Baby steps my good man, baby steps. This one was an upgrade. That said, I'm learning.
The Moment When It All Comes Together - What's your ingredients???
- Thread starter onwardjames
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Baby steps my good man, baby steps. This one was an upgrade. That said, I'm learning.
yosl
Active Member
Sorry to take this off the memories theme, music can be a pretty powerful inducer. The moment it all came together for me came as a bit of a surprise. It was supposed to be a hold the fort system while in accommodation transition mode. Knew listening room would be the second bedroom/home office about 12 X 13.5 ft. Knew I couldn't have "rock the casba" speakers as we had direct neighbors (it's a triplex), so picked my Thiel Model 02's. For my amp I was going to use my AU 519 but the old girl is getting more and more temperamental so I subbed a $30 thrift store find, a Luxman R-114. Decided to put my Thorens TD-145 back in rotation as I hadn't heard the Nagaoka MP110 on it for a while. Just as I said, what a surprise, the whole system images like a hot damn in a way I had never heard before from the component pieces in other mixes. I'd call it neutral sounding, clear and detailed but not fatiguing, and above all it has great tone, anyway who knew!
First, wonderful story, and thank you. Second, welcome to AK !!! Finally, my condolences on your sis.
@55Redneck Great story as well, and condolences to you about your friend.
signal76
Active Member
Thanks onwardjames and 55redneck! I have never owned a high end system, hell Ive never even heard a marantz and with my budget probably never will. I do have some decent stuff now and yes that definitely helps bring it all together but I still think emotion can bring it all together too. a few days before I lost my sister we were sitting on the deck with a hitachi portable cassette listening to alice cooper. being there with my big sister, sipping ice tea and listening to alice like we did when we were young brought it all together like you wouldnt believe
My condolences on your sister. Remember the good times.
EDIT - Just realized, I had already covered this. I'm getting older, ya'll, lol.
I have said this over and over, high fidelity helps, but the music is what matters. Some of the finest moments I've had are sitting by the campfire with my oldest friend, a battered am radio with a coathanger for antenna, listening to the local am station.
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I am sitting in the living room right now listening to the King of Country Music, George Strait sing "I Can Still Make Cheyenne ". .......ribs will going in the oven and my wife is safe and coming home soon. Marantz, music, ribs and my bride make for a great day.
My system has gone through many changes, true upgrades, and some were more laterals. Large parts of it, including the speakers, and a power amp are 45 years old, and I bought that new in the mid 70's.
All of the most meaningful upgrades have occurred in the past year, and largely from this forum, and the Lansing Heritage forum. And a big part of the help I got was from another member here, @nedseg who also has owned the same model speakers I own, also for 45 years. It was through a year or so of back and forth discussions about his plan path for upgrading his L200's that we modded our speakers in several ways. His are slightly different in amps and sources but should be fairly close in sound.
Each of these mods made some difference, some of the differences were huge, revealing never heard before details, and imaging, far and away better than before. Bass in particular has been transformed from boomy and muddy to flat, and very finely detailed down to the lowest frequency without the bass "hump" from before!
Speakers - Here is what we came up with. My JBL L200's have been modded in the following ways: The internal crossover have been completely taken out, replaced by a MiniDSP 4x10HD and triamped. The stock woofers were replaced by these which are the direct replacement drivers for the JBL 4367:
On their own, these were huge boosts in SQ for my system. But I also knew I was leaving LOTS on the table with just this mod alone. So after biamping and room EQ using the miniDSP and REW software I was able to make more big advances, and now for the first time ever, a flat FR down to near 20Hz which took away the need I was feeling before of having subs.
Then I bought another new amp, and fully triamped the system with each driver now having its own amp. Another thing I forgot to mention, is I already had 077 tweeters, thus making these normally 2 way speakers, 3 way.
Amplifier - The 3 amps that drive my system are: Kenwood 700M (170 WPC) that I have owned since new, and has had a partial rebuild from EchoWars The thing is too heavy for USPS so he rebuilt board by board, then I replaced the output transistors per his recommendations. The other amps were bought, sort of as an experiment because they were fairly inexpensive and could be had on Amazon. They are (2) Yamaha AS-301's (ran in fully bypassed mode). These are just 60 wpc, but have very good specs. A little lighter weight than I would want for a total one amplifier solution unless the speaker sensitivity was high enough. But in their role of just participating in a triamped system, not having to do any of the heavy lifting of the bass driver but just a fraction of the audio frequencies they work wonderfully! The Kenwood drives the bass up to 1200hz, the #1 Yamaha drives the Mid Horn (LE85) from 1200hz to 8500Hz, and Yamaha #2 drives the 077 tweeter from 8.5Khz to 20KHz. These 2 Yamaha amps draw such little power that the amps auto power down detection feature thought they were not in use! Fortunately I was able to deactivate that feature.. So all totaled, the power I have available is just 10w shy of 300 wpc..
Source - I only do digital anymore so go from either JRiver running on a Win10 PC pulling files off a NAS drive, or Qobuz direct to the MiniDSP 4x10HD. I was using the Kenwood 700C preamp, but after realizing what I was giving up for that huge volume knob, I went direct. Before I had been running the digital signal to a Schiit Modi 3, converting to analog, going through the 700C, then to the MiniDSP which has to use a ADC to convert the signal back to digital, then another DAC (3 of them actually) before going to the 3 amps. Feeding that MiniDSP direct was a "come together" moment in itself!. Eliminating a preamp, and 2 digital analog conversions was a good move for me, but I do miss having that big volume knob.. Such is life.
Cables - Nothing exotic, but a LOT of speaker cable which I bought on 100 foot reels. There are 12 individual speaker cables, all #12 OFC stranded. that's 24 terminations! I used the locking banana plug type.. The RCA's are nothing exotic either, just audio quality.. 3 pairs of RCA's going from the MiniDSP to each amp.
Room - This is the interesting part. The "room" is 20 feet wide, and 40 feet long, The living room is at one end and the kitchen/dining room at the other. Over the living room the ceiling is open to the roof which is a 12/12 pitch with the peak at 20 feet. There is a balcony 16 feet back, just behind the listening chair and behind that upstairs, a bedroom. The ceiling is all tongue and groove paneling, and the house itself is timber frame, with lots of diffraction from a lot of big posts and beams. And other than the usual things, I really don't have any dedicated room treatments.
Normally I would say this room would have problems, and it could, if played loud enough, but whatever that is, I don't seem to come close to it at the SPL's I play music at. If I record my system using my cellphone, I can hear the echo that way, but not when I am listening normally. Maybe a slight "ambience" but that's it. Why that is I do not know.. I suspect that the upstairs balcony absorbs much of it, and the fact that the rear wall is 28 feet behind my listening chair might also have an effect.
Looking towards the kitchen in front of my listening chair, and up to the balcony:
Looking towards the speakers from behind the listening chair.
All of the most meaningful upgrades have occurred in the past year, and largely from this forum, and the Lansing Heritage forum. And a big part of the help I got was from another member here, @nedseg who also has owned the same model speakers I own, also for 45 years. It was through a year or so of back and forth discussions about his plan path for upgrading his L200's that we modded our speakers in several ways. His are slightly different in amps and sources but should be fairly close in sound.
Each of these mods made some difference, some of the differences were huge, revealing never heard before details, and imaging, far and away better than before. Bass in particular has been transformed from boomy and muddy to flat, and very finely detailed down to the lowest frequency without the bass "hump" from before!
Speakers - Here is what we came up with. My JBL L200's have been modded in the following ways: The internal crossover have been completely taken out, replaced by a MiniDSP 4x10HD and triamped. The stock woofers were replaced by these which are the direct replacement drivers for the JBL 4367:
On their own, these were huge boosts in SQ for my system. But I also knew I was leaving LOTS on the table with just this mod alone. So after biamping and room EQ using the miniDSP and REW software I was able to make more big advances, and now for the first time ever, a flat FR down to near 20Hz which took away the need I was feeling before of having subs.
Then I bought another new amp, and fully triamped the system with each driver now having its own amp. Another thing I forgot to mention, is I already had 077 tweeters, thus making these normally 2 way speakers, 3 way.
Amplifier - The 3 amps that drive my system are: Kenwood 700M (170 WPC) that I have owned since new, and has had a partial rebuild from EchoWars The thing is too heavy for USPS so he rebuilt board by board, then I replaced the output transistors per his recommendations. The other amps were bought, sort of as an experiment because they were fairly inexpensive and could be had on Amazon. They are (2) Yamaha AS-301's (ran in fully bypassed mode). These are just 60 wpc, but have very good specs. A little lighter weight than I would want for a total one amplifier solution unless the speaker sensitivity was high enough. But in their role of just participating in a triamped system, not having to do any of the heavy lifting of the bass driver but just a fraction of the audio frequencies they work wonderfully! The Kenwood drives the bass up to 1200hz, the #1 Yamaha drives the Mid Horn (LE85) from 1200hz to 8500Hz, and Yamaha #2 drives the 077 tweeter from 8.5Khz to 20KHz. These 2 Yamaha amps draw such little power that the amps auto power down detection feature thought they were not in use! Fortunately I was able to deactivate that feature.. So all totaled, the power I have available is just 10w shy of 300 wpc..
Source - I only do digital anymore so go from either JRiver running on a Win10 PC pulling files off a NAS drive, or Qobuz direct to the MiniDSP 4x10HD. I was using the Kenwood 700C preamp, but after realizing what I was giving up for that huge volume knob, I went direct. Before I had been running the digital signal to a Schiit Modi 3, converting to analog, going through the 700C, then to the MiniDSP which has to use a ADC to convert the signal back to digital, then another DAC (3 of them actually) before going to the 3 amps. Feeding that MiniDSP direct was a "come together" moment in itself!. Eliminating a preamp, and 2 digital analog conversions was a good move for me, but I do miss having that big volume knob.. Such is life.
Cables - Nothing exotic, but a LOT of speaker cable which I bought on 100 foot reels. There are 12 individual speaker cables, all #12 OFC stranded. that's 24 terminations! I used the locking banana plug type.. The RCA's are nothing exotic either, just audio quality.. 3 pairs of RCA's going from the MiniDSP to each amp.
Room - This is the interesting part. The "room" is 20 feet wide, and 40 feet long, The living room is at one end and the kitchen/dining room at the other. Over the living room the ceiling is open to the roof which is a 12/12 pitch with the peak at 20 feet. There is a balcony 16 feet back, just behind the listening chair and behind that upstairs, a bedroom. The ceiling is all tongue and groove paneling, and the house itself is timber frame, with lots of diffraction from a lot of big posts and beams. And other than the usual things, I really don't have any dedicated room treatments.
Normally I would say this room would have problems, and it could, if played loud enough, but whatever that is, I don't seem to come close to it at the SPL's I play music at. If I record my system using my cellphone, I can hear the echo that way, but not when I am listening normally. Maybe a slight "ambience" but that's it. Why that is I do not know.. I suspect that the upstairs balcony absorbs much of it, and the fact that the rear wall is 28 feet behind my listening chair might also have an effect.
Looking towards the kitchen in front of my listening chair, and up to the balcony:
Looking towards the speakers from behind the listening chair.
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Those Marantz are indeed special. I am yearning to break mine out of retirement.
@Alobar I really appreciate such a thorough writeup. I would really love to hear that setup, and see if perhaps I need to consider getting the volume knob "out of the way". I have an Aragon 18k, known for stunning clarity and lack of color, but one always wonders.
Also, I like that you dance "with the one who you brought with you", as you've had those for so very long.
Wonderful, wonderful writeup.
Thanks Tim, I think that it was more about the 2 extra digital conversions than the preamp, particularly the ADC internal to the minidsp. And being there is no way to feed digital through the pre, it has to vacate anyway. Once I did that, lots of interesting things became apparent, or improved. The disappearance of the speakers, the more pinpoint image of instruments and vocals, detail etc. Feels like I hit paydirt in the past year with these old speakers and have more or less lost interest in more upgrading..
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