounds more tuneful in my system.
So that listening to the recordings and ranking them becomes more of an exercise in which vinyl source had more synergy / less incompatability with the (inadequate) recording equipment and technique

I can give you a fair and unbiased ranking of the vinyl sources in my system. Because the differences are clear and consistent when doing level matched AB listening tests. Or with the volume from the less tuneful vinyl source slightly higher when doing AB listening tests.

In my system the EMT 930 and 950 sound more similar to each other than the Linn LP12 does to either of them. And yet on the You See Red recordings, it doesn't sound like that's the case.

The EMT 155st phono amp in the EMT 930 had a higher output than the phono amplification in the EMT 950. The EMT 950 built in phono card in turn had a higher output than the EAR 834p. This resulted in terrible synergy between the EMT 930 and the desktop PC. So terrible that it would be fair comment to say that the 2 were completely incompatible.

The EMT turntables were designed for radio station broadcast use. Their balanced output would be fed into a mixing desk, from where it would be sent to be broadcast. The voltage output from them is higher than it is from domestic hi-fi phono amps. This higher output from the EMT's was an issue when I used them with a TVC pre-amp. The transformers in the TVC were getting saturated. The higher output from the EMT's was not a problem when used with an LDR pre-amp, a stepped attenuator pre-amp, traditional hi-fi integrated amplification, professional power amps with volume controls.

I'm more interested in what you hear when you listen to your clips, lindsayt.

I hear saturation on all of them.

With the worse sounding recordings being more saturated.

Saturation is terrible from a tunedem point of view.

The saturation on these recordings make them unlistenable for pleasure. It's a masochistic exercise for me to listen to these recordings. Especially when compared to hearing the same records on the same vinyl sources with no saturation.

What exactly do you mean by saturation in this case?

By saturation I mean that the components in the PC were overloaded with too much power. With that including the ADC.

The recordings have a large amount of clipping on them. With the amount of clipping not being consistent across the vinyl sources due to the different outputs from the cartridge and phono amplification combinations.
It may well be that it wasn't just the ADC converter that was saturated, but also the electronic components inside the PC that were feeding the ADC chip.

My PC motherboard failed whilst I was doing a recording from the EMT 930. This may have been coincidence. Or it may have been caused by too much power being fed into the mic circuits of the PC.

[John]

Lindsay, sorry to hear of your difficulties with your PC. Using an iPhone might make more sense to show differences in your source setups. You can level match each of them and would give us an opportunity to hear the rest of your setup as well. I’d certainly be interested in listening to the results.

[springwood64]

My PC motherboard failed whilst I was doing a recording from the EMT 930. This may have been coincidence. Or it may have been caused by too much power being fed into the mic circuits of the PC.

Oh no!

[lejonklou]

Lindsay, sorry to hear of your difficulties with your PC. Using an iPhone might make more sense to show differences in your source setups. You can level match each of them and would give us an opportunity to hear the rest of your setup as well. I’d certainly be interested in listening to the results.

Indeed in-room iPhone recordings work great for comparisons. They are flawed, but apparently so were the recordings we just compared. It doesn't matter.

The first two clips from lindsayt match pretty well with my memories of EMT turntables. I don't remember the models, which is why I haven't brought it up before. But I remember a Rega Planar 3 walking all over them and over every other classic turntable that we got through the doors at The Sound Company between 1990 and 1995.

Apparently all who listened to those two clips heard the same thing: The LP12 is vastly superior to the EMT in tunefulness. Those who don't hear that when comparing the two clips have something to look forward to: Learning how to master the Tune Method. I highly recommend it - it's a thrill, it's surprisingly fun, it's certain to change your view on everything HiFi and could potentially change your life. At least it changed mine.

[ThomasOK]

AAA

vs.

BBB

Nope, that's it in a nutshell and I thought I would share the links/results thinking that some here would find it interesting. I was making a few system recordings -for the first time- and I uploaded this file to Google Drive and was disappointed with the result, just sucked all the Tune and fun or "swing" out of it. I then opened an account with Dropbox and downloaded the same exact file there and was surprised how much better it sounded, still no where near to the actual experience but definitely more "In Tune" than the Google Drive version. ...So, in short, people posting here on "Playground" should take this into consideration.

Hmmm so what you are saying tpetsch is that you can't make a good comparison with GoogleDrive because Dropbox is more tuneful !?That really doesn't make any sense to me .

What I am saying is that people should take this into consideration. ...If your goal is to make A/B "Tune" comparisons than uploading the same files on Google drive as compared to Dropbox will put them all at a disadvantage from the get go. And this disadvantage may be enough of an issue for listeners to just dismiss the overall performance as "sounds Terrible" or "just a mess" as I have said in the past, and I will not do that anymore. Yes, you will still be able to tell which track is more "In Tune" from a Google Drive comparison, but you may not get to the potential issue as easily.

I don't disagree with this. Most of us have used dropbox for these comparisons and we have had good results with it. While you might be able to still hear the tune differences through google drive I see no reason why you would want to use a service that, at least based on this comparison, starts out robbing the music of musicality and tunefulness. I have also noticed before that transferring a file multiple times can reduce quality so I always load clips made on my iPhone directly from it to dropbox. Emailing them to another device and then uploading them, as I was once forced to do, reduces the musicality of the resulting playback. This was done before figuring out the secret handshake necessary to do it directly from the iPhone.

[lindsayt]

Lindsay, sorry to hear of your difficulties with your PC. Using an iPhone might make more sense to show differences in your source setups. You can level match each of them and would give us an opportunity to hear the rest of your setup as well. I’d certainly be interested in listening to the results.

Indeed in-room iPhone recordings work great for comparisons. They are flawed, but apparently so were the recordings we just compared. It doesn't matter.

The first two clips from lindsayt match pretty well with my memories of EMT turntables. I don't remember the models, which is why I haven't brought it up before. But I remember a Rega Planar 3 walking all over them and over every other classic turntable that we got through the doors at The Sound Company between 1990 and 1995.

Apparently all who listened to those two clips heard the same thing: The LP12 is vastly superior to the EMT in tunefulness. Those who don't hear that when comparing the two clips have something to look forward to: Learning how to master the Tune Method. I highly recommend it - it's a thrill, it's surprisingly fun, it's certain to change your view on everything HiFi and could potentially change your life. At least it changed mine.

It's fine by me if anyone thinks that a Rega Planar 3 is more tuneful than a fully working EMT 930 or 950.

It's also fine by me if anyone wants to focus on my Talking Heads recordings, whilst paying no attention to my You See Red recordings.

It's also fine by me if anyone wants to take recordings with differing amounts of saturation seriously and use them to infer a pecking order between different vinyl sources.

As a philosophical statement. Fill your boots and follow whichever path you want to when it comes to hi-fi equipment.

[lindsayt]

Lindsay, sorry to hear of your difficulties with your PC. Using an iPhone might make more sense to show differences in your source setups. You can level match each of them and would give us an opportunity to hear the rest of your setup as well. I’d certainly be interested in listening to the results.

If you owned 3 vinyl sources, would you keep all 3 of them? Or would you get rid of the least tuneful sounding one?

Would you use recordings made on someone else's iphone, or a Moto G7 Power to rule in or rule out any equipment from your potential buying list?

If you live in Britain, I'd be happy to bring a CD player, amp and speakers to your place so that you could do whatever listening tests you wanted.

[John]

I have always been fan of using needle drops recordings to show up differences between source changes. Years ago we used cassette deck recordings. More than good enough if you use the tune dem.

Give it a try for yourself with whatever phone you have and see how it works for you. There’s plenty of iPhone recordings on this thread showing more subtle changes than two entirely different turntables.

I pretty much mastered how to use Audacity software on an iMac and used to connect from the sound card to the tape output on my preamp. Those recordings were superb and hard to distinguish from the real thing. One could open two windows with each recording, set indexes at various places in the song and play short 5-10 second sections of the same part of each recording. I would use that method rather than go back and forth physically from one turntable to another.

Perhaps I’ll put recording a here on this thread for evaluation. The iMac holding the recordings is over a decade old and barely boots up, but I’ll see what I can find.

[Charlie1]

My village has been having intermittent power issues all year and we now have a trunk on the road opposite the house with a portable generator.

Thought folks might be interested to hear the difference:

• Standard Mains: https://www.dropbox.com/s/as260t6geod5l ... D.mp4?dl=0

• Mobile Generator: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c4lph4261irsz ... D.mp4?dl=0

[beck]

A really nice improvement. Have you considered investing in such a mobile device! :-)

Then maybe not. The standard mains sound is maybe more solid.

[tokenbrit]

Grateful (for safety's sake) that it wasn't something by Sparks...

[ThomasOK]

I'm liking the standard mains clip better. The generator one sounds a little flat and sluggish to me with the bass in particular less tuneful.

[lejonklou]

Yuck!

That portable generator really hurts your system.

[V.A.MKD]

Standard Mains for me, definitely.

[Tony Tune-age]

My village has been having intermittent power issues all year and we now have a trunk on the road opposite the house with a portable generator.

Thought folks might be interested to hear the difference:

• Standard Mains: https://www.dropbox.com/s/as260t6geod5l ... D.mp4?dl=0

• Mobile Generator: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c4lph4261irsz ... D.mp4?dl=0

It's a good idea to have a backup portable generator for electrical power outages. However, the portable generator doesn't sound as good as the standard mains to my ears.

[David Neel]

The regular mains is just "right" - great system! It rather falls apart with the portable generator, feels almost as if it's changing second by second.

[ThomasOK]

The regular mains is just "right" - great system! It rather falls apart with the portable generator, feels almost as if it's changing second by second.

Well stated.

[Charlie1]

Mains was reconnected last night. It definitely feels more grounded and no feeling of 'oddness' about it. It wasn't all bad to my ears but defo prefer it back to normal. Glad I had the chance to compare anyway.

[Catweazle]

First of all thanks @John who posted files from MediaFire, a free service unknown to yours truly, which encouraged me to share some clips here.
As eastern is rapidly approaching, here are two easter eggs for you to digest:

1. https://www.mediafire.com/file/yomh92w6 ... .flac/file
2. https://www.mediafire.com/file/f22g7lgd ... .flac/file

As I'm living close to the Northern German town of Lübeck, famous for its Lübecker Marzipan, I chose the names of two local marzipan brands to differentiate the tracks by name.

The LP is the same of course, recording is done by Songcorder from the Songcast data stream of my Klimax Renew DSM. More to be revealed later. Enjoy and share, which one tastes better to your musical senses.

Happy Easter Listening!
CW

[ThomasOK]

I love good marzipan but it is hard to find around here. I didn't even know there were different varieties!

[Spannko]

Catweazle,

The mediafire clips took far too long to download so I gave up. Dropbox is also free and works well.

[John]

Catweazle,

The mediafire clips took far too long to download so I gave up. Dropbox is also free and works well.

Just click on view rather than download.

[beck]

I prefer 2.