Category: Acoustics

Thixar Silence Plus Platform

Thixar

Enjoying the peace. The playback benefits from this dedicated platform from Thixar. Solidify the presentation by packing the musical core and then releasing the naturalness into the air.

SACD WITH PLATFORM

With the Thixar Silence Plus, this humble Marantz SA8005 SACD player is transformed into high res player. Vocal reverb that are inherent in the mix are now apparent effortlessly. Cheers!

Room Acoustics

Room Tuning

Room acoustics and the space within it is another big component of audio listening pleasure. Take care of the room and the music will follow. Recently, had the honor to have Mr Motu Lin of Acuslik-Labor (Taiwan) and William (Audiosound.biz) drop by to my man cave for some tuning.  Activated the room acoustics so far with tuning resonator bells, resonator discs as well bass tuning board. In the room, i had earlier placed two RPF Diffuser panels as well. It is the Motu product that did the trick to integrate the room and hardware. The result so far is wonderful listening session. Another upgrade in near future to involve the power source.

Rachmaninov Concerto No.3

Gala : Rachmaninov Concerto No.3
SSO , Vladimir Ashkenazy : Conductor
ALEXEI Volodin : Piano

Esplanade Concert Hall has a relatively “dead” sounding acoustic that will give the musician no rooms to hide any mistakes or hesitation. Tonight, the SSO is totally on the BALL !!! That is because the legendar Vladimir Ashkenazy is conducting.

SSO

Sunday learnings

Last night, the Mark Levinson preamp was driving me crazy with a high pitch tone (faint but audible) near the transformer side.  The noise did not comes from the speakers and after much troubleshooting of powering down all other equipment as well re-positioning did not helps.  So, who you gonna call?

FB message William and he immediately told me it might be the LED display causing the high pitched. It’s a DUH-moment, why didnt i think of that! I should have disable the display and voila, no noise!

Another learning from re-positioning the rack to right corner of the room is that is acts like a low pass cut-off filter. It was too much drop of bass for my liking but this confirm that i can use bass trap for bass management.

Marantz CD player do not like to be stack on the pre-amp. It resulted in slight treble harshness.

That is all i spent the day learning audio on the hands-on way, physically.

 

Diagonal Speaker Placement

Since I am waiting for my Barcelona chair to arrived in January, I decided to try a diagonal speaker placement. There are two reasons: comfort listening while resting on my bed and reduce some standing waves issue.

In short, it works!  Had shifted the equipment rack sitting at the corner and trying to find the widest parallel plane for the speakers.  With the diagonal position, i am able to get a very decent soundscape balance.  Also, I swapped the custom speakers stands and use a more solid filled Atacama stands coupled with Finite Elemente Cerapucs base. The mids are back and the high less shrills. My reference disc is Penny Tai “Unexpected” where it is very obvious to me that something is wrong and need to be fixed.

And that my friend, is audio winning 🙂