Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Odyssey amp with m80s

Maybe Axiom should add a DIY or Tweak section to this forum.

I have done a lot of tweking to my M60's, VP-150, & QS8's as well as my other components. I think some of you guys would be shocked to hear just how good my system sounds. I have never heard any HT system that sounds as detailed, liquid, sweet, airy,a ll with a huge soundstage where my speakers have all but disappeared.

I am not talking playing loud here and I do not have a very large room.

cheeseroo, you sound like my Ph.D. advisor but I agree ;-)

I don't have scientific papers on sound, I did that kind of stuff on audiovisual stuff in my old days and it's scientifically proven that e.g. we can see way, way, way less than 1% irregularities on a one-color plane as long it's a pattern (pattern is a very complex thing, you go into self-similarity and other hard math I don't feel like doing here). And yes, it does _not_ mean our audio complex is the same way (but I would very hard bet on that, especially in 1-4kHz at normal loudness, speech recognition perfected for million years is a complete marvel when you go a tad into how to do it with computers [used to listen to lots of lectures given by guys in Watson research on that topic, but it was a different angle than what we do of course, albeit very solid science, full of markov-chains ;-)]). Just think quickly what we're doing when in a noisy bar where a dozen people are talking, music is playing and a guy with an accent we never heard is explaining something to us. And he's drunk and blurs vocals.

The pico-seconds stuff we can hear is just something I picked of a web site so no clue whether it's true? no resaerch I can point to here. Any Ph.D. candidates out there listening ? ;-)

For psychological modification of what we hear, the patricia -woman (sorry forgetting the name) has been widely published and it's very solid research (but hey, read Kant, he knew it all the way along).

In your summary you're slightly off, I _don't believe_ jitter is an issue, I was asking for enlightement, I see it as the next possiblity of what to improve unless given better ideas here. Following Occam's razor here, unless given a simpler theory of what to tinker on next ;-)

And finally chesseroo, don't forget that science is nothing else than modern day religion and other approaches have been taken quite seriously much longer than the time passed since Bacon [whom I would loosely label as father of the repeatable experiment on nature as the standard we hold our believes to]. Read Thomas of Acquine (spelling, darnd ?) and Kant's 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' and talk to some of the bleeding edge sub-atomic particles physisicts of today, this is the god-damnd hardest darnd math beyond my brain and when you listen to them, they sound exactly like meta-physicists of the middle-age, 'parallel universes' anyone or 'our brain being an instrument that creates conciousness, physical laws and time'. Heidegger was mumbling about that 100 years ago and was laughed at ;-) ?

-- tony

Saturn,

How have you been enjoying your HTPC, BTW? Have you run into any frustrations with added complexity of the interface or anything like that. That's my largest concern with building mine. I don't want to make it even more difficult to do the stuff I do today.

Thomas Aquinas.

This post gets my vote for Entertaining Post Of The Month. Kant, Aquinas, Bacon, Occam, and Heidegger, all in one post about M80s. I love it. :-)

prz,

I think you were refering to Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin.

oh, missed the response first or maybe we crossed.

For jitter, yes, this is very good information. I go and drive some experts nuts about this jitter now. Now I also remember that CPUs had about picosecs jitter to them, saw it with our ASIC designers (I'm a refugee from some serious full-rack, kick-butt we can heat a house telekom gear startups, been in it for >10 years now ;-) Sounds like you're doing some Stratus I stuff, not much demand for that now from telecom side ;-)

The pico-seconds I explained in other post, didn't see any solid science for, just audiophile website hear-say ;-)

Again, for speech, the patricia woman is very well published, she gave a talk when I was in Bell Labs. Actually, there is much more interesting stuff to it, they tested how we build kind of a 'warp matrix' as very small children (<1year) that zeroes in on the key sounds of _our_ language. So that's e.g. why a chinese cannot hear (where cannot not defined physically but by what arrives in your gray matter) the difference between 'r' and 'l'. There seem to be a sound in chinese language that is keyed on that lies close to both and for a chinese everything that is close enough sounds like this one sound. We (e.g. english speaking) have same problem when spoken other languages to. I'm searching my Bell Labs mailbox but there were thousands of talks :-/ Aaaah, here it is




General Research Colloquium
Friday, February 12, 1999
3:00pm
ARNOLD AUDITORIUM, Murray Hill

Speaker: Patricia K. Kuhl, University of Washington

Title: Language, mind, and brain: How infants crack the speech code

Humans' unique linguistic capacity interests members of
the academy, business, industry, and society at large from
different perspectives. This talk uses new data from behavioral
and neurological studies to suggest a theory about how infants
crack the speech code. Their strategies provide clues that may
help machines understand speech.

Host: Alan Gelperin MH 1C-464 (908)582-5696
Simulcast to: HO(AUD), IH(AUD), OEC(1B-264A), WH(AUD), HOH (Conf Room)

Suggestions and comments are welcome, and may be sent to
grc@research.bell-labs.com

GRC talks are open to all members of Lucent and AT&T communities.

If you're interested in viewing the videotape, please send email to
GRC secretary Judy Paone at judy@research.bell-labs.com


And, the interconnects are for analog, not digital, not even _I_ believe that silver digital interconnect will make an audible difference (then again, pass that rabit foot along, will you ;-)

--- tony

Hey JasonG, glad I made you laugh.

My dad taught me that when you hit them, hit them with all you got and then throw a load of bricks on top just in case. You don't want them to get up, dust off and go after you ...

So only the best philosophers with really intimidating names need to apply to the tackling team [but yes, in case you wonder I read them up years ago and fractionally understood what they had to say {except Nietzsche} so what I wrote should make sense] ;-)

Anyway, those guys were all off kilt, everything that was worth saying was said by the greeks and some romans, the only guy that made sense on a daily basis was Seneca

-- tony out and out

Since we have started to post some journal paper titles while quoting infamous philosophers, allow me to share an article i came across not too long ago.
Here is its reference:

Health and reproduction: the sex-specific clinical profile of Great Tits (Parus major) in relation to breeding.
By P. Horak, S. Jenni-Eiermann, I. Ots, and L. Tegelmann (1999). Canadian Journal of Zoology. p.2235

I'm pretty positive this was intentional, but the 'Freudian slip' is interesting nonetheless.

With respect to DVD playback and cable TV upscaling no problems. DVD looks great and TV looks great. Works well with Rotel learning remote...infrared keyboard keystrokes mimiced on learning remote.


PVR duties. Definitely will need to spec a faster machine as you have noted. Will follow your spec but since I really want a small format box, I will need to pay special attention to heat dissapation and energy consumption. So will need to rebuild a new box with higher specs. Current box will be a gift and do fine for my dads needs.


Didn't do DSCALER as a recommended viewer since the MSI TV@anywhere has the new Conexant chip and is not yet supported by DSCALER. But based on DCSLAR's own site comparison of WinDVD it is not far off. One good thing to note DSCALER can take plugins and such for special filters or other drivers of cards. DSCALER audio support is kinda finnicky. I think some people do a mix of DSCALER video capabilities with another programs driver that does sound. Sounds complicated so I have yet to try it. One thing to note with my setup. Some DVDs are great others have this horizontal scan lines showing on fast scenes. I have not yet discovered if it is the lack of horsepower. Using the built in 2d/3d video card with DVD motion compensation hardware chips. Or if the DVD recording was originally poor. I play the same DVD in an Asia market DVD with super error connection and do not get the scan lines in fast moving scenes. The Asia market DVD is not progressive. But most DVDs are excellent. I am only getting those scan lines from Asia market DVDs (which is suspect)


So software I use is the Intervideo WinDVD and the WinDVR. Its a no brainer (like me) and all the audio/video hookups and decoding work great and with ease. I know the DSCALER can give a slightly better picture but the interface can be difficult.


Since the box is small it has been a chore to set it up originally. I do not have the most petite of hands. The S/PDIF audio qualities on the onboard connector on the EPIA V version of the motherboard worked rather smoothly. I could not discernably hear a difference in sound quality over my standard DVD via coax digi. One positive note is that I could not believe the quality of downloaded MP3 that have been encoded at 256k or higher. I doubt that its playing at 256k but I was surprised that when feeding a digital signal of the MP3 it sounded awesome. I didn't realize that you coud feed the MP3 signal straight through the S/PDIF. I though it would pipe through the analog output of the speaker section. I only use the analog output for the TV tuner. Since TV cable is analog I do not know if it would be worth it or possible to convert the signal from analog to digital. Most of the smaller boxes come with proprietory power supplies which are all noisy. Small fans spinning fast with high pitched shreik. Had to disconnect the 12V fan and splice hard drive power connectors and figure out the 5V power leads. When all the fans were running 5V rather than 12v. They were spinnin slower but were almost dead silent. The air dissipation was good enough to get the hot air out of box generated by the hard drive, TV tuner card, VIA C3-933, EPIA V series mobo and the DVD rom.

The next box I will try to build is the S968L cube which can take P4 with 533 bus. It also now has 1 4x agp slot and and PCI slot in one small but boxy case.
I hope the power supply is not as loud as my current one. But its spec since it is a 150w could be underpowered (300w is minumum I'm thinking) and as noisy as my older box. Higher CPU and better video card will give me some issues with the small box. I have to be able to cool the thing without excessive noise. Since it will be front center with the rest of the audio pieces it also has to note WAF into consideration.

http://www.amselectronics.com/Products/PC_Servers/CF-968.html


my old box
http://www.amselectronics.com/Products/PC_Servers/CF-7989.html

This is a precursor to my projector purchase (which I thought the DVD player could easily do) which was brought up by you and Sushi and a few other individuals on this forum. Now I also need to to make up my mind with the Panny 300 or Sanyo PLV-Z1. The question I ask myself is $400 US is worth the upgrade to the Panny model. That $400 could be used toward a nice Mies Van Der Rohe leather listening chair.

Regards;
Saturn

In reply to:

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Will follow your spec but since I really want a small format box, I will need to pay special attention to heat dissapation and energy consumption.

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There are several smaller and attractive cases made by Coolermaster and the like meant for specifically this that use as micro-ATX motherboard. You can get decent micro-ATX boards, though obviously selection will be limitted.

In reply to:

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So software I use is the Intervideo WinDVD and the WinDVR. Its a no brainer (like me) and all the audio/video hookups and decoding work great and with ease. I know the DSCALER can give a slightly better picture but the interface can be difficult.

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Do you have any trouble seeing the interface cues on the TV. PC text can be a little weird with this sort of thing and the actual control elements can be hard to work with, or at least I expect them to be. It doesn't sound like you have much trouble with that though, which is enouraging.

In reply to:

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I though it would pipe through the analog output of the speaker section.

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Your computer is a digital entity. Anything that exists in it will be a digital signal. As such, it's relatively trivial for your computer to passthrough all audio through the SPDIF, including your cable signal, should you so choose.

In reply to:

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Most of the smaller boxes come with proprietory power supplies which are all noisy. Small fans spinning fast with high pitched shreik. Had to disconnect the 12V fan and splice hard drive power connectors and figure out the 5V power leads. When all the fans were running 5V rather than 12v. They were spinnin slower but were almost dead silent. The air dissipation was good enough to get the hot air out of box generated by the hard drive, TV tuner card, VIA C3-933, EPIA V series mobo and the DVD rom.

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It's a little absurd that only the most expensive manufacturers take sound into consideration. However, it sounds like you have it under control.

In reply to:

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I hope the power supply is not as loud as my current one. But its spec since it is a 150w could be underpowered (300w is minumum I'm thinking) and as noisy as my older box. Higher CPU and better video card will give me some issues with the small box. I have to be able to cool the thing without excessive noise. Since it will be front center with the rest of the audio pieces it also has to note WAF into consideration.

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I would also be leary of that PSU, especially if you go with a P4 or something similar. 300W is even getting to the point of not quite being enough, depending on what hardware you have installed. The power consumption of these computers is getting to be absurd.

BTW, you can get those same cube cases from several others. Do a search of cube computers on the ArsTechnica Case forum.

Regards,
Semi