My wife has decided to buy me a new music system for Christmas. At the moment, I have something I bought on E-bay just after our daughter was born. This is all right, though the sound is rather bleached, and it is beginning to die.
What I fancied at first was this: Denon RCD-M39DAB (Black) Micro CD Receiver System with Q Acoustics 2010i Speakers (Walnut). Includes 5 metres Chord Leyline High Performance Speaker Cable. It gets very good reviews. However, I have been thinking about how I listen to music now, not how I did in the 1980s. I hardly ever play CDs, but instead listen to music from my mp3 collection, and quite often on the Internet from Radio 3 and a Czech station that broadcasts in high quality. I also listen to Radio 3 on FM first thing in the morning: I have a big FM aerial in the attic, and I can get a good signal where I live from France Musique. I don’t like DAB radio. The bit rate is often noticeably too poor. Oh, and I have a 35mbps Internet connection.
So what I want is something that can access my mp3 collection and Internet radio, and still receive FM radio. I also want decent sound overall. I think Mrs Gabb is willing to spend up to £200, though she might be pressed a little higher.
Any suggestions?
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
That little black Denon box will be fine. But if the speakers are a little as they look in the picture – say under about a foot-and-a-half-tall – I would junk them and get some proper speaker cabs, very sold and big with at least a 12″ “driver”, a 4-6″ “midrange”, and a proper little “horn” tweeter – with properly designed crossovers inside the cabs. if the Denon gives 30 watts per channel (very probable) then it will easily drive a system with two good cabs about 30 inches tall by 18 wide, and at least 18 deep. Good lots of anechoic wadding inside too.
Stand the cabs on a good couple of inches of hard but slightly squishy and fairly dense foam rubber. Don’t let them touch your bookshelves (they’ll get indoctrinated, and you won’t like the sound they make…)
Incidentally, all the urban legends surrounding what sort of speaker leads you “have to have” are just that: Legends. It’s like guitar-blokes trying to convince you and themselves that different brands of valves sound different. Ordinary 5-amp twin-lead mains cable for pennies per metre is just as good. I have even used 75-ohm satellite dish coaxial cable for speaker wiring, with no observable degradation. It’s just, well, wire.
Thanks re the speakers. However, the Denon system linked to is based around CDs, which I no longer play.
Advice regarding speakers is good for all systems. They are today the weakest link in the chain, being as they are the only mechanical devices apart from recording quality mikes, on which thousands and thousands can be and is indeed spent.
This is since (a) wire doesn’t matter (within reason) and (b) modern solid-state audio amplifiers are, to all intents and purposes, “operational amplifiers”, and therefore turn out to be almost perfectly “linear”. No self-respecting maker of mass-market apparatus would tolerate more than 0.01% to 0.05% harmonic distortion of its gears’ outputs.
By contrast, the post-WW2 early “mass produced” [and not really in our terms!] hi-fi valve amps such as the Williamson, hailed as major breakthroughs in consumer appliance design, rarely gave less than about 4% distortion in practice (although around 0.1% was the experimentally-achieved figure), and were saddled with rather poor loudspeakers into the bargain: people had only just got used to the increasing availability of recordings to hear at all!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_amplifier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_amplifier
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Williamson_home_constructed_amplifier%2C_c_1949._%289663806448%29.jpg/220px-Williamson_home_constructed_amplifier%2C_c_1949._%289663806448%29.jpg
I would build you a stereo Williamson if you liked. It can still be done.
Thanks, but I like modern digital technology. Are you saying, though, that there is no audible difference between a cheap and an expensive modern amplifier – the main difference being in the quality of the speakers?
In general, that is mostly true. It is now very very hard to build and even sell a crap modern amplifier. I would say that the difference in amp quiality varies as the logarithm (base 10, e, what you like) of the price, in contrast the difference in speaker quality is much much more price-sensitive.
You should buy the most highly-regarded speakers that you can afford, from the best makers. The connecting wire is not quite unimportant but is fairly so. It should merely be thickish. 15-amp 2-core mains cable is very good and costs almost nothing. The amps are all more or less made to an “operational amplifier” “linear” specification, such as would have been used to translate the Gun-Directors’ rangefinder-sightings from aloft, to the Turret-Training-Servos down on the Upper Deck. Literally. You had to have a way of making motors and hydraulic pistons driving a turret, do something _exactly_ when given a “voltage”, derived from the movement of a geared table on which lay a giant binoculars set hundreds and hundreds of feet away and upstairs, really. That’s how and why your Hi-fi today is so deeply faithful to the sound. Out of evil comes good.
Digital transmission of the music to your device is also more or less 100% faithful to the original “analogue” input. Your amplifying device will, this having been re-converted by the “DAC” (the digital-to-analogue converter” chip), then reproduce the back-converted code (now analogue music again) as faithfully as any op-amp would. You could research “DAC” chips, but really they are now all about as good as each other. Old Christos and some others swear by the Philips chip,
http://www.dutchaudioclassics.nl/Philips-TDA1541.asp
but I think it really doesn’t matter which one you have in your machine, they all do a job more finely-resolved in data-rate terms than the human ear is capable of discriminating about.
Spend three times more money on speakers than the rest of the set put together, and you will be OK.
I’ve decided to stick with my existing set up, but to find a bolt-on for it that will allow me to stream music from the computer network. This may be much cheaper than anything so far considered, and may actually do the job I have in mind.
I can get you a little Behringer box, with a USB cable input and both line-level-out and stereo-phono-out, plus 3.5mmmjack headphone out, if you’re quick, for about £28. It plays mp3s, mp4s and the like. it also has an “optical” connector for a fibre-optic link to your amp if that has such an input.
I have bought this: http://www.superfi.co.uk/p-13079-pure-jongo-a2-wireless-hi-fi-adaptor-with-wi-fi-and-bluetooth.aspx?VariantHid=25666&gclid=CMit4aXchMICFSXHtAodE0IAvA
It has the advantage of upgrading my present system and whatever other second hand stuff I might buy in future.