For the Audiophiles of the Cafe'

[Uncle Al]

This info came up on the Theatre Organ Chat List.
Someone was talking about getting good bass sound
from a recording and using this sound for a VTPO
(Virtual Theatre Pipe Organ a.k.a. Digital not analog)

Main Webpage http://www.firstwatt.com/
(The guy in the picture sort-of reminds me of Murray(a.k.a. Jack-Track - may he rest in peace)
Super-Sized Speakers part 1 http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_kleinhorn1.pdf
Super-Sized Speakers part 2 http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_kleinhorn2.pdf

Happy Building and I hope you have the floor space to set these
"Bad Boys" up to use them

Uncle Al

[crfriend]

Super-Sized Speakers part 2 http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_kleinhorn2.pdf

Oh, my! The response-curve! Unfortunately the sheer size of the beasties is larger than my study.

But, Dang! Nice!

[MrNaturalAZ]

Pretty impressive, especially combined with the "El Pipe-o" subs. Fun to imagine and read about, but I've nowhere to put anything like that.

OTOH, trying to achieve reasonably accurate reproduction in my tiny space is an entirely different sort of challenge.

[Big and Bashful]

Well I have just had an evening of communing with old technology. I had an idea which worked, I have now got a working phono level input box to my hifi, so dusted off my Rega Planar 3 turntable, Shure V15 and RB250 tonearm. Then regretted leaving the belt on the 45 rpm pulley when I saw how slack it was, however after a bit of practice it remembered how to make records go round.
Mmmm! hi-fi crackles with a musical accompaniment, so that's why I like digital music!
Since the pc is connected to the hifi as well, I went on-line looking for ways to test out the system and my 54 year old ears.
It turns out that I can hear up to just over 15 kHz, not bad for my age as far as know. The hifi goes up to 20 kHz and probably beyond but the iPad's spectrum analyser only goes to 20 kHz. At the low end as I expected, below 30 Hz things start to tail off, with 20 Hz being my audible limit (I am only human!). It's nice that my speakers are still rattling windows down at 30 Hz, they made good speakers back at the beginning of the 80's.

Anyone recommend any good organ recordings? a church organ can surely move a lot of air at low frequencies and I love the sound of air moving!

I am indeed, ready to rumble!

Oh abd back to vinyl, I must see if the amps I am now using still do what my vintage amp did, move the speakers at what looks like well below 10 Hz, the old amp had hi-pass filters to stop it destroying speakers, but this set-up doesn't have such fripparies.

[r.m.anderson]

Like something out of a Star Wars movie - a battle cruisers exhaust wave - - - "BUT" -----

"THERE - IS - NO - SOUND - TO - BE - HEARD - IN - SPACE" !

Or in another time frame circa Mae West - - -

My my those are some really BIG HORNS you have there fellow - "Why don't you come up and (we see how they sound) meet me sometime" !

Extremely liberal applications applied !

Interesting when they were first using the bass horns what the sound was that attracted the presence of the police - what were the effects !?!

No sense asking for a computer demonstration - It can not be replicated in computer mode !

[Big and Bashful]

Mr. A.
Have you had a wee tipple by any chance? if not, why not? Yes, I love the Star Wars rumble, it works rather well. Music wise, apart from my usual fare of rock and prog. type music one of my favourite pieces which sits on top of a gloriously large pipe is Holst's Satur,. bringer of old age, which if you find the right recording, has the final soft piece sitting on top of some beautiful organ reinforcement. I love music I can feel as well as hear!
I must admit that I was surprised to see that Youtube doesn't filter out lows, it was rather unnerving watching my speakers reproducing a 1 Hz tone! obviously nothing my ears could detect until around 20 Hz, with real power starting around 25 Hz.

[crfriend]

Anyone recommend any good organ recordings? a church organ can surely move a lot of air at low frequencies and I love the sound of air moving!

I am indeed, ready to rumble!

Have a go at Abide With Me as played on the Midmer Losh organ at the Atlantic City Convention Hall. With a 64-foot register you can most definitely watch the woofers pushing air around. Crank this puppy up and by the end it your rafters will be shaking!

Also, well worth a listen is the finale to Saint Saens' "Organ Symphony". That'll raise the rafters as well. You have been warned. (Note: The link above is the one I use for "newcomers". My personal reference is this one done by the Auckland Symphony Orchestra in what they think is a "town hall".)

[Big and Bashful]

Anyone recommend any good organ recordings? a church organ can surely move a lot of air at low frequencies and I love the sound of air moving!

I am indeed, ready to rumble!

Have a go at Abide With Me as played on the Midmer Losh organ at the Atlantic City Convention Hall. With a 64-foot register you can most definitely watch the woofers pushing air around. Crank this puppy up and by the end it your rafters will be shaking!

Also, well worth a listen is the finale to Saint Saens' "Organ Symphony". That'll raise the rafters as well. You have been warned. (Note: The link above is the one I use for "newcomers". My personal reference is this one done by the Auckland Symphony Orchestra in what they think is a "town hall".)

Thank Ee kindly Carl!
I will give them a blast after my shopping trip today.

[dillon]

I got a look yesterday at the 1800 Tannenburg organ at Old Salem; unfortunately the recitals are on Wednesdays, so not sure if or when I will ever get to hear it. There are only about ten surviving Tannenburg church organs; each was hand crafted. This one is a 644 pipe organ. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-pipe-dream/

But this thread brought to mind an amusing thing that happened over the holidays. My 19 year-old son, an engineering student, suddenly got an interest in my old stereo turntable. It was packed in a box, and I then realized that he has never seen or heard a LP played; it is a total mystery to him. I explained that it had a bad cartridge which happened before we moved down here fifteen years ago, and that it was easily repairable, but that I have no idea in what condition my crates of old vinyl might be. I just never bothered to break out the old machine after we moved. I really had little time to chill and listen, plus with two kids in the house, it just wasn't possible, perhaps until now.

To my surprise, he ordered a part to repair it, but apparently only ordered a stylus. I explained to him that it was the actual cartridge that had gone bad. He looked at me curiously. Cartridge? This is a kid that thinks compact discs are quaint technology! He really had no idea how a phono cartridge worked, so I gave a quick layman's explanation of the magnet/coil in one and the difference between MM and MC cartridges. He looked at me like "Is that even possible, to translate music that way?" He was dumbfounded. The technology seemed so primitive to him. To him it was something from the Flintstones!

I had to dig out the first digitally recorded "rock" LP - Ry Cooder's Bop 'Til You Drop, which was actually a D>A>A vinyl LP recording - and explain to him that 1979 was not as long ago as he thought, and also remind him that the human ear is analog!

[Big and Bashful]

Well last night, once I had found a power supply which worked with the phono pre-amp, I hooke everything up, cursed the stretched belt but got the RP3 to work properly, dug out a few LPs, was stunned when one of the inner sleeves- one of those upper class grey translucent plastic ones, crumbled to shreds when I tried to put the LP back into it, outlasted by paper, how embarrassing for it!
Anyway, the albums still work and sound as crackly as ever.
I think tonight I will check out a couple of lps and compare them to the CDs I replaced them with, as many of my LPs were only ever played once to be recorded onto cassette it should be a reasonable comparison, although apparently the NAD phono pre-amp stage isn't the best so the CDs should really sound better, we shall see!

[skirted_in_SF]

. . . although apparently the NAD phono pre-amp stage isn't the best so the CDs should really sound better, we shall see!

I've never used the phono input on my NAD pre-amp. Guess I'll have to get my turntable serviced and try it out. No belt on my direct drive turntable and the cartridge was in good shape when last used. And I think the stylus is nearly new.

[Big and Bashful]

. . . although apparently the NAD phono pre-amp stage isn't the best so the CDs should really sound better, we shall see!

I've never used the phono input on my NAD pre-amp. Guess I'll have to get my turntable serviced and try it out. No belt on my direct drive turntable and the cartridge was in good shape when last used. And I think the stylus is nearly new.

The NAD is a seperate little box. I have an old Rotel RA1412 amp which had tqo phono stages which had 3 different impedance? settings for cartridge matching. This wonderful, sought after beast was has some switches which are playing up. When it originally blew up I invested in a Rotel set-up to replace it, a couple of power amps, each running in bridge mode, and a Rotel pre-amp. The set-up has more power and sounds even better, but the pre-amp does not have a phono input.

So with it I bought the little NAD phono amp. However a bit of on-line research showed me that I could have a much better pre-amp for records. If it didn't weigh half a hundredweight and wasn't colossal, I would try using the pre-amp side of my original amp, through the newer power amps, but thinkgs are just too big and heavy to go faffing around like that! So I will just have to wait till I can afford to get a better phono pre-amp. (Not sure if it is worth it now that most music is now on CD or on line, maybe the money would be better invested in a newer CD player...)

[crfriend]

If it didn't weigh half a hundredweight and wasn't colossal, I would try using the pre-amp side of my original amp, through the newer power amps, but thinkgs are just too big and heavy to go faffing around like that!

A setup as you mention is perfectly acceptable if you've only got some vinyl you want to record onto some other media and then disconnect it all again. I've done that many times, and ran my original system that way for years when the power stage of the SAE TWO amp/preamp went.

As far as recording what's on your vinyl goes, I'd recommend going directly to digital and then using a non-lossy compression tactic to make the most out of the storage space. I would not digitise and then encode into MP3 -- you will curse that decision in good time as the difference between a pure digital stream (or losslessly-compressed one) is very different from one encoded using lossy compression. It's not so bad if you're listening to it in the car, but a good home setup will be able to reproduce the difference, and you will hear it even if your hearing is slightly going (or gone).

The system I used to have was able to not only tell me the difference between an MP3 stream and a pure uncompressed one, but I could also hear the differences between various MP3 encoders. A FLAC-encoded stream and a pure digital one were indistinguishable from one another.

Sadly, that system is broken up into its component pieces now and non-reassemblable where i landed; there's simply no place to put it and its drivers. One dead CD player, a dead cassette deck, and a disabled LASER-disc player are part of the fallout. The other cassette deck and the reel-to-reel still seem to work.

[Big and Bashful]

I wouldn't digitise to mo3, although 320 bps isn't bad, Once I discovered that iTunes can encode to lossless files and re-encode on the fly as it squeezes music into an iPod without taking up more space on my pc that changed the way I store music. I used to encode at 320 bps mp3, I am now re-doing my CDs at lossless with a scrunch to 192 bps for the iPod on the fly. It has simplified things, I used to have 2 collections, one pc ripping at lossless and feeding my hi-fi, the other at 320 bps for the iPod, later at 182 bps when the iPod ran out of space. Now one lossless collection does everything.
As for ripping from vinyl and tape, I am looking at one of three methods:

Rip to a lossless file via the pc soundcard,

or

Rip through my behringer mixing desk and it's USB feed to get the signal into the pc for losslessing,

or

Rip straight to minidisc in it's lossless or raw format, I can then import that via my Sony MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder into Sonicstage, which then gives me a wav file to work with. The minidisc DACs are supposed to be some of the best around and way ahead of anything Apple have produced.

Currently I am leaning towards minidisc however I appreciate any thoughts!

Now listening to Rick Wright's LP, called Wet Dreams, nice an bluesy with some really nice sexyphone breaks. Haven't played it for years!

[crfriend]

I[...] Rip straight to minidisc in it's lossless or raw format, I can then import that via my Sony MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder into Sonicstage, which then gives me a wav file to work with. The minidisc DACs are supposed to be some of the best around and way ahead of anything Apple have produced.

That's the avenue I'd use.

The audio cards in consumer-grade PC kit have come quite a ways since the early ones, but I'd still give them a wide berth. I use mid-1990s era Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for the function, usually sampled at 44.1 kHz although if I want the best possible I go for 48 kHz. The results in either case can best my hearing even under controlled circumstances.

I have a bunch of irreplaceable stuff on both vinyl and cassette which needs to get put into bits, but I need to reassemble enough of my old system to actually do it, not to mention that the turntable needs a lot of work, mostly electronic thanks to corrosion from being exposed a few too many times to cat barf and spray over the years. One of my Indys are here, and it works -- or at least did a few weeks ago -- so at least that's ready to go (we had a power-cut at work, and the one I keep there didn't survive).