The Entry Level 2021, A New Set Up

The Entry Level Set Up

It's been a while since my last article, but it doesn't mean I have not been busy. If you've been following my restoration of a pair of  Acoustic Research M6 Holographic Tower Speakers, link here if you wanna read: http://hifi-unlimited.blogspot.com/2020/09/another-classic-restoration-acoustic.html

A buddy of mine have been rather keen to take it up for use as a simple system to relax in his bed room. However, he is an everyday guy with up to date everyday needs, meaning he wants to wireless stream music & remote control the system from his smart phone, plays MP3 music files on a USB stick and the occasional CD, if he is in the mood for sound decent sound quality. His needs are more of a practicality & connectivity, with absolute sound quality being less of a priority. i.e, he is not strictly dyed in the wool audiophile, but rather someone who wants decent sound quality, but with connectivity of a modern lifestyle system. And yes, he has provided a budget for me to work on too!

I set about studying the features he needs and the available components that will meet his requirements. but yet still providing high enough quality sound, while meeting his budgetary concerns.

Teac PD 650-B CD Player With USB Input

After going through the products that meet the budget, and lifestyle vs sound requirements, I have decided to start the set up with a CD player c/w front panel USB input for MP3 convenience, which lead me to the Teac PD 650-B model with see here. Retailing at just MYR 1380/unit, it's quite possibly the cheapest CD player with USB input and hifi brand credibility. After all, Teac used to make many good studio grade components. 

The plastic finished front panel still looks & feels solidly built, despite it's humble price tag. The satin black finished unit still looks & feels very decent to touch. The weight is not too heavy of course, but enough not to make it feel cheap. The central CD drawer design ejects in & out smoothly and all front panel buttons work with an reassuring "click".  The unit comes with a basic plastic remote for convenience too.

  

Yamaha R-N602 Receiver

The next star in this system line up is the amplifier, the heart of any self respecting hifi system, or in this case rather, a receiver, which in these days seems to be making a comeback of sorts. This Yamaha R-N602 is handsome, with pseudo classic looks that is functional and well built at one go. The Yamaha comes with all the modern feature that any audiophile or otherwise could want in a receiver. It has built in wifi, which could be wireless or wired, USB input for smart phone connection or just for playing MP3 music files, and it even connects to your smart phone via Bluetooth. Last but not least, once wifi is set up & connected, one can down load Yamaha's Musicast  app to your smart phone to access the Yamaha receiver wireless. Musicast app can be used as a remote control function or, play music flies stored on your smart phone. As a bonus, the receiver also come with FM/AM tuner.

The Yamaha receiver is rated at 80W RMS power output and the internal bits, such as beefy EI transformer for power supply, and over size heatsinks tells me the hardware is serious stuff! There are multiple RCA inputs at the back and the amp section can drive 2 pairs of speaker at once if required. 

Acoustic Research M6 Holographic Tower Speakers

The speaker in this system is my recently restored Acoustic Research M6 Holographic Tower Speakers. These are considered pinnacle of 90's speaker design and frankly, it still sounds pretty darn good today. Tonal balance is on the rich side of things, and the speaker is capable of projecting a big open sound space that is very transparent, yet managing to sound musical. With a built in sub woofer at the bottom cabinet, a nice weighty, low bass is there to anchor the music. This is an efficient speaker design and the Yamaha's 80W RMS feels comfortable pushing this speaker to it's fullest potential.

Ancillary items used in setting up this system includes a pair of Cardas Hexlink 5C RCA cable, a pair of Belden speaker cables, and a Weiduka AC2.2 power bar for power conditioning. Setting up the simple 3 component system was easy as A,B,C!

  

Once hooked up, the overall sound of this system was high musical of the foot tapping kind. I played The Best Of Yazoo CD from the Teac CD player and I was dancing to the music. Yazoo's blend of punk pop fusion music is synthesizer heavy and can sound distractingly jaunty and tiring in the wrong system, but here it actually sounded very nice. The near neutral tone with just a tinge of warmness from the Yamaha saved the day. Now, how did I tell who was doing what sound wise?

You see, both the Yamaha & the Teac allows USB input, and that is where the similarity and sound differentiation can be easily identified. When playing some of my old Canto pop music on MP3 via the USB stick, I first plugged in to the Teac CD player and then do the same via the USB input of the Yamaha  receiver. From the Teac, the sound was as per described earlier as playing CD, only less details and resolution, and maybe just a tad higher noise floor(white hash basically). However the same USB stick played via Yamaha, the sound turned even more musical, more danceable, and those MP3 files gained an analog like texture which to my ears are more sympathetic to the low res files. I also managed to stream music to the Yamaha from my smart phone and got very good results as well, with no signal drop of or anything as such.

I find it highly satisfying being able to enjoy music from an entry level system, costing even less than most of those high end cables that audiophiles prized. With the latest crop of budget hifi products on offer as represented here, I see a glimmer of hope for an industry coping with changes of modern life style. Lovely indeed! And lastly, after setting up this system in my buddies house, he sent me a thank you note, saying he was very satisfied with the sound of the system and will be so until he hit the jackpot, then he will consider an upgrade! 

For this project, I did all my shopping at Style Laser in Kuala Lumpur, a cash & carry outlet. 

My first ever home theater.

 

The very first setup was done back in year 2009. Is kind of coincidence , as I went to Harvey Norman on a weekend spotted this kind of home theater set for sale which is one of the entry level Pioneer VSX-819HK. HDMI during those days are still pretty new and this AVR has like 5 HDMI input and 1 HDMI output which is amazing. The AVR came together of course the Pioneer speakers 5.1 including the sub. I remember quite clearly it was like RM3500 for all of this. Mind you that is 11 years ago and that is quite some price to pay. This AVR is one of the earlier with DTS-MA and TrueHD surround sound format. 

Obviously just getting a home theater set without TV , doesn't make sense. Might as well look for one now together hoping for a better deal. Well, I did came across this beautiful plasma screen from Panasonic (P50S10K) which is made in Japan. Looking at it, indeed is really stunning with the black level which is the best of the days. Well it is still the best till today when comes to TV. During the plasma days, Pioneer Kuro plasma is really the pinnacle of TV technology. It is a TV use as reference for many professionals. Unfortunately Pionner didn't make it for the TV race at the end. The KURO tech is finally pass on to Panasonic which is still in use today for their TV.

Back to my shopping, the TV came with the Panasonic Bluray player (BD60) with 2 free discs. The first ever blu ray movie I own is the "Batman Begins". The second disc is "Transformer". The BD60 is really quite the cutting edge BD player from Panasonic which was beating down on Sony, although Sony is the company that created bluray format. 

Got back home and the waiting starts for Harvey Norman to deliver my new toys. It came pretty quickly next day. No setup or installation was provided , so me as a newbie who knows nuts of home theater started my first step towards some crazy adventure. Practically, I was just trying to connecting everything to make sure it works. Internet was not so handy still but I do get some help online and reading the manual. Finally after hours of meddling, it is all done and ready to go. 

I had only 2 movies, so pop in the first one "Transformer". Just watching this movie for the first time on 50" TV is really cool. It was so excited to hear all the 5.1 sound of TrueHD audio for the very first time ever in my OWN HOME......I guess you can see from the picture above it is pretty messy and the cabinet can't even fit the AVR. All this kind of lesson learn through the years later. Ever since than, the journey had never ended till today 2021 and still upgrade is on going. More and more collection of movies added. Next part of the journey will be more exciting and a lot more elaborate. Will share it soon.

My home theater

 A small little tour of my home theater which started about 6 years ago and this is how it is like today after much changes and decoration. In Malaysia although we have many who love movies but having a home cinema is still a luxury. Throughout my long journey of getting it done, I do learn that we can still keep cost low while getting it done up. Most importantly is the planning and setting of goal. 

It will be really nice to see our local enthusiast to share more of what they have in mind or what is already done. I will say that with much ideas it will certainly helps in realizing dreams of others. Will share more next time on videos into a little more details of how pieces of hardware, setup, background work, in building the dream man cave.

New Member, New Journey, Let's Welcome Sonerin!

For a while, it seems like we have been pretty jaded with all things Hi-fi. I am happy that Sonerin, my long time sifu in all things CAS & HT has decided to come on board and contribute to this pages. In the few short years I've known Sonerin, he has been super helpful and his IT professional back ground adds a lot of depth & knowledge in todays IOT Hi-fi, which is increasingly connected to the rest of the home, car & mobile phone. Our Smart mobile phone will the control center of all our devices in the near future of connectivity.

We are fortunate to have Sonerin contribute in these pages, and let us give him a warm welcome as he makes hi first posting. I for one am looking forward to his continued presence with more than a breath of fresh air here! 

Sonerin, take it away please?

De-jittering with iFi S/PDIF iPurifier for Spotify

Continuing from my last post on my music exploration with Spotify (here), I continued to think about what other tweaks I could try out to improve Spotify's MP3-equivalent sound quality. 

I thought about jitter, which we audiophiles have learned is one of the big influencers in digital music replay quality. So I decided to search for a de-jittering device, something like the Ultra Jitterbug from Sonic Frontiers or the Genesis Digital Lens of yore, to see whether it would make any difference to Spotify's sound quality feeding my TAD-D600's DAC.  

Again, I didn't want to spend too much money, not knowing a de-jittering device's efficacy on the TAD-D600, given that TAD has paid special attention to the D600's master clock to reduce jitter with a proprietary high precision crystal oscillator. 

After some research online, I turned up with the iFi S/PDIF iPurifier (there is also a iPurifier version for USB), which iFi says does its work in 4 stages - " isolation, regeneration, a memory buffer and re-clocking. This restores the industry standard ‘square wave’ which represents the desired signal". The iFi S/PDIF iPurifier can also convert between coaxial and optical input/output too. I don't want to get into its technical specifications too much, you can read more on iFi's website.

Again, I found a used one online, it is a S/PDIF iPurifier version 1 (list price USD150). iFi has come out with iPurifier 2 which performs the same functions as far as I could ascertain. 

My need is the iPurifier's coaxial connection. For this, the iPurifier has a female RCA on one end, which the digital data feed from my Bluetooth receiver will go into, and a male RCA on the other end, which will be plugged into the digital input on the TAD-D600.

The iPurifier comes with a wall wart power supply that converts our AC into 5v DC which iFi says is a low noise power supply. I ran the iPurifier with this wall wart for a start. In no time I could hear the iPurifier's contribution to the sound quality. Basically, the improvements came in terms of improved precision, with a clearer sound and slightly heightened resolution at both ends of the frequency spectrum. The images became more focused with better definition in the bass and treble regions. 

With prolonged listening, despite these improvements, I felt that that was a certain hash in the sound that I didn't like. So I got myself another battery pack to supply 5v DC to the iPurifier, just like I did with the Bluetooth receiver as in my last post. That did the trick, the sound became smoother overall.  

Here are 2 recordings used to compare the effects without and with the iFi S/PDIF iPurifier in the loop. Noted that resolution wise they are at Spotify highest quality setting which is 320kb/s, less than a quarter of the CD's 1,411kb/s, so we can't expect miracle here. These recordings were done with an iPhone SE, hand held. The sound quality differences may be difficult to hear on mobile devices' or a PC's built in speakers, a pair of good headphones should do better. 

1. "Historia De Un Amor" by Lisa Ono, on her album "Romance Latino Selection" 

1a. Without iFi iPurifier

1b. With iFi iPurifier

The effects I noticed may be deemed subtle, but they are there. I found that the decay of each piano note cleaner with the iPurifier, There is also a similar effect with Ono's breathiness and decay at the end of each phrase of her vocal part. Each musical note, including the bass notes are also rendered with better definition. The brushed cymbal (from 1:32 onwards) stands out a little more with better dynamic shading, though its resolution is limited by the bitrate.

I prefer the sound with the iPurifier, but I can understand too if some listeners preferred the slightly warmer and looser sound without.

2. "Imperial March" - John Williams and Vienna Philharmonic from "John Williams in Vienna"

Listen to the entire track and compare how each one holds your listening attention more from beginning to end.

2a. Without iFi iPurifier

2b. With iFi iPurifier

To me, this example is all about rhythm and momentum. The recording with the iPurifier holds the musical line tighter and propels the music along better, with the music sounding more relentless and more urgent, as it should be.

Lastly, just sharing a track that a reader requested. Nice song. I just played it from Spotify and recorded it with the same setup:

3. "It Knows Me" - Avi Kaplan

Putting on the audiophile hat, I think in this recording there is a tilt in the balance towards the bottom end, it is bass heavy. With the resolution level offered by Spotify, the bass part is dense rather than well defined. The situation is further exacerbated by a somewhat recessed vocal. This track can be a challenge to a system with too much bass to play it in a well balanced manner in my view. 

Final thought - ya, in HiFi, little things do add up. The tweaks I did improved Spotify's replay to a level that is more palatable to me, which is a good thing - Spotify has become a staple in my HiFi system for me to explore new music.