Back to the Dark Side: Solid State

"ssm-one" (ssm-one) 01/14/2015 at 12:55 • Filed to: None

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So, I've decided to rid my living area of the small Sony dock-style sound system and go old skool with a Crown IC150 pre-amp, Crown DC150 amp, a Marantz 105 and a set of Tannoy SRM12B studio monitors I had laying around. Nice full sound, even with somewhat compressed digital files!

This was inherited from from a friend of my mother's who had it sitting in their attic for years and years and asked if I had any interest in it. My first thought was to pass it along, but my father wisely talked me down.

He's a bit of an audio fiend that currently sports two set-ups. First up is a Conrad Johnson MF2500 SS amp which is rated at 250wpc RMS but actually puts out (based on Stereophile test results) 300wpc RMS into 8ohms and 600wpc at 4ohms and 900wpc at 2ohms and is mated to a Conrad Johnson PFR pre-amp. Speakers are Hyperion 938's which are like the Wilson Watt Puppies model 7 in that they have bass cabinets with twin 8" woofers and a triangulated 'puppy' separate cabinet which sits on top of the bass cabinet with 6" mid range and 1" dome tweeter. Tjoeb 99 (Marantz CD unit) tube output CD player, plus a "Full Circle" Wilson Benesche turntable with a MC cartridge and Roark pre-pre-amp for the MC cartridge do the spinning as well as Apple Airport Express.

His 'vintage' set-up uses Quad II mono blocks (one each side) and Conrad Johnson tube PV4 pre-amp connected to fully restored Quad 57 electro-static speakers. Another Tjoeb 99 tube output player for CD duties and a Garrard 301 NOS BBC turntable with SME3012 12" arm and Shure M75 cartridge. Not a cheap hobby...

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > ssm-one 01/14/2015 at 12:59

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studio reverb monitors

Reverb monitors? What? Also, yeah - old receivers are the shit. I always tell anyone looking for a good receiver that doesn't have to do all of the fancy modern stuff to start combing craigslist, thrift stores, and garage sales and buy the one that's the heaviest.

ssm-one > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 13:06

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Ooops!

Mattbob > ssm-one 01/14/2015 at 13:08

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ugh, audiophiles.... If you want to accurately amplify an audio signal, solid state is better than tube amps. This is a fact. Tube amps color sound, and change it. If you want to hear it the way it was recorded, use a solid state amplifier. Tube amps are good for instruments because they change the tone and make it nice. If I hear one more person tell me tube amps are better for home stereo I might slap them. Buying good speakers on the other hand, makes a big difference. BTW, I am an electrical engineer.

ssm-one > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 13:11

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The CJ in his other room is SS and is the preference I gather... Quad stuff is more nostalgia. I'm no pro though....

NaturallyAspirated > ssm-one 01/14/2015 at 13:25

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Looks like you have a good setup there. I'm still enthralled with my 1977 Teledyne Acoustic Research AR15s that I scored from a thrift store, hooked up to a basic Lepai "Class T" amplifier and running audio from my trusty old Zune. I've been keeping my eyes out for a good vintage amp, but I haven't had any luck yet - the ones I find at thrift stores tend to be either crappy "amp + tape deck" type setups, or else they weigh so little that I know there's nothing of any real value inside.

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 13:35

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There are two types of better. There's better as in the signal's more accurate (solid state), and there's better musically, which really means harmonic distortion. No one wants to listen to a clean signal even if they think they do. For example, people say that tape is better. It's still solid state, it's just an analog format that introduces more distortion.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 13:39

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I like my distortion introduced during recording via the amplifier then. Not During playback. One pass through distortion is good enough. Live music only gets distorted once, why distort it twice at home?

Mattbob > ssm-one 01/14/2015 at 13:41

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ahh, understandable. Tubes do look cool when they are working.

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 13:51

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You'd be surprised at how many passes of distortion music actually goes through before you hear it. In a good studio, from the top we have the room acoustics (not electrical distortion, but distortion nonetheless), the microphone construction (same), the microphone electrics, the preamp, the EQ, compression, maybe more EQ, through the output section, to tape (tape being a catch-all term; we still say "to tape" even though most studios are all digital now), back from tape, back into the input section of the console, through the EQ section again (maybe getting some more EQ on the way), whatever other processing it's going to get in the mix, back out of the console to tape again... And in a good studio, it probably went through an iron transformer in pretty much every step of the process. There's nothing wrong with introducing a tiny bit more at playback.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 14:01

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nope, paying stupid amounts of money for extra distortion is insane. You could run it through a DSP and simulate tube distortion for way cheaper than buying some of those tube amps. And yes, DSPs are fast enough now that they can copy a tube sound if that is what you really want. If you like the nostolgia or the look of it, then fine, but paying that much for the sound is just silly to me.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 14:08

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also, quick question, when you say that it is going through an "iron transformer" you are referring to a 1:1 isolation transformer with an iron core, and not some kind of actual iron transformer I have never heard of... Also, if it is a good studio, they shouldn't need isolation transformers and should have their ground situation sorted out. Isolation transformers are a cop out and can change the signal depending on their impedance.

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 14:10

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DSPs are fast enough, yes. They still aren't good enough yet. I have tons of high-end plugins for my studio, but only use a few of them since most are crap. I still try to do as much out of the box as I can because a plugin will never sound as good as the hardware it's trying to copy. They're getting better, but I don't know if they can ever truly replace hardware.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 14:15

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plugin? Are you talking about a software plugin to a program? You have to use a hardware DSP to really get good sound, since PC's don't really do that great at real time signal processing. I have a DSP based pedal board for guitar, and everyone I have talked to and everything I have read says it sounds exactly like the tubes it is supposed to sound like. Its a POD HD, I believe it uses an Analog Devices chip (irony).

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 14:34

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I'm talking about the same type of transformer, but being used in a different way. Basically, in the studio we use balanced lines. The way this works (you may already know this) is that in a cable, you'll have three lines. Two will be responsible for sending the signal, and one is the shield/ground. The two signals will be inverted to be thrown out of phase before it leaves the device it's being sent from so that any line noise picked up along the way will be in phase with itself. Once it gets to the receiving device, another transformer will invert the signals again and combine them, eliminating what was picked up along the line since it will now be canceled by an out of phase version of itself. This can be done in other ways too, but transformers sound better, and different transformers have different flavors. We don't just use any 1:1 transformer for this. Jensen, CineMag, and Carnhill are the manufacturers that we like in the studio. It's not really a cop-out because while our equipment may be sorted, it doesn't matter once you have a few of the band's amps on in the room. It's also fun to drive the transformers a little bit. The effect is pretty similar to running to tape.

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 14:42

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Words cannot express how much I hate POD. A DSP is just a way of performing an algorithm. It doesn't matter how the algorithm is processed since it's digital. The analog hardware before it matters more. A DSP might have less latency than a plugin, but that doesn't matter when mixing. Hell, it doesn't even seem to matter when tracking anymore. I've been monitoring from the box for a few years now because no one will ever hear the 1.3 ms of latency it brings. Anyone who says they can (no one has yet) is probably lying. A drummer will hear the snare in their headphones before they hear it in the room with latency that low.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 14:53

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oh yeah, I got my common mode rejection game on point yo. We accomplish this business in the lab environment with a differential pair and instrumentation amplifiers. Same idea.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 15:04

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yeah, it's closer to >10 ms where it starts to get noticeable (I don't but a friend of mine who can play fast can notice, and it messes him up). You really hate the newer PODs? Not the old red blobs, but the newer floor units. What you aren't mentioning is the fact that with greater DSP power, you can use a lot better algorithms and use more bits for your ADC/DAC thereby reducing your quantization error. With extremely low quantization error, and the ability to run filters in realtime, the only real drawback is how well the programmer can understand what he wants to reproduce and how to model it. The hardware is there, it is just weak ass programming at this point. (Oh gosh, I am having flashbacks to my DSP class and remembering things I wanted to forget.) Mapping out a frequency response of an amplifier should not be that hard these days.

Have you seen this thing?

http://www.kemper-amps.com/page/render/la…

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 15:31

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Most of my disdain is for the old red-blob ones. The new ones aren't bad for what they are, especially if you want a ton of effects in a small space, but I still wouldn't want to use one in the studio. You nailed it when you said that the main limitation is the programmer. I'm not a studio Luddite like many people are (I'm looking at you, Dave Grohl), but the reason a plugin will probably never be as good as the real thing is the programmer. The programmer can try to account for everything, but the problem is that they're trying to model imperfection. For example, electric guitars and electric guitar amps sound terrible. If you tried to run anything other than an electric guitar through an amp, you'd be wondering why the hell the amp costs so much when its sound reproduction is so poor. Alternatively, try DIing an electric guitar and making it sound good without an amp simulator. Plug the guitar into the amp though, and you have yourself some rawk. I haven't seen that specific amp yet, but I've seen some of the POD Bogner ones and the old Fender ones. They're getting better, that's for sure, but it's still a case of getting 20 versions of okay vs one version of awesome.

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 16:19

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the one I linked actually will copy a real amps response. You have to have the real amp, and you connect them or some such thing, and it makes a model from the real amp.

SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie > Mattbob 01/14/2015 at 16:33

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Ahh, I didn't look that closely at what it was before. I'm guessing that it's using the same idea as a convolution reverb then and probably adding additional effects upon it. The tools to do this already exist in most DAWs these days, so if you're interested in experimenting, you might be able to do something similar in your computer. I'm curious about how they're doing the variable things like gain or EQ though. Do they have you run the sample through at a ton of settings, or do they have their own EQs and distortion built in?

Mattbob > SidewaysOnDirt still misses Bowie 01/14/2015 at 16:45

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I would guess they would have to make a new model for each EQ setting on the amp, and just add their own EQ onto the end for on the go tweaks. EQ circuits in amps are odd beasts.