Holst
Addicted Member
A Mouse in my house!
I received a PM from MrZero63 letting me know the Mouse had been shipped. It included a tracking number and a mention that it would likely arrive the next day. My first check of the tracking number indicated it had not left yet. A check again the next morning said it was in town and out for delivery.
Excited and the chance to play with something new I told one of my friends at work.
He asked what it was.
I said "An amplifier".
"a what?"
"an amplifier"
"What's it amplify?"
Yes, he's younger than me.
Seeing the Mouse in real life, as opposed to seeing it's picture on the Internet makes a difference. The Mouse is better looking in person. The web tte thing.pics all seem to look like it's somewhat homemade. In person it has more of a professional appearance.
My teenage daughter was immediately caught by the cool factor of the little amp.
My wife called home from work and Hanna informed her that Dad is redoing the stereo in the living room and it's going to be [insert hip teenage term here].
Wife: so I hear your tearing the living room apart, what are you doing.
Yes, I trying out a new amplifier.
What's an amplifier. Don't you already have an amplifier.
Yes, the McIntosh
Oh, you mean the pre-amplifier.
I have a per-amplifier and an amplifier.
You have two McIntosh's?
An illusion.
It seems very small, however if you include it's rather large wall wart type power supply, and if you were to add a source selector and include it all in one box.... you have a much more average size integrated amp.
It's a metal mouse. It's face includes four pretty blue led indicators for power, temp, fault and peak. When on the power led is bright enough to also illuminate the other three indicators. A good guess would be that giving the their own little led holders, the amp would double in size.
WAF (Wife approval/acceptance factor) and DAF (divorce acceleration factor(thank you Army)) are both a non-event. It was still hooked up in the living room when my wife came home and she couldn't find it.
I planned how I would test it well in advance of it's arrival and decided to get straight to it.
The hardest hurdle first.
I decided to hook it up to my Ohm 300's. Low impedance, low sensitivity. The sonic reef that two Luxman receivers ran aground on. The Luxman's are high quality product's but the Ohm's demand so much juice, they could force them to work so hard on big, loud dynamic recordings. That the Luxman's ended up sounding hard. The McIntosh with it's autoformer output only sees a happy load and can gracefully tackle a difficult to drive speaker.
So I'd leave everything the same except the Mouse would take the place of my McIntosh C-27 and MC-2125. Instead of the AMC cd8b CDP I used my Luxman D-373 as it was easier to get to than pulling the AMC player out of it's rack.
Swapping the McIntosh for the Mouse was easy enough with the exception of my daughter firing up a stereo elsewhere in the house. With no living room system to drown it out, I was force to listen while I swapped wires.
Fortunately, the Mouse was up and running before I started singing along.
I first played FJ Haydn's Opus 17 string quartets with Quatuor Festetics on the Arcana label. I picked this because I have been playing these for the last three weeks when I drank my coffee before work. There isn't anything on the radio at that hour and I just kept one of the disks in the CDP so I could ingest caffeine without hunting for a disk. I was very familiar with the recordings.
Yes, the Mouse sounded different than the McIntosh. It seemed to have greater stereo separation and was a bit brighter.
Even though I spent a leisurely ( breakfast cereal bowl size ) cup of coffee's worth of time listening to these recordings every morning. Sonic memory isn't worth a damn. These are period instrument performances. Gut string can sound harsh. I found myself asking later, did they sound harsh? By the time I asked that, the Mouse had moved on to other speakers.
My plan was to go about testing the Mouse in the same manner as my AK test's in Thinking Out Loud with various interconnects and Machina Dynamica products like the Clever Little Clock, Tru-Tone Duplex Covers and Brilliant Pebbles.
I would see if my sound meter running some test tones could hear or not hear what what I was hearing or not hearing.
I set my Sound Level Meter on a homemade wooden stand that places it at ear level in my comfy listening room (think Capt. Kirk) chair. I use this contraption to find the best spot for my speakers. I've been doing this for years and have lot's of practice.
I made my measurement's using the 1/3 octave test tones off my Delos Surround Spectacular disk.
I went by the Stereo Review standard that said, anything less than 3 db difference wasn't worth worrying about. You can't fix everything unless you use an equalizer and it being a less than perfect world. I don't use one.
My room does have three notable bumps of well over than 3db centered around 135 hz, between 57hz and 65hz and a lesser one between 30 hz and 35 hz.
The last time I ran the test I had the Tru-Tone Duplex Covers.
My test time with all the above ended the same. I didn't hear any difference.
The meter didn't hear any difference, either.
This time I had, so.....
I ran the test tones.
The test Friday found my room acoustics had changed for the first time since we moved here in 2001. My 135 hz bump was not only gone it was now down 3db from the reference tone. I though about a bit and then remembered that the huge TV that had sat between the speakers had been replaced by another different kind of huge TV, a CD rack had been moved and various picture frames had been moved.
The rooms main resonant point was now between 58 hz and 62 hz.
I thought about making a graph or something, but the difference's aren't that much.
The plus, minus and 0 are the deviation from the reference tone at that frequency
Frequency McIntosh Mouse
12,699 -2 -1
10,079 -2 -2
8,000 +2 +3
6,350 +2 +4
5,040 +1 +2
4,000 +1 +1
3,174 0 +1
2,250 -1 0
1,587 -1 -2
1,260 -4 -4
1,000 -2 -4
794 -1 -2
630 -1 -2
500 0 +1
397 0 +1
315 +1 +1
250 -2 -2
198 -2 -4
125 -3 -4
99 -3 -4
When running the low frequency sweeps on the test disk everything comes back up, especially with the above mentioned bumps, both amps were at +4 db at 20hz.
So what does it mean?
Nothing really.
OK, it means I spent a half hour running test tones.
What you have are the results of two different amps, running my speakers in my listening room as measured from my chair. Your milage will vary.
The difference in loudness is simply the different amps handling my speakers differing impedance at different frequency's.
It makes even less of a difference since moving the speakers a few inches here and there will result in different readings.
The two amps seem to sound different, but really just how the two amps handle the difficult load of my Ohm 300's.
So, there seems to be greater stereo separation, probably, because higher frequencys seem to cling to the speakers making the clearer points of reference to my ears.
A Man among Mouse.
I gave up on being Julian Hirsch and pulled out the most deadly CD I own. Gerard Schwartz/Seattle Symphony doing Alan Hovhaness Symphony 50. Mount St. Helens.
For those of you too young to remember, at 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.
This resulted an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, it's north face fell off in a massive avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown down or buried beneath volcanic deposits.
Think A-bomb going off for 9 hours.
A mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. Scientist's say that crap tossed into the air by Mount St. Helens that day is still floating around in the air making sunsets prettier.
A forest was removed in the first few minutes.
Alan Hovhaness was close enough to hear the big mountain go, and set it to music.
Two peaceful movement's and then amp clippin' time. Massive percussion, lot's of horns and the rest of the orchestra trying to be heard over the din.
It's wonderful music and a guilty pleasure at the same time. I own two recordings of it, this is the louder of them.
I played nice with the Mouse and kept levels below fourth row concert hall and kept it where the peak led just flickered a bit. I have played it louder. Stuff falling off shelves loud. Lamp shades swayin'. The Ohm's are rated to 22hz, but run even lower in room. Impedance is very low at the lower register, amps get sucked dry.
Bwhahahahaha!
I decided I really enjoyed the sound I was hearing in the first two movements and waited for the Mouse to sound like crap in the third.
That failed to happen.
My McIntosh amp handles this piece effortlessly, my two Luxman receivers tended to be pushed to near clipping. Granted they were pushing the speakers louder than I let the Mouse.
I didn't think to measure the sound pressure until after I had moved the Mouse out.
I was loud, very loud. The worst I could say about it was the the instruments seemed to blend together, this would have more to due with the Mouse being a 35 watter than anything else.
Other than that, it was very clear, clean and free of any sort of noise.
It was now one hour before kick off for the Vikes vs the Jet's and I planned to watch the game.
I also wanted to hear the Mouse pushing an easy load., so, I was off to hook up the Mouse and some easy speakers to the DVR/Sat dish box and enjoy the game.
I'm not delusional about the sound of my Lafayette SK-58's coaxial drivers in their pretty Eliptoflex cabinets but I since I used the saddle leather restoring stuff my wife bought, for, well, her saddle, on the leather (sheep skin) surround. They sound pretty good. Sensitivity has to be low to mid 90's. I thought briefly about hauling a speaker, the meter and the Mouse outside and finding out. That though passed quickly.
The Lafayette's and Mouse were hooked up in the living room to the DVR/Sat thing, and sounded really bad.
Like I said, I'm not delusional about the Lafayette's, but I do regard them as HiFI. This wasn't.
I supposed part of it was the sky dive from the sound of the Ohm's to the sound of the Lafayette's. A direct comparison on the Ohm's home court, but it was now ten minutes to kick off. I ran downstairs and got a few cardboard boxes, moved the speakers around and up and ended up making them sound better.
If I could have moved the speakers to the wall, I could have had something. But I didn't feel like remodeling the house.
The Mouse had no trouble making it all loud. The little white dot on the volume knob was pointed at the power led. In other words, barely on.
It sounded interesting, some crowd sounds seemed to crawl along the floor, some seemed to float overhead.
By the end of the game, I had it sounding good, and the Vikings won. So it was a good point to end the night.
Saturday, over the protest of my daughter who wanted to listen to "High School Musical 2" over the Mousefayette setup, I relocated the Mouse upstairs. I hooked it between a computer and the Altec 85's.
I've listened to MPR and to ABC classical Australia via Internet radio. It sounds very good. The Mouse seems to benefit from cranking the output on the computer sound card. A low level signal forces you to crank the volume with little sound.
What have I learned.
It's a very quiet amp. Notice I resisted saying quiet as a mouse.... damn.
The wall wart type power supply seems to do a great job. I know in audiophile circles they worry about the power supply being big enough. Well...... It is.
The Mouse handles loads like a champ. It takes to loads like a mouse takes to Gorgonzola. *sigh*
The Mouse is very clean and clear sounding. Distortion free. Just music, no sonic mouse droppings.....
I like it..... and could live happily ever after with it.
I received a PM from MrZero63 letting me know the Mouse had been shipped. It included a tracking number and a mention that it would likely arrive the next day. My first check of the tracking number indicated it had not left yet. A check again the next morning said it was in town and out for delivery.
Excited and the chance to play with something new I told one of my friends at work.
He asked what it was.
I said "An amplifier".
"a what?"
"an amplifier"
"What's it amplify?"
Yes, he's younger than me.
Seeing the Mouse in real life, as opposed to seeing it's picture on the Internet makes a difference. The Mouse is better looking in person. The web tte thing.pics all seem to look like it's somewhat homemade. In person it has more of a professional appearance.
My teenage daughter was immediately caught by the cool factor of the little amp.
My wife called home from work and Hanna informed her that Dad is redoing the stereo in the living room and it's going to be [insert hip teenage term here].
Wife: so I hear your tearing the living room apart, what are you doing.
Yes, I trying out a new amplifier.
What's an amplifier. Don't you already have an amplifier.
Yes, the McIntosh
Oh, you mean the pre-amplifier.
I have a per-amplifier and an amplifier.
You have two McIntosh's?
An illusion.
It seems very small, however if you include it's rather large wall wart type power supply, and if you were to add a source selector and include it all in one box.... you have a much more average size integrated amp.
It's a metal mouse. It's face includes four pretty blue led indicators for power, temp, fault and peak. When on the power led is bright enough to also illuminate the other three indicators. A good guess would be that giving the their own little led holders, the amp would double in size.
WAF (Wife approval/acceptance factor) and DAF (divorce acceleration factor(thank you Army)) are both a non-event. It was still hooked up in the living room when my wife came home and she couldn't find it.
I planned how I would test it well in advance of it's arrival and decided to get straight to it.
The hardest hurdle first.
I decided to hook it up to my Ohm 300's. Low impedance, low sensitivity. The sonic reef that two Luxman receivers ran aground on. The Luxman's are high quality product's but the Ohm's demand so much juice, they could force them to work so hard on big, loud dynamic recordings. That the Luxman's ended up sounding hard. The McIntosh with it's autoformer output only sees a happy load and can gracefully tackle a difficult to drive speaker.
So I'd leave everything the same except the Mouse would take the place of my McIntosh C-27 and MC-2125. Instead of the AMC cd8b CDP I used my Luxman D-373 as it was easier to get to than pulling the AMC player out of it's rack.
Swapping the McIntosh for the Mouse was easy enough with the exception of my daughter firing up a stereo elsewhere in the house. With no living room system to drown it out, I was force to listen while I swapped wires.
Fortunately, the Mouse was up and running before I started singing along.
I first played FJ Haydn's Opus 17 string quartets with Quatuor Festetics on the Arcana label. I picked this because I have been playing these for the last three weeks when I drank my coffee before work. There isn't anything on the radio at that hour and I just kept one of the disks in the CDP so I could ingest caffeine without hunting for a disk. I was very familiar with the recordings.
Yes, the Mouse sounded different than the McIntosh. It seemed to have greater stereo separation and was a bit brighter.
Even though I spent a leisurely ( breakfast cereal bowl size ) cup of coffee's worth of time listening to these recordings every morning. Sonic memory isn't worth a damn. These are period instrument performances. Gut string can sound harsh. I found myself asking later, did they sound harsh? By the time I asked that, the Mouse had moved on to other speakers.
My plan was to go about testing the Mouse in the same manner as my AK test's in Thinking Out Loud with various interconnects and Machina Dynamica products like the Clever Little Clock, Tru-Tone Duplex Covers and Brilliant Pebbles.
I would see if my sound meter running some test tones could hear or not hear what what I was hearing or not hearing.
I set my Sound Level Meter on a homemade wooden stand that places it at ear level in my comfy listening room (think Capt. Kirk) chair. I use this contraption to find the best spot for my speakers. I've been doing this for years and have lot's of practice.
I made my measurement's using the 1/3 octave test tones off my Delos Surround Spectacular disk.
I went by the Stereo Review standard that said, anything less than 3 db difference wasn't worth worrying about. You can't fix everything unless you use an equalizer and it being a less than perfect world. I don't use one.
My room does have three notable bumps of well over than 3db centered around 135 hz, between 57hz and 65hz and a lesser one between 30 hz and 35 hz.
The last time I ran the test I had the Tru-Tone Duplex Covers.
My test time with all the above ended the same. I didn't hear any difference.
The meter didn't hear any difference, either.
This time I had, so.....
I ran the test tones.
The test Friday found my room acoustics had changed for the first time since we moved here in 2001. My 135 hz bump was not only gone it was now down 3db from the reference tone. I though about a bit and then remembered that the huge TV that had sat between the speakers had been replaced by another different kind of huge TV, a CD rack had been moved and various picture frames had been moved.
The rooms main resonant point was now between 58 hz and 62 hz.
I thought about making a graph or something, but the difference's aren't that much.
The plus, minus and 0 are the deviation from the reference tone at that frequency
Frequency McIntosh Mouse
12,699 -2 -1
10,079 -2 -2
8,000 +2 +3
6,350 +2 +4
5,040 +1 +2
4,000 +1 +1
3,174 0 +1
2,250 -1 0
1,587 -1 -2
1,260 -4 -4
1,000 -2 -4
794 -1 -2
630 -1 -2
500 0 +1
397 0 +1
315 +1 +1
250 -2 -2
198 -2 -4
125 -3 -4
99 -3 -4
When running the low frequency sweeps on the test disk everything comes back up, especially with the above mentioned bumps, both amps were at +4 db at 20hz.
So what does it mean?
Nothing really.
OK, it means I spent a half hour running test tones.
What you have are the results of two different amps, running my speakers in my listening room as measured from my chair. Your milage will vary.
The difference in loudness is simply the different amps handling my speakers differing impedance at different frequency's.
It makes even less of a difference since moving the speakers a few inches here and there will result in different readings.
The two amps seem to sound different, but really just how the two amps handle the difficult load of my Ohm 300's.
So, there seems to be greater stereo separation, probably, because higher frequencys seem to cling to the speakers making the clearer points of reference to my ears.
A Man among Mouse.
I gave up on being Julian Hirsch and pulled out the most deadly CD I own. Gerard Schwartz/Seattle Symphony doing Alan Hovhaness Symphony 50. Mount St. Helens.
For those of you too young to remember, at 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.
This resulted an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, it's north face fell off in a massive avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown down or buried beneath volcanic deposits.
Think A-bomb going off for 9 hours.
A mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. Scientist's say that crap tossed into the air by Mount St. Helens that day is still floating around in the air making sunsets prettier.
A forest was removed in the first few minutes.
Alan Hovhaness was close enough to hear the big mountain go, and set it to music.
Two peaceful movement's and then amp clippin' time. Massive percussion, lot's of horns and the rest of the orchestra trying to be heard over the din.
It's wonderful music and a guilty pleasure at the same time. I own two recordings of it, this is the louder of them.
I played nice with the Mouse and kept levels below fourth row concert hall and kept it where the peak led just flickered a bit. I have played it louder. Stuff falling off shelves loud. Lamp shades swayin'. The Ohm's are rated to 22hz, but run even lower in room. Impedance is very low at the lower register, amps get sucked dry.
Bwhahahahaha!
I decided I really enjoyed the sound I was hearing in the first two movements and waited for the Mouse to sound like crap in the third.
That failed to happen.
My McIntosh amp handles this piece effortlessly, my two Luxman receivers tended to be pushed to near clipping. Granted they were pushing the speakers louder than I let the Mouse.
I didn't think to measure the sound pressure until after I had moved the Mouse out.
I was loud, very loud. The worst I could say about it was the the instruments seemed to blend together, this would have more to due with the Mouse being a 35 watter than anything else.
Other than that, it was very clear, clean and free of any sort of noise.
It was now one hour before kick off for the Vikes vs the Jet's and I planned to watch the game.
I also wanted to hear the Mouse pushing an easy load., so, I was off to hook up the Mouse and some easy speakers to the DVR/Sat dish box and enjoy the game.
I'm not delusional about the sound of my Lafayette SK-58's coaxial drivers in their pretty Eliptoflex cabinets but I since I used the saddle leather restoring stuff my wife bought, for, well, her saddle, on the leather (sheep skin) surround. They sound pretty good. Sensitivity has to be low to mid 90's. I thought briefly about hauling a speaker, the meter and the Mouse outside and finding out. That though passed quickly.
The Lafayette's and Mouse were hooked up in the living room to the DVR/Sat thing, and sounded really bad.
Like I said, I'm not delusional about the Lafayette's, but I do regard them as HiFI. This wasn't.
I supposed part of it was the sky dive from the sound of the Ohm's to the sound of the Lafayette's. A direct comparison on the Ohm's home court, but it was now ten minutes to kick off. I ran downstairs and got a few cardboard boxes, moved the speakers around and up and ended up making them sound better.
If I could have moved the speakers to the wall, I could have had something. But I didn't feel like remodeling the house.
The Mouse had no trouble making it all loud. The little white dot on the volume knob was pointed at the power led. In other words, barely on.
It sounded interesting, some crowd sounds seemed to crawl along the floor, some seemed to float overhead.
By the end of the game, I had it sounding good, and the Vikings won. So it was a good point to end the night.
Saturday, over the protest of my daughter who wanted to listen to "High School Musical 2" over the Mousefayette setup, I relocated the Mouse upstairs. I hooked it between a computer and the Altec 85's.
I've listened to MPR and to ABC classical Australia via Internet radio. It sounds very good. The Mouse seems to benefit from cranking the output on the computer sound card. A low level signal forces you to crank the volume with little sound.
What have I learned.
It's a very quiet amp. Notice I resisted saying quiet as a mouse.... damn.
The wall wart type power supply seems to do a great job. I know in audiophile circles they worry about the power supply being big enough. Well...... It is.
The Mouse handles loads like a champ. It takes to loads like a mouse takes to Gorgonzola. *sigh*
The Mouse is very clean and clear sounding. Distortion free. Just music, no sonic mouse droppings.....
I like it..... and could live happily ever after with it.
