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Mozi posted:I have an (Orbit) turntable with built-in preamp that works fine. I'm now connecting it to my new receiver and when I put it in the Phono inputs I get a horrible buzzing (with preamp on or off). I note the receiver has a ground terminal by the phono inputs. The turntable has no ground connection on it. When I plug the turntable into the generic RCA audio inputs instead, everything sounds great. Should I just leave it like that? If there's a switch to disable/bypass the built-in preamp in the Turntable, you should flip that and run the RCA into the reciever's phono input. If you can't, then you run the signal to any standard input. The phono input has a pre-amp built in, probably better than the one built-in to the turntable, and if you feed a signal that's already gone through a preamp into it, you're not going to get a listenable signal. Also, if you do have a way to bypass the built in preamp on the turntable, you should find a way to fashion your own ground connection so you can ground out the turntable and receiver together
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Jul 21, 2022 18:07
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Not sure which model Mozi has, but the manual for their most basic model indicates there's a bypass switch so it's possible to turn off the preamp. Not seeing any mention of a grounding post though.
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Jul 21, 2022 18:20
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Yeah there is a switch to turn off the preamp but it sounds terrible with the buzz when connected to the phono input. With the preamp on it's obviously wrong/blown out/overdriven. There doesn't seem to be any way to ground the turntable itself. Google sez "Due to the fact that the Orbit is internally grounded through the shielding of the left RCA output, the Orbit is seated by the shielding of the RCA output." but that doesn't seem to be doing the trick here. Again it does sound OK using the preamp and going to the regular audio input, but I'd rather have it be all proper if it wouldn't be too much more effort. It's a Yamaha receiver if that makes any difference. Mozi fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 19:19
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polyester concept posted:Wrap the peg in a layer or two of foil I’ll give it a shot. Can’t hurt
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Jul 21, 2022 19:32
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Mozi posted:Yeah there is a switch to turn off the preamp but it sounds terrible with the buzz when connected to the phono input. With the preamp on it's obviously wrong/blown out/overdriven. There doesn't seem to be any way to ground the turntable itself. sounds like there’s a problem with your preamp/output circuit. have you reached out to UTurn?
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Jul 21, 2022 23:37
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So I inherited a bunch of 78s fairly recently, and I need to get around to deciding if any of it is worth holding onto. I did not keep my grandmother's 78 player (an ancient suitcase player that had seen better days and barely worked), so I need a player. Any recommendations? Also, what kind of a phono preamp do you even need for 78s? I know there wasn't really a standard curve back in the day, but is the RIAA curve close enough?
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Jul 24, 2022 01:37
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TheMadMilkman posted:So I inherited a bunch of 78s fairly recently, and I need to get around to deciding if any of it is worth holding onto. IMO all of it is at least worth keeping intact and giving to a good home if you’re not going to keep it yourself. Not exactly a plethora of new-production 78rpm records out there, you know? Plus, how many people can say they have their grandmother’s actual collection of records from her youth in the pre-Long Play era? It has value as a historical object, especially as a complete collection reflecting the life of its owner in her time. You can easily get a 78 cartridge to work on just about any TT. Audio Technica makes one called the VM95SP: https://www.crutchfield.com/p_057VM95SP/Audio-Technica-AT-VM95SP.html And here it is for sale pre-mounted on a headshell: https://www.turntablelab.com/products/audio-technica-at-vm95sp-h-headshell-cartridge-combo-kit That should work with any bog-standard MM preamp, like the kind built into many amps/receivers and lots of contemporary tables. As for the table itself, it needs to play at 78 RPM (or I guess you could record it into a computer at 33 or 45 and speed-change it to 78 with special math + software but that’s a lot of bullshit to go through). Lots of tables have a secret/not-so-secret 78 mode. At the top of that pile is the Technics SL-1200 series (ie the best turntable on the market for the past five decades and seven iterations), which has a 78rpm mode if you press both the 33 and 45 buttons at the same time. At the other end is the Audio Technica AT-LP-120 series and its offshoots and children and cousins. This is the best 1200 clone for the money that isn’t a half-abandoned Pioneer model (itself made by the same OEM). Lots of vintage tables have a similar 78 mode too. For belt-drive tables like those by Pro-Ject, Rega, Fluance, UTurn, etc you can usually buy a 78 wheel/belt combo that enables the platter to spin at the correct ratio (so instead of changing between the 33 and 45 wheels, you’re popping in the 78 wheel) for pretty cheap.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:20
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I did not know that the SL-1200 had a 78 mode. I inherited a Mk1 from my aunt. It needs to be cleaned and oiled, but not having to buy something new is the right price. I absolutely will not trash anything, but I’m happy to see stuff I don’t want go to collectors. And I do understand the value of the collection as a whole, but my grandma REALLY liked polka. But I won’t make any decisions at all until I have a chance to at least sample every disc.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:28
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TheMadMilkman posted:I did not know that the SL-1200 had a 78 mode. I inherited a Mk1 from my aunt. It needs to be cleaned and oiled, but not having to buy something new is the right price. I’m not 100% sure if all 1200s can do the 78 thing, but I’m fairly certain those that do all do it the same way—press both 33 and 45 speed buttons simultaneously (33+45=78 lol). At the very least definitely get pictures and a title list of the whole collection. Edit: also load that poo poo up to the internet! maybe some enterprising goon invents the next electro-swing…this time polka-based!
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Jul 24, 2022 02:39
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As far as I know 1200s don’t have 78 capability from the factory. The newer mk7s may.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:56
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The Bandit posted:As far as I know 1200s don’t have 78 capability from the factory. The newer mk7s may. Huh, you’re right. It’s only the mk 7s. There’s a well-known mod version (KAB Broadcast Standard) encompassing the older variants up through Mk 5. I guess every time I saw a 1200 being used for 78 duty it was one of those special variants. My bad. trilobite terror fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jul 24, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 03:11
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Well that’s too bad. I’ll look into the Audio Technica table, as well as searching for used tables locally. I like the idea of the USB output for some of the LP120 variants.
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Jul 24, 2022 06:29
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A buddy gave me these speakers the other day. I know they're not going to be nearly as good as the Advents I have right now, and probably not even as good as the cheap Pioneers I have. But... are they garbage? I haven't hooked them up yet.  They're big and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with them after I clean them up a bit. Maybe a garage system or something...
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Jul 27, 2022 17:48
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CornHolio posted:A buddy gave me these speakers the other day. I know they're not going to be nearly as good as the Advents I have right now, and probably not even as good as the cheap Pioneers I have. But... are they garbage? I haven't hooked them up yet. I always assume that when a speaker sticks a frequency graph on it they’re not so hot. But they might be good!
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Jul 27, 2022 18:14
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Plug them in bro and let us know. 3khz is a pretty high crossover for a woofer that size though jeez.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:08
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93db... isn't that extremely efficient for an 8ohm speaker? I think my 4-6ohm lintons are optimistically rated at 90 but maybe I'm misunderstanding
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Jul 28, 2022 00:35
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Brain Issues posted:Plug them in bro and let us know. 3khz is a pretty high crossover for a woofer that size though jeez. The 5kHz tweeter crossover is also an eyebrow raiser. But if they work and have no major issues, why not just use them in the garage?
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Jul 28, 2022 07:15
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large hands posted:93db... isn't that extremely efficient for an 8ohm speaker? I think my 4-6ohm lintons are optimistically rated at 90 but maybe I'm misunderstanding They could also just be random numbers on a sticker that don’t mean much.
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Jul 28, 2022 11:30
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TheMadMilkman posted:The 5kHz tweeter crossover is also an eyebrow raiser. But if they work and have no major issues, why not just use them in the garage? That's kind of my thinking. I haven't plugged them in yet and it might be awhile before I get around to it, just kinda fishing for thoughts. If people were all "oh poo poo those are awesome" I'd probably do it sooner and if people were all unanimously "those are trash" then I'd put it off longer. I really like the Advents I have (Futuras) and have no reason to get rid of them, though honestly the size of these is just cool and on paper they can take higher wattage.
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Jul 28, 2022 12:24
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1) the Advents I've heard (primarily my Heritage towers) are solid and hard to beat without going pretty far up the price range. Unless you find some prime JBLs that are being given away by some poor sap who has no idea how valuable they are, the Advents probably won't get outperformed by an opportunity find. 2) wattage isn't everything, not by a long shot. Sensitivity makes a massive difference - 3dB increased sensitivity means you get the same output with half the power. A 93dB sensitive speaker will be just as loud at 10W as a 90dB sensitive speaker will be when running 20W. 3) assuming everything is in reasonable working order, it is totally worth the effort to set up two speaker sets and A/B them. Your ears can tell you more than some spec sheet can. If your receiver has dual zones/dual outputs, just run some speaker wire to both speaker pairs, and flip back and forth from speaker channel A to speaker channel B. Adequate speaker wire is cheap, so if you don't have extra laying around it will just cost a few bucks to get a small roll of 16gauge or so.
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Jul 28, 2022 15:46
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The Science Goy posted:
I did this with the two sets of Pioneers I have. I was amazed at how different they sounded. I really need to do it more.
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Jul 28, 2022 16:01
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Enos Cabell posted:I've got a stack of old laserdiscs but haven't had a working player in probably 20 years. I do have a working RCA Selectavision player hooked up to my garage tv with several boxes full of CEDs though. Nice. I accidentally a CED collection and player in the early 2000s when I bought what I thought were laserdiscs at a thrift store and then found a working SGT250 on ebay. it's my favorite old tech because of how clever/weird it is.
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Jul 28, 2022 17:22
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Well I hooked up those big Sanyo speakers and they sound really flat. I'll probably be getting rid of them. I wanted to like them because they're more powerful than the ones I currently use and I think they look cool but oh well.
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Jul 30, 2022 18:12
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I don’t know if Sanyo were well known in the US, but they were popular in the UK but definitely on a lower price point. If you couldn’t afford the Sony stack, the Sanyo stack might be something you’d get.
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Jul 30, 2022 19:18
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Regarding 78rpm records - it is highly advisable to put a graphic equalizer into your set. This is because those records often have various different correction curves depending on how old they are. Of course that equalizer can be on you computer/editing software if you digitize them all. Most of the pre 1950s ones also don't have much audio information above 8khz so you wanna remove all noise above that frequency. Some of the pre-war ones already stop at 5khz. Only the most modern ones that already overlap with early vinyl records have the standard RIAA correction. Re: quality of records vs lossless digital - while vinyl records are objectively much worse than digital, there's one issue i'm running into fairly regularly: bad mastering (the loudness war) and digital files that have been copied many times and have been lossy compressed at some point in their life. Because of the better mastering, while the medium is objectively worse, it still can sound better. In this case, there's an audiophile reason to chose for vinyl, because the *content* of the record are different than the contents of the digital file or disk. Sad bit is that modern vinyl is not always mastered in the same way as the old records used to be, and if that's the case, you end up with lovely mastering on a medium that's worse than lossless digital. Digital mastering of vinyl isn't necessarily bad, but it is when they just slam the CD master onto the vinyl matrix. Mastering records is a dark art and not easy to do exactly right. I have Radiohead - Amnesiac on vinyl, and while it sounds gorgeous for almost the whole album, the finale of the album is recorded so loud that even on very high quality turntables it's getting hints of inner groove distortion.
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Jul 31, 2022 12:42
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e: how much of a hassle is it swapping those out anyway? she enjoys thrifting so might have her stay on the lookout for a turntable we can leave dedicated to 78s e2: nm I'm a dumbass and missed Ok Comboomers post on this very page Enos Cabell fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 14:09
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Wow thanks for the infos about 78s, even if in hindsight it would be obvious. I'm kind of excited to get going on these Xavier Cugat rhumbas baby!
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Jul 31, 2022 14:16
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LimaBiker posted:
Whether something sounds good or bad is a subjective thing.
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Jul 31, 2022 14:54
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EL BROMANCE posted:I don’t know if Sanyo were well known in the US, but they were popular in the UK but definitely on a lower price point. If you couldn’t afford the Sony stack, the Sanyo stack might be something you’d get. As a youth, i had one of those Sanyo combo stereos - phono, dual cassette, tuner, and a pair of wired speakers. Didn't sound great but cost $150 and got me through high school. I dragged those speakers around through three more systems and when i finally replaced them i was amazed at how much better everything sounded.
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Jul 31, 2022 15:51
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EL BROMANCE posted:I don’t know if Sanyo were well known in the US, but they were popular in the UK but definitely on a lower price point. If you couldn’t afford the Sony stack, the Sanyo stack might be something you’d get. Yeah, pretty much how I remember it  .
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Jul 31, 2022 15:58
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Digital can sound very good, some of the higher resolution DSD for example, but for the average easily accessible formats vinyl generally is giving you the best representation currently. Granted we live in a time were you can get good to great sounding music from just about anything. Mastering is still the big issue with a lot of stuff as was said. Pretty much anything made from 1991 until the late 00s has some much compression and been squeezed that it just sounds like a mess. There are countless CDs that I have where cymbals sound like just digital noise. Most digital remasters are pretty awful as well, there have been a few exceptions over the years of course. The issue that streaming has is services like Spotify throw everything through a normalizer which does awful things. Modern vinyl being hit or miss is mostly due to pretty much everyone having to recreate the wheel again. With the death of vinyl in the 90s tons of equipment and knowledge was lost forever. It is remarkable how far the industry has come in the last ten years especially. There are some advancements coming down the pipeline which should be huge, most notably a modern DMM system. At the end of the day it still comes down to people creating and mastering the music for the strengths of the medium it is put on though.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:05
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LimaBiker posted:Regarding 78rpm records - it is highly advisable to put a graphic equalizer into your set. This is because those records often have various different correction curves depending on how old they are. Of course that equalizer can be on you computer/editing software if you digitize them all. On second thought, my inclination would be to record at the highest bandwidth I can practically do and apply a software EQ filter or maybe even a fft filter? Ideally keeping the raw recording and doing destructive changes on the remaster copies? Which opens up a whole nother can of worms. I've got some pretty nice software on my Adobe Audition for records, does anybody use that? Or anything like it? I've also got Total Recorder's record plugin too, it's good though I use the ones in Audition and REAPER mostly.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:07
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petit choux posted:On second thought, my inclination would be to record at the highest bandwidth I can practically do and apply a software EQ filter or maybe even a fft filter? Ideally keeping the raw recording and doing destructive changes on the remaster copies? The big needle drop people use Audition. They do manual declick and whatnot through that.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:17
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Djarum posted:Digital can sound very good, some of the higher resolution DSD for example, but for the average easily accessible formats vinyl generally is giving you the best representation currently. Source your ridiculous audiophile quotes, please. There is absolutely no justification for anything higher than 44.1/48KHz at 16 bits for audio playback meant for human hearing. Anything higher is silly at best or downright ridiculous audiophile nonsense, especially DSD, which has absolutely no reason to exist. The only reason it was invented, was because Sony needed a new patent licensing cash cow after the Compact Disc. E: Also, Spotify et.al. do not "throw everything through a normalizer", unless you enable it yourself. FM/AM/digital radio does, though. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 16:18
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KozmoNaut posted:Source your ridiculous audiophile quotes, please. The reason for higher resolution, especially in things that were recorded via analog, is that you want an accurate representation of what was recorded. DSD, especially the higher end Quad at 12.288 MHz and Octuple 24.576 MHz are among the few digital formats currently that can capture the full range of an analog recording on a 1 inch tape at 30 ips as an example. It's still not absolutely perfect but really there is no way to perfectly capture an analog source to digital without some sort of loss by it's nature. Is that stuff overkill for the average listener? Of course but it isn't made for that. It is made for archival for analog masters which many are 40+ years old. But I think just about everyone can agree that a 44.1/16 bit PCM not the end all for for human hearing, if nothing else you are gaining more clarity in the recording at a higher sample rate/resolution. While you might not be able to hear anything in the higher registers it is helping to round out the recording and the brain can tell when it is not there. Your argument is akin to the human eye can only see 24fps so why do we have higher refresh rates on screens. And Spotify absolutely normalizes everything. See here. https://artists.spotify.com/en/help/article/loudness-normalization
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Jul 31, 2022 16:45
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Djarum posted:Digital can sound very good, some of the higher resolution DSD for example, but for the average easily accessible formats vinyl generally is giving you the best representation currently. Granted we live in a time were you can get good to great sounding music from just about anything. Mastering is still the big issue with a lot of stuff as was said. Pretty much anything made from 1991 until the late 00s has some much compression and been squeezed that it just sounds like a mess. There are countless CDs that I have where cymbals sound like just digital noise. Most digital remasters are pretty awful as well, there have been a few exceptions over the years of course. The issue that streaming has is services like Spotify throw everything through a normalizer which does awful things. I don’t know that you’d pinpoint 91 as when loudness war stuff started but I’m no expert. I know in that era and in the half decade leading up there were plenty of producers and engineers who tried out a totally digital recording and mastering process and that poo poo sounds really hollow and lifeless. The technology wasn’t good enough. Sometimes that sound works though?
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Jul 31, 2022 16:46
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Most of the stuff i listen to was recorded by junkies on poo poo equipment, which is something i often reflect upon when i look at remasters and lossless versions and such. I did notice that the Big Black remasters (yeah i know, shut up) had a whole lot of high-hat work that i'd never heard before. Must've just gotten buried in the tape hiss.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:50
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Brian Worms posted:Most of the stuff i listen to was recorded by junkies on poo poo equipment, which is something i often reflect upon when i look at remasters and lossless versions and such.  picturing every article I’ve ever read about Henry Rollins’ quarter million dollar stereo
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Jul 31, 2022 16:53
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KozmoNaut posted:Source your ridiculous audiophile quotes, please. What justifies recording at hte highest bitrate and depth is, IIRC, not so much how it's going to sound to a "consumer" but how it's going to sound after you process it. IIRC, 16-bit truncates some of the info about volume that affects what you will hear after you compress it, say. I try to record at 24-bit, 48000 whenever possible. All of my record collection is my raw material in my imaginary world where I'm making brilliant audiocollage all day. So in a sense, as you say, quote:There is absolutely no justification for anything higher than 44.1/48KHz at 16 bits for audio playback meant for human hearing. I guess I can agree with that, I'm only saving it to a slightly higher rate and depth because I anticipate doing processing with it down the road. So not intended directly for human hearing.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:54
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Brian Worms posted:Most of the stuff i listen to was recorded by junkies on poo poo equipment, which is something i often reflect upon when i look at remasters and lossless versions and such. Don't you badmouth Albini but yeah you're right
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Jul 31, 2022 16:56
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