[Music] welcome back everybody to another episode of the Darko audio podcast our first for 2024 we haven't done one since the end of November and in this podcast I am once again joined by San from six moons and we have plucked not four but six different news stories from The Ether that I've cropped up in the last month or so this podcast is going out here on YouTube obviously because that's how you're watching it but if you're listening to it then obviously you're listening to the audio version which is going out on Spotify SoundCloud Apple podcasts and a whole bunch of other services however there is a twist for this year because what San and I have decided to do is not just just hit you with the fluff of news stories cuz they really are fluff but also try and extract a an educational moment from each news story so we can try and learn something but we obviously are doing it to the best of our abilities we don't know everything about Hi-Fi but we know some things and we hope that sharing those some with you will I guess just help Elevate everybody's understanding so the first item is a new streaming amplifier model from name if you want more information on any of the products discussed in this podcast I'll put links in the description box below this episode is brought to you by morance now celebrating its 70th Anniversary click the link in the show notes for more information so welcome back San another another season of the dark audio podcast is upon us glad to be here in sunny Ireland for a change oh yeah actually that reminds me yes it's it's super sunny here today the the crappy weather that was forecast this week is is now off the menu and so it's like I don't want to brag but it's 20 degrees here right now and sunny so I've got one of my doors open to the outside world so if we hear car horns and traffic occasionally you'll just have to wear it because I just want to kind of do the uh the lufton through the house like air the house because otherwise it' gets super stuffy in here so um yeah just in case anybody hears any kind of environmental noise that is why so anyway in this second season San we've kind of resolved not only to cover news items as they sort of appear or in the month that they appear but also to sort of turn them inside out to reveal maybe a a learning point from each one I think that's what we're doing isn't it yes I mean I think if news items are entertainment you know for hobbi that like to sort of stay in touch with what's going on in their hobby then having some facts in there that explain how certain things work if this or that the other person in our audience walks away and has understood something better than they knew before I think then we serve the purpose of entertainment and a little bit of Education maybe yeah well we'll see how we go because I'm going to launch straight into the first news item that came out I think about two weeks ago and it's from the British Hi-Fi company name which is also I guess paired with focal now so they're owned by an investment group and yeah but name have a new amplifier just announced and it's part of their Unity Series so the unity atom is the half width box the unity Nova is a is a full width box that looks like a basically a garage is buil built onto the side of a Unity atom so we still get what I consider to be the best volume control in the world I really do think it is it's wonderfully smooth on the top of the the unity Nova and the unity atom but yeah so name's new Unity item is the unity Nova power Edition or PE now I think they've introduced this because dealers have been clamoring for more power from those Unity series because previously the unity atom well still does I mean still for sale gives us 40 watts per channel the standard Unity Nova gives us 80 watts per Channel but the the new Power Edition gives us 150 watts per channel into 8 OHS and 250 into four and it's almost the same as the original apart from two key areas so it still does like all the streaming smart the connectivity on the back is pretty much the same as the 5,000 eish Unity Nova but the unity Nova power Edition is coming to Market at almost twice the price €10,000 or $10,000 Us doll and I think that's to be noted but the other thing that I think will make many name purists sit up and take notice is this is a class D amplifier from name and I think it's their most conspicuous deployment of Class D to date I think so I don't think they've maybe they have in car audio or in that in the muso you know the kind of the sort of Soundbar type thing pretty sure that's class D and we'll get to this right because it's that's a small container for speakers and for amps and obviously one of the things we'll get to is that class D goes into smaller spaces than Class A B amplifiers but I kind of wanted to pick apart the differences between Class A Class A B Class B and class D now if I get anything wrong here San please speak up and and let me know because I did write an article about this a couple of years ago and I had to go long on research on that and it's been a while so I went back to it to kind of put my notes together and I think I've got it so basically inside I I think the output stages of most amplifiers well all amplifiers are essentially transistors right and they travel in pairs so we have two on the Left Channel two on the right channel minimum I mean they can you want we can have just one we don't need a pair you okay but that's that's generally single-ended but how many single-ended transistor amps are there I don't think there are that many either uh the first what and then you can have parall you can have parallel single ended where you run two or four or six per side yes and they're not push pull okay so when we're talking about Push Pull and single-ended here what we mean is that in a single end transistor that one transistor does the up half of the sound wave and the down half as well right correct but in a pushpull design and this is where I think name amplifiers the class A amplifiers work they have maybe two maybe four maybe six per side I don't know the numbers but when you have an even number per side so they travel in pairs you have one transistor doing the up half and then the other transistor does the down half of the sound wave right so it's kind of like that's it's called Push Pull it's like one section does one part and the other transistors does the other half and as far as I know well not most of them are mosfets because there are different kinds of transistors right San yeah bipolars for example okay I'm going to use mosfets because they relate to what we're going to get to so but generally we're just talking about transistors that drive our loud speakers now in a class A amplifier let's say we've just got a simple Push Pull design and we've got a pair of transistors on the Left Channel and a pair on the right so if we look at each pair in a class A Design both of those transistors will be switched on all of the time so if a signal goes up through the say the transistor a and then down through transistor B both of those transistors are on even if they're not doing anything correct and this is why Class A amplifiers generally in the main tend to run hot because they'll pull a certain amount from the wall and if it's not pushed into the amplifier to drive a speaker cone in a certain direction it must be dissipated in heat well in fact a Class A amplifier will draw the same power at idle right as it does Under full power so just sitting there doing absolutely nothing if you wait for 15 or 20 minutes until the transistors have sort of heated up you'll have an old space heater sitting there and then when you actually play music at high volumes it's putting out this it's drawing the same amount of current from the wall voltage right but people I mean they don't love the space heater element of Class A amplifiers but they tolerate it because a lot of people talk about The Sweet Sound Of Class A amplifiers but they tend to be large and bulk well not always bulky because there's that musical Fidelity A1 which was reintroduced last year that's Class A that's about ,500 Euros I think and I'm getting one later this year but I spoke to somebody who' reviewed one recently he said yeah it runs pretty damn hot so that's Class A obviously the downside is the heat so what follows that really is this concept of Class B which we hardly ever see and there's a reason for that so what class B does is it says well okay if a Class A if one of the Class A transistors is Idle whilst it's not doing anything we may as well just turn it off so we we're not wasting any power when we're not pushing out more heat into the room so basically the transistor is only engaged when it's needed for the signal so it turns on and off as requested right now there is a small window I think I'm trying to kind of hold my fingers up to show a little tiny gap between them I guess we call it the crossover zone so as the signal crosses from the top half of the waveform into the lower half you want a Zone where it's a bit like a race you're handing the Baton across right so you want a Zone where both transistors are on momentarily simultaneously they overlap right they overlap so that the signal can pass from one to the other and once the signal is handed off like a yeah like a relay race the first one goes off until it's needed again so they're switching on and off pretty fast but not as fast as they could do we'll get to that in a moment but the downside of that is because of that switching and because of that relay race crossover window we get something called crossover Distortion is this right San I think I'm I'm right about this right yes it's basically when you cross the zero line you have your positive half of the wave and you have the negative half and when they cross the zero line they're supposed to meet the handoff is supposed to be instantaneous but if for some reason it is slightly delayed yeah like when in your baton race doing the hand over the first guy isn't letting go fast enough the second guy already has it and now the first gu is pulling on the other you have a little bit of an inefficiency so the idea is the first guy lets go the microsc that the second guy has a firm Grim right and so because of that Distortion apparently it's pretty damn Audible and it's not very pleasant so we don't I don't think I've ever seen a Class B amplifier maybe one exists I don't know so then what we have is really to get the best of both worlds because Class B you I think you can get more power out of class B than you can can get out of class A for the same wattage input from the wall I think I could be wrong about that do you know Shan or is this something I'm not not sure what's definitely true is that you will get more power out of the same size box with the same amount of heat sings because it's more efficient yeah so you can run the circuit harder if you have a power supply that can deliver I mean that would make sense because if we look at a Class A amplifier which is a combination of Class B and Class A we can get more power than generally speaking than Class A so if you look at your average let's say you pick five Class A amplifiers and five Class B generally speaking you'll find that the class AB sets offer more power for your loudspeakers not a huge amount but enough to be noticeable so how does a class ABB circuit work but again you've got your transistor pairs on each Channel and what happens is is you have a certain amount of class a bias so what that means is that the both of the transistors the upper half one and the lower half one will stay on as long as this they'll both stay on at the same time simultaneously as long as the signals kind of like chugging along at a fairly low level so we might be listening quietly or the music might not be too demanding but if we turn the volume up or the music music suddenly wants more oomph to drive the The Speaker Drive s what happens then is it kind of moves into class B so as the signal ramps up the the other transistor that's not in operation then it switches off corre it's it's not needed for that that time and then it might come down again and then the upper half transistor switches off and the the lower half transistor switches on again and it'll behave in sort of this class B mode until the signal drops down in level or we turn the volume down right so you can get correct and that's is a completely smooth transition between the B mode when the transistors keep switching on and off and the a mode when the transistors both stay on it's not like a Harley-Davidson clutch where suddenly you go from class A B to a it's completely smooth yeah so I mean from my understanding class AB reduces drastically the amount of crossover Distortion I don't think it gets rid of it completely because I know that um amplifier designers always sort of battling to lower crossover Distortion in their designs but it's way better than Class B which is why class AB has been the main topology for the majority of amplifiers well I w't say for the last 50 years but certainly up until about 20 years ago that was all you could really get right was class class A B and Class A but then about 20 years ago class D was introduced now the D in class D does not mean digital now a digital amplifier is something completely different I'm not going to talk about it today but two examples in case you want to go and look it up is a lindorf amplifier the the the modern ones with the streaming and the room perfect correction and also Peach Tree have a power amplifier which takes a a digital input and that's a digital amplifier but they work very differently to class D now a class damp and this is something that blew my mind San when I first discovered this cuz I I never knew what was switching in the output stage because class D amps are often known as switching amps right so I'm thinking what is switching so it can't be a transistor can it well it turns out it bloody well is so the same type of transistor well actually it's not the same it's usually a mosfet well well not nowadays but we'll get to that later in the episode but usually a mosfet because of all the transistors available apart from one it offers the fastest switching speed which is why you don't see a bipolar on a class damp switching now when we talking about switching we're talking a ludicrously fast rate far greater than a class AB MOS sorry a Class A or Class B mosfet would switch because it's almost like now I've got to be very careful here but it's a bit like DSD switching but it's not DSD because DSD is pulse density modulation and a switching amplifier is pulse width modulation but the PR there are some principles that are shared between the two um not going to commit myself to saying exactly what they are I'm I'm going to throw in maybe something that will help if you think of Class D um like mors code right you have pulses of different lengths and the length of these pulses describes both the amplitude and the frequency of of the wave for continuous W it's a different way of describing it the wave form so this is a very very efficient way of using your transistors to effectively make a sound through your louds speakers so I think class D amps are something like over 90% efficient right so what what power goes in is used to drive the loudspeakers and very Li very little Escapes in in heat through the chassis we don't need as much heat sinking on a Class D amp although some of them do because some that switching can get slightly warm and not all class D amps run stone cold or cool but it's a very efficient very environmentally friendly way to drive your speakers and it's also much gentler on your power bill correct as far as I know so and well we'll get to where we see class D amps later on but the downside of class damps the way I understand it and again San correct me if I've got this wrong is noise so when you switch something extremely quickly you produce produce a lot of very very very high frequency noise which humans cannot hear but it still has to be filtered out of the of the well the signal band right I won't say the audible band because our hearing stops at 20 khz and we're talking are we talking megahertz here or is it just very high Kilz my understanding is that the fastest class D amplifier that I know of where there's a number available they switched at 550 KZ and 800 khz that seems to be about the ceiling and they don't use the general mosfet the Silicon mosfet type you'll get into that later on I will yeah so okay so we're not quite into the megahertz range we're still in the kilohertz range but it still has to be filtered and as far as I know this is very similar to class D noise filtering so you know the further away you mean you mean DSD sorry DSD class yes so the further away from the audible band The Noise sits So the faster switching essentially the faster the switching the the further away the noise can sit from the audible band and that also therefore has the knock on effect that the filters that are used to take it out can be shallower and they yeah they're just further away from the audible band I mean this reminds me when I'm talking about high res because people say oh you know what's the point high res because we can't hear above 20 khz well because it's the filters right you got to look at the filters and where they are and how steep they are right that's what affects well it's one of the factors that allows in some cases for higher Reds to sound better than CD quality but not always but again it's it's always about implementation I don't want to say that class A is better than class D or class D is better than Class A always down to implementation would you agree with that San or yes and I think I would like to add that unlike maybe popular misconception that class D and switch mode power supplies are not necessarily wedded at the hip so you can have a switching output stage that works in class D combined with a linear power supply you can have the inverse you can have a linear output stage a Class A or Class A output stage that is driven by a switch more power supply M okay okay I mean I I surveyed my YouTube audience because it's a way for me to talk to like many thousands of people and I just said hello loudspeaker people what class is your amplifier right this is on the Community page on YouTube 10,000 votes right this is what I love about YouTube you get masses of people and I did this poll last year but the results are similar this year I did it last week so of those 10,000 people 11% say they're using Class A MH 43% say they're using CL Class A B 26% say they're using class D we've got 3% with none of the above so they might be using either a switching digital amp sorry a digital amplifier or they'll be using a class G that Arcam uses what what is class G I never really understood it I believe and I might be wrong but I believe that class G is the next form of class AB where you have two different voltage rails on the amount of draw that the amplifier has to put out it switches to a higher voltage and then it a lower rail right that makes sense that makes sense and then tellingly and I guess maybe this is because it's a YouTube audience 177% say I don't know what class my amplifier is which you know that's that's almost a fifth of people so it is a pretty dry topic I really do think so but a lot of audio files are very I don't know it's almost along with streaming service choices Amplified topology choices are almost like the identity politics of the Hi-Fi world because people see they can't separate themselves from their Hi-Fi choices though they'll say things like Over My Dead Body will I have a class D amplifier because class D amplifiers when they first came out I believe I wasn't around listening to them at the time but what from what everybody tells me is that in the early 2000s mid 2000s they sounded like they were cold hard bright all of those nasty words maybe these are the words that we associate with third order or fifth order harmonic Distortion I don't know but one of my favorite amplifiers of the last couple of years is class D and I love the form factor that you can get from class D which is much harder to get from class AB can be asked which one that is your favorite amplifier yes you can because it's it's going to be featuring in a video this weekend actually it's the NAD M23 which uses um the purify igen tax module that Bruno puts his last viso and Peter lorf co-developed a couple of years ago I love the sound of that thing because it's just got this I don't know how to describe it it it I think it's very microdynamic Lively so you can really get a sense of not just the big rhythms but the smaller ticks and pulses as well and it doesn't sound cold it doesn't sound sterile it doesn't sound like a class AB amplifier like a big Hegel h590 they sound different you know the Hegel is a bit more rounded I think maybe on some of the spikier transients I think CD when it's done poorly gets those transient spikes wrong and they can come across like Needles and Pins I don't like that but that's pretty rare these days I don't think a classd amplify that does that would be on the market for very long because there are so many good ones now right I mean you've you've heard some very exotic class daysan or No Yes uh one by Alberto Guera an Italian designer who now works out of La AGD is his brand Alberto Guera design Productions and Merill audio out of I believe Canada now we're talking very expensive 20K 30k for a pair of Class D monoblocks W okay which used to be anatha it used to be impossible when class D was still thought to be just fit for subwoofers and then it was just fit for Loi but I don't exactly know when but I think if we say 10 years ago sort of the tide started to shift and I think now class D is has become respectable it's now a valid alternative even in the high end to traditional Class A or Class A amplifiers I mean I don't I don't want to give Bruno put this too much credit here but but it did seem the tide did seem to turn when he introduced or he and his team did the UCD module the encor module and then now we've got this purify I know there are others like Pascal ice power uh who else is there I've forgotten now who who else that makes class D modules soft right but as you just pointed out San a class D amplifier sound is not just the module it's also the power supply that feeds the module and as you said it could be linear it could be switching and it's also the output filter right yeah the filter and how that output filter and the loudspeaker load interact with the feedback that's inside the class D output stage right so all of those are sort of variables that interact in different ways so let's bring it back to the name very quickly before I end this segment so we've got this new power edition of the unity Nova €10,000 I think I think it might be a Purify module I tried to get conf information on this from names PR team external third party PR team and they they said oh we've got a we've got some information for you John from Steve Sals at name who wants to say something about the the class D implementation here but that wasn't forthcoming and I asked again a couple of days ago specifically because I knew we were going to talk about this this podcast and again nothing so I've asked I've tried to dig under the hood to work out what's inside this amplifier and knowing name and looking at the pricing they're not going to be skimping on the quality of they can't because they have been class AB for decades so if they get this wrong that's going to cause them tons of brand damage and the flip side is if they get it right like we assume it legitimizes class D even further when the brand like name that has been a main stay Gets behind a class D amplifier come to think of it we should also give credit to people who are who have who about 10 years ago made very good class D implementations I'm thinking of John stronza at belcanto correct and EJ sento at wired for sound who seems to bit dropped off the map a little bit these days but here like class D the was it called the mamp little half width yeah based on ice power fantastic fantastic little unit you know like and yeah I'm sure there are tons of these things I don't want to label the points raan and I know that I've spoken way too long in this first segment so let me let me hand the uh the floor over to you you can give us a news item and an educational lesson well I'm going to talk about a problem solver okay but before I mention it there's the the usual small print which is that those people who believe that bit perfect in a digital Transmission in like an Ethernet transmission is all that matters they won't be very happy about what I have to say okay now I will admit that in my case a 30 m ethernet cable between my router and my music iMac the next room over is all that I have ever needed to get music signal without any Distortion without any dropouts without any crack Les are bit perfect end to end no problem don't need anything else mhm now if I had known at the time that you could go from and now I'm going to show John that I could go from this type of cable which is just an ordinary e you're you're holding up an ethernet cable right so it's correct I think everyone know look looks looks looks like yeah so that instead of having to Route 20 or 30 or 40 meters of this stuff up the stairs and across the hallway underneath the carpet that I could have used something like what am i showing you now okay this is a much thinner cable much thinner it doesn't look as stiff as EET either and then it's got some kind of weird ass blue plastic termination on the end so you know what it looks like it looks like the fiber optic cable that comes out of my wall downstairs that goes into my modem because I've got fiber ethernet ethernet fiber internet here it looks like that but that's what it is ah okay it's fiber optics now we can't plug this directly this end into a component we still need this bit and if I put this close enough you may see that there's a a circuit body thing on the inside so when you when we say this and this we're talking about you can't put the the the fiber CA the fiber cables termination into your modem because it's the wrong socket yes and you also can't put it in the in the rear of your Melco streamer or Lumen streamer the right socket you need this piece which goes on here so you got like like it's okay so metal adapter goes on the end of your fiber op right I call it a cartridge okay yeah and inside that cartridge you have what converts the electrical signal into an optical signal it's a little bit like toslink except that fiber optics for Network use has much more bandwidths than a copper ethernet cable it has way more bandwidth which is why it's used for high-speed internet it can be run across much longer distances it's completely immune to picking up external noise because it's not an electrical signal it's just light it's much easier to route and hallelujah it's much cheaper you can get 100 m of the stuff for like $40 $50 and how much does 100 meters of ethernet cable cost you more I don't remember what I PID but I remember that when I bought my 30 40 m Spurs it cost me more so even if this skinny cable had no other benefit than being easier to Route mm and being cheaper I would still prefer that over ethernet cable now what do we need if we have an ordinary router like my IT company gave me when I signed up for the internet and there is no fiber optic port on the back yeah we need What's called the media converter so the media converter will have an rg45 input or output and it will have a second Port which is called an SFP small form factor plugable which is catchy which is the equivalent to this thing and it looks like it looks like okay so I need to describe thisan for anybody that's listening to this podcast and not watching the video version so we've got from what I can tell you've got an Ethernet input and an SFP output I mean this other land sockets it's a it's a kind of a I don't know it's it's looks like it's roughly the size of say a MCH Brooklyn Bridge or maybe not quite as deep and a bit exactly it's it's a network switch right but you don't need those land sockets on the back right if you if you're doing conversions for what we're talking about right now all we need are these two ports so you need ethernet and SFP exactly right now this company lhy audio Yeah exactly lhy audio is a subsidiary to Jay's audio M and Jay's audio together with Stenner frips and kinky studio is one of the brands of the Singapore reseller winshine audio yes and winshine audio has gotten so busy with Stenner frps that they have split off another company also based out of Singapore under the same management that's called beat technique. comom and beat technique globally distributes J's audio M and lie audio and so now Li audio or lhy audio has media converters if you don't believe that they're important you go to your local computer Emporium and you spend 30 to 40 on a media converter M from TP Link it's all you need if you do want to go a little bit higher end and get a linear power Supply and you want to get a high quality fto clock inside your media converter Li audio now have one that is $494 delivered globally but would you need two of them to do the conversion at either end you would unless you have an switch like this one that already comes with one or you have a streamer from Melco or Lumen that aside from the Reg rg45 ethernet input also has a fiber optic input so the I've got it behind me in a box actually there's there's a Neo stream streamer from IFI and that has an optical fiber like input and a little box that does the conversion from ethernet but it's a different type of socket it's not the one that you have there it's probably the one that that John strer used for banto it's called St fiber right and it's a different kind of plug but it's it's the same idea same principle right you convert your ethernet to light essentially and that travels along your fiber optic cable until it needs to be converted back to ethernet again or go straight into your your media streamer as as essentially light pulses right yeah and now I'm going to say something that will upset the people that think that bit perfect audio is all that matters okay uh oh look how world so what are we showing you now so we've got two small ethernet runs and in the middle you've got this plastic box that looks I I think I used to have one of these years ago and I think I yeah this it it says stum on the top I think yes it's soul of the music South Korean company and what this Gizmo in the middle is when you open it up so you've got well just a a bunch of components on a board that probably you have basically uh ganic isolation in between the input and the output oh it's a galvanic isolator okay okay yes right an inline ethernet isolator mhm and now this is I was always unhappy with the quality of cloud files versus my local files in the main system even though the signal pass was the same it was either internet coming into my iMac or it was uh USB 3 coming off an SSD drive that I have parked my library on and then once they were inside the iMac everything was the same local files sounded better to me so I didn't really do any streaming and finally I got upset and said what can I do and I read up on it what the extremist the streaming extremists do and they said you need not only one switch but you may need two or three Network switches so I got my first Network switch and yes the sound got a little better but it was still not the same as my local files and then I got this one that I just showed you to review MH and now I had two switches and I put them in serious adding this silly little Gizmo in between and now finally with two switches an inline isolator these two little pigtails and internet ethernet cable on one side and ethernet table on the other side I finally had parity between my local files and cloud files and then when I finally had opportunity to review fiber optics M I realized that I didn't need two switches in serus I didn't need my little inline isolator I could just go from my router fiber optics into another media converter into the iMac and I got the same quality of sound so it was me today if if I redid this installation I would go for fiber optics okay in in preempting the comment section on this one San two things I want to say here firstly I know some people are going to say that well if the ultimate in galvanic isolation or whatever kind of isolation between your router and your media streamer is W Wi-Fi and I know you don't do Wi-Fi but this is what comment section people will say and one of the way one of the ways it was explained to me and I guess this relates to my second point about ethernet because a lot of people will start their comment with as a network engineer of 25 years the people that have only worked in it really only have to generally move files around and time is not a component in that but I know that ethernet has foolproof error correction absolutely I'm never going to argue against that not at all but the way it was explained to me was that on an Ethernet input in order for it to do its error correction it has different levels of error correction let's call them one two and three right so a fairly good signal will only ever need level one error correction but if the signal gets noisier it'll maybe bump up internally to level two and then maybe also to level three if it's a really noisy incoming signal and again the way it was explained to me was that every extra layer of error correction introduces more electrical noise inside the component that you're trying to keep electrical noise out of right so you kind of you get rid of it from the incoming signal but you're generating your own which also I think is the way that WiFi it's probably why Wi-Fi doesn't sound as good as people would expect because you would think okay well if I can isolate my yeah my internet or my my modem router and my network streamer the best way to do that is just use Wi-Fi right but the Wi-Fi circuit inside your network streamer is also generating electrical noise which is might be why it doesn't sound as good as a hardwired connection nothing to do with errors nothing to do with it Administration Network administration because again there's no time factor in moving a file or printing a you know printing a an image to a printer it doesn't matter whether the printer takes five minutes or 30 seconds or whether it does it you know in chunks whereas an audio stream can't arrive in chunks like that separated by big big gaps it must be a real reasonably steady stream for the the receiver to make sense of it or to do what it needs to do so to recap I would say it's nothing at all to do with bit perfect because if generic internet wasn't bit perfect the stock market would collapse and online banking wouldn't work if I'm trying to make a $30 transfer and the bank takes out 300 I'd be very unhappy never ever happens but this is about ultrasonic noise that somehow ends up on the signal and travels from source to the load and interferes or diminishes the quality of our sound and so the more of that noise we can remove the better the sound gets even though we don't have more or less bits nothing there changes whatsoever right but I think we should also remind viewers and listeners that this is what I call a skinny end of the audio file wedge problem to solve right absolutely this is this is the last thing that you should ever really I think concern yourself with right your speakers your room your amplifier subwoofers DAC and network streamer I guess that's kind of tied in with what we're talking about here so it really is the skinny end of the wedge it's why it's taken me 20 years to address this particular issue there was nothing else that I could do to my system I don't want to change it I have what I want I have what I could afford which works for my room and it was just this last thing that bothered me that my local file still sounded better than streaming so I did streaming only on the desktop to find new music and for background entertainment all the serious listening was done to local files and now finally it has equalized but like you said it's the last sort of chrome polish Beed Stripes dusting that you should do not before all right let me move on to um my next item and this is actually connected to my previous item related to class D we have a new integrated amplifier from South Korea's Hi-Fi Rose and it is called the r280 now many people will if they don't know high-fi rows they might know of the the um the full width kind of yeah like a normal high-fi component type touchcreen streamers so they've taken the high-end market for touchscreen streamers by storm in the last couple of years but they also had an amplifier called the ra18 which had the completely batet crazy front panel with all the the kind of bizarre knobs switches and dials which actually related in many ways to its equally bizarre functionality because you could buy amp out of it so you could drive your and like I said say two-way you could drive your base mid-base driver with one portion and then the the Tweeter with the other portion of the amplifier you could add a super Tweeter to your speakers and drive that from this amplifier and then it also had a Dack inside but no streamer it had mm phono and MC phono and I think it was maybe 400 watts into eight homes but I could be wrong about that but it doesn't it's really academic really for this for this piece because the 280 is like a junior version so it's cheaper it's 3500 Euros whereas the 180 was about five and something and the 280 is much simpler on its front panel it doesn't look as crazy or bit crazy as the first one and it offers yeah 200 watts per channel into 8 ohms and 4 Ohms it doesn't have a DAC it doesn't have the super tweeted stuff it doesn't have the bamp stuff but it got these things right the Vu meters it does have the Vu meters yes so the the 180 had the Vu meters the 280 does but they're kind of small but I think people do most audio files I think would say that Vu meters are audile catnip you know they love them it's kind of it certainly is is for me anyway um but the reason that I'm pulling this news item out of the draw from what a week ago two weeks ago is because it's class D it's a switching amplifier but it does not use mosfets so a couple of years ago we started to see talk of a new type of switching device that could be used in power supplies it's kind of big in the mobile phone brick charger world at the moment and this is something called a gan fet and according to my research and I have to I didn't write it down I wrote it in an email to you s I didn't write it in my notes damn it basically ganet can switch I think it's up to 100 times faster than a mosfit now why is that important why is that useful to to an audio amplifier designer well if it switches faster it means that the the change over delay between on and off is shorter so we have less I think they call it dead time right so the dead time on a ganet is much smaller than an mosfet I remember seeing years ago people posting on forums going if class D had faster switching it would be a viable proposition well now it does in the form of Gan fits and in the form of high-fi Rose amplifier like the ra 280 the new one and the ra1 180 the old one who else uses Gan fits I think Peach Tree Peach Tree used them in their Gan one power amplifier I think it's in a mych amplifier the big one I think so the Empire The Empire yes I always forget the name of that I don't know why because it's New York I mean should be pretty easy to remember but it's not and the two I mentioned earlier about expensive class D I really enjoyed was the AGD and the meril audio and it turns out that the designer of AGD was actually personally involved in the design of the Gan fet output device ah okay he worked for a company that developed it and so I had I had some discussions with him and he explained why a gan fed is specifically designed for class D and does not really lend itself to class A or AB designs right so it's designed explicited to be to be a switching device a very fast switching device right correct and I guess the the last benefit which I kind of touched on before was that because it switches faster the noise that it generates is further away from the upper limit of the audible band so it's way out there it still has to be filtered but it can be filtered yeah further away from the audible band and with a shallower filter slope I believe so again this is just like highrise audio a little bit like DSD but not entirely like DSD um so yeah I just think that's kind of interesting that I think we're going to see more and more Gan fet class D amplifiers I think they eventually they'll take over and they will be the dominant force in class D so mosfets I think we'll just see eventually only used in class A and ab implementations they won't be used as class D switches anymore so I think if any anything that people should really learn from this if they didn't know it already which I'm sure many people do is that class D amplifier is a switching amplifier very very fast switching amplifier a bit like a a switching power supply which also switches very fast um I've got a few switching charges and power supplies in this house I know they are because they make a noise I can hear them they go they're like a mosquito if they're badly done right they're just for like batteries and things like that but that is a switching power supply and I think if you've got a switching power supply inside your amplifier if it's well done it won't make a noise but some of the Le ones you can put your ear close up and you can hear the high pitch whine of those switching devices it won't even have to be a power supply it might could be I think a switching regulator Works in a similar kind of way well interestingly enough Lin audio just introduced their new 800 solo climax or climax solo 800 MH it's a 37,000 a pair monoblock okay Class A does 800 into 4 Ohms and it's using a switch mode power supply ah there we go so switch mode power supplies done properly is completely legit for highend audio purposes nagra audio use them cord audio uses them even a tube amplifier company manly labs and they use them designed by Bruno putsy specifically to get the noise flow of tube equipment much lower than they previously could ah okay I didn't know that that's interesting so just like just like class D sort of had a bad rep with the highend audio segment so do switching power supplies and I think they are also Now sort of coming into their own because companies like Lynn and the ones that we just mentioned legitimize their use in hon audio equipment there's a guy there's a company in Germany called linenberg MH they have a class A amplifier with a switch more power Supply ah okay and Avic in Denmark has their 80 components are all Class A with four times 500 wat switch mode power supplies per amplifier I think I'm about to get a case of the hiccups ofan because I poured some water into my coffee cup and it's it's it's sparkling it's called ped it's a Portuguese is absolutely delicious it's quite kind of salty um but yes I've just been guzzling it down I'm hoping I don't get onset early onset hiccups anyway whilst I deal with that back to you for another another news item with an educational twist what am i showing you uh it is a big chunky metal disc it's about 5 cm across that size of a CD but it's much much deeper and it looks kind of heavy by the way you're holding it what would you call that if it was a steak or a burger is this like a a half pounder or yeah it would be a maybe a full pounder I mean it's a it's a big sort of T-bone steak it looks heavy it looks looks like a monster footer from a monster speaker it is an isolation footer and if I were to take off this this bit here which is the hide adjuster so that that kind of swivel so rotates off right yeah then we are left with that and what this part here is is a triple ball bearing isolator for vertical is I mean for a horizontal isolation so that's the side to side movement right so okay right there's another one with three ball bearings on the in the top so this one Jiggles left back and forth M and hidden inside the body is a visco elastic uh sleeve like a squishy material okay and that's OB then for vertical isolation like the Jackhammer isolation that we experienc when we put especially a subwoofer or loud speaker with low base on the floor and it interacts with the floor like a jackhammer right when this first came out without this additional isolator here this piece sold for $300 made Hang on we're talking about the inner ring though the inner disc inside right this if you take this this bit out when when you hang on WE we've got people listening San so we need to kind of go beyond what what this is so it's like the the inner cylinder the inner portion of that isolator yes when we take the upper ball bearing insert out mhm and we're just dealing with a hidden visco elastic layer and at the bottom a three ball bearing isolator we're talking about a very heavy footer that sold for $300 a piece okay from a company called carbide audio in Yano Texas mhm and after they added the second isolation layer on the top ball bearing isolation layer the price went up to 600 mhm okay super effective excellent under equipment racks subwoofers or loudspeakers but if like me your subwoofer only cost you ,300 a set of those where you need at least three for 600 you're spending more on the footer than on the subwofer doesn't make sense not happy math so the news item for today is that the same company just came out with a miniature footer that is less than 5 cm across and less than 27 mm tall it has a single ball bearing and a set of three sells for $199 and a set of four for $249 and a set of four can support 220 kilos which should for most intention purposes be enough even for really heavy big powerful Class A amplifiers so why would why would I use one of a set of those what what's the benefit it is physical isolation between the component and whatever the component sits on the loudspeaker will sit on a floor if the floor is of a suspended design like a wooden floor in a first or second story flat M and you have a speaker that can do 25 HZ and you like to play it Loud that woofer movement inside the cabinet and the pressure inside the cabinet will transfers through the spikes into the floor M it's a little bit similar to like how a boom truck uses the entire chassis of the car as a quasi amplifier it makes the woofers actually louder because they couple to the entire enclosure but that sort of fake amplification the mechanical is structural amplification is always be behind to beat first you have the wer doing its thing and then the car or in our case the room or the floor follows right so if you want to sort of cut that coupling between the loudspeaker and the floor you need an isolator and visal elastic materials like soain or rubber are one possibility but they really only work in this axis they don't work in that axis when you hang on we I got to stop you up and down up and down yeah yes they don't work left and right so horizontal right okay yes and horizontal isolation via ball bearings comes from high-rise buildings specifically in Japan where they have a lot of earthquakes yes and so in order for the high-rise building not to shift as far back and forth like a tree in the wind where it then can actually you know get damaged they have roller ball isolation at in the basement of the high-rise building so that instead of wobbling it just moves back and forth but stays straight I didn't know that's where this technology originally came from right and so the news today is that if you have sort of ey physical isolation Footers that are prop engineered but they were either too big too heavy or too expensive for your budget or taste that now there's something much smaller available that is only lacking the visco elastic element so it doesn't have any squishy element hidden on the inside it only has the ball bearing it has a single ball bearing so you need a minimum of three of those mhm okay all right brother back to me then um I want to talk about a well I won't call it a new loudspeaker because it's not it was introduced last May is the first kind of sightings I've seen of it on the internet but I want to talk about it today because it's new to me and I think it's it has an interesting concept that we don't see very often in speakers so it's made by Antelope audio I believe that's a Bulgarian company that make I think they make a lot of PRO Sound interfaces and dacs and adcs and things like that and they have occasionally drifted into the Hi-Fi space but I haven't heard from them for many years same here right okay so this is a new loudspeaker relatively new L speaker it's called The Atlas I8 $5,000 a pair and it's a three-way so you look at the front of the speaker and you can see clearly see three drivers right you see the Tweeter and that's coaxially I can never say this coaxially mounted in the middle of the mid-range driver we see that with K I'm looking at a pair of LSX 2 on my desktop right here it's the same kind of thing right and it's generally done to improve the Imaging capabilities of the speaker roughly now beneath that beneath those two drivers that coaxial Arrangement is a Bas driver so you kind of go okay three-way that makes sense but the thing is there are four drivers inside this loudspeaker not three there are four so yes you got one Tweeter one mid-range driver and then you've got one base driver that you can see but there's one that's hidden and it's actually mounted directly behind the the the outward facing bass driver and it's facing the same direction mhm so and I think from what I've gathered from reading up on this they are sealed in their own enclosure and so they both move in the same direction at the same time that's the idea and the idea behind this and I've got to look at the gentleman's name who developed this in the 1950s has an old idea developed by a chap called Harry Olen and so what he did was yeah put put these two things it's called yeah isobaric so that isobaric I think means equal pressure but I don't think necessarily that equal pressure relates to the physics of what's going on between the front and the the rear driver but I I don't know enough about it San to kind of go any further in in that direction with that thought but okay so we have to ask like why do loudspeaker Engineers Mount the mount Bas drivers isobarically like this and we'll also come in a moment like why don't we see this more often but the general idea is you can get the same base extension and performance from two drivers mounted isobarically as you can from one driver in a cabinet with twice the volume so you can make a smaller speaker with the same kind of Base power as a larger speaker but without having the larger cabinet now the payoff from this from what I understand is is a lack of sensitivity so you need more power which makes sense really doesn't it you're moving two two units to move air so you need more power into them to kind of get the same sound pressure levels at the front of the speaker so in this speaker and it's an active speaker so we get 100 watts of Class D on the Tweeter 100 watts of Class D on the mid driver nothing unusual about that 200 watts of Class D on the base drivers now 200 Watts I think is quite a lot for a speaker this size and it's probably because of the isobaric implementation of those Bas drivers right but but you told me in a phone call last week that it doesn't have to be they don't have to the drivers don't have to face the same direction no they can be face to face right with one magnet sticking out but naked mhm and they can also invert so they can face away from each other yeah okay they just have to share the same volume right so the question then becomes is like why don't we see this more often if it's such a cool way of getting more base out of a smaller speaker why isn't this standard practice I mean I don't have the answer to this I don't know whether you do or not but no I have the same question because to my knowledge the majority of isobaric designs that are still available or were available were British Right Lynn name um Benes neat yeah Kudos and ATC all have or have made isobaric speakers but outside of the UK M it gets skinny totem Acoustics used to have a flagship speaker that was an isobaric and the tiny little one that speaker I have upstairs which is the 4 and a half inch two-way from Korea yeah sounds great one called the uh supermon mini from mon Acoustics that's that's an isobaric it has a hidden 4-in driver inside the box that's about the extent of isobaric designs I'm aware of and so this was news to me that antelope now makes some it's also interesting because this is an active I don't know this is the first isobaric active I've seen which is why I kind of really caught my attention like oh wow that's pretty unusual I mean this is pitched at the Pro Studio people this is not pitched at audio files that doesn't mean that audio files couldn't get into it and couldn't you know go and have a listen somewhere and you know maybe use them in their home I mean as we have discussed ad nauseum on this podcast withan is that active speakers are very much a strong future for most I guess most Hi-Fi operation I don't know but I think active speakers with majority but not exclusively class D amplification because because class damps don't generate as much heat as Class A and also the power supplies as well like if they're switching power supply and switching amplifier you you got the lowest heat you could possibly have from that amplifier unit right and that can go into a tiny loudspeaker whereas you couldn't put a class AB amp as easily into that same box you might be able to get away with it on the Twitter especially if you're running your class AB amplifier of maybe 10 or 20 watts off a switch mode power supply which is I think what kef did with the ls60 Wireless class AB on the Tweeter I think sonus Farber did it with that duetto speaker that I covered last year class AB on the Twitter class D on the mid-base driver because class D is you know made for base really I think from what I can tell if you're trying to sell an active speaker to a DieHard audio file you've really got to put class AB on the Tweeter for that diard audio file to take you seriously right because otherwise you'll go oh class D that would be me really okay because I just recently did review uh a fully active DSP controlled class D speaker and the one misgiving I had had to do with the upper mid-range and treble where I thought it was a little over damned right so that same ultimate control and grippiness that is so wonderful in the base as the frequencies Ascend I found it just a little bit less pleasing and I was wondering if I could hear that same speaker with at least the treble and maybe even the mid-range Class A and leave class D just for the woer section would that minor complaint that I had that was really the only one that I had of the slight dryness and overdamping would that then have gone away I don't know but it had me curious yeah I do wonder about that and wonder you know why some manufacturers go class D top to bottom maybe it's an it's a financial thing bill of materials thing but maybe maybe it's a heat thing maybe the heat dissipation from any form of class AB amplifier in the speaker cabinet is just too difficult to manage I don't know I mean bookart do class D all the way up and down um I'm trying to think of another one so I've got I'm going to get this wrong I've got a pair of PGA here at the moment but I I'm pretty sure they're all class D if I've got that wrong please let me know in the comments but it's a 701 Gen 2 I think it's class D top to bottom but I don't know that has a very different Tweeter though so this is more of an an exception than anything else you know because that's got a ribbon Tweeter well my assumption is that possibly speaker manufacturers don't have the design wear was all inhouse to design their own class AB amplifier for twer whereas they can go to purify or UCD or they can get readymade power modules that they then they just program the DSP but basically they are lot bigger designers they might know how to design a driver and certainly know how to design a crossover and cabinet maybe an excellent class AB amplifier just for Twitter use they don't really know how to design and maybe it's much harder to get one of those OEM then all of those different class D modules that are made for three ways two ways four ways you just plug in what you want and you get the module maybe is that why we see few you know here's an interesting Twist on this and and I think this is the reason that bookart go class D see like a motorbike why bookart go class D is because I think the modules have become user swappable so if one dies you can unscrew the back plate and then take one out and plug a new one in which I think is brilliant and I think this is a feature that a lot of I know a lot of my commenters really infused about that because they're worried their main concern with cl sorry with active speakers is like what if the amp you know an amp dies inside you know whole thing has to go back I would argue that if your amp dies anyway then you you have no sound so whether the amp is in the speaker or external you still have no sound but I understand like if you've got a floor standing active and an amp module dies you've got to cut that whole speaker back to the store or you've got to ship it God knows where that's that that's an inconvenience to say the least and because bookart are direct selling they obviously don't want the customers buying let's say in Australia from Denmark to then get you know an amplifier module let's say it's dead in arrival because of some Knockin shipping in transit they can just ship a new module out and the user can fit it which I think is great it's BR and I'm I think I'm not sure of any other company that's doing that at the moment because KF don't do it key don't do it Dutch and Dutch don't do it I'm not singling them out for like bad treatment here I'm just saying this is something that this is a plus for class D because I think class AB module swapping those out for users I think that might be more of an ask don't know possibly okay suan I think back to you for your final uh item of the day yes now we're getting into Ferrari Lamborghini territory okay and now I'm going to change my headress and you'll have to describe what it is that you see all right and I won't be able to hear you just for a couple of seconds so I can say what I like okay Lookout world I don't know what San is about to do here but he's going to do something odd oh oh my goodness what the hell are actually I do know what they are but [Laughter] no no so how would you describe what you just saw from an Aesthetics point of view it's a no from me yes I agree it's I mean I they remind me of those was it AKG had a headphone like that years ago called the k1000 right and it was just these kind of flappy bits that look I mean I think I tried a pair once in in Berlin about eight years ago or some maybe there was another company that made a kind of a followup to that maybe it was some ex AKG Engineers I can't remember now very uncomfortable from from what I remember didn't love them but how would you describe what it is that you see okay it's a headphone right sorry yes it's a headphone it's kind of got this sort of it's like a plastic piece maybe with a metal exterior it's oh God I mean I'm talking about the what would normally be the ear cups they're not ear cups they're just this plastic piece that probably has some kind of driver on the inside it has to if it's a headphone um yeah it it look because of the plastic nature of those I'll use the the term loosely ear cups San I just wings wings okay like wings that fold in and out like from your ears so you can adjust the angle to which they fire into your ears which I guess was the the the selling point of the AKG back way back when but I believe these are your favorite headphones of all time aren't they they are but as you rightly noticed because they are not house broken when it comes to looks no they have looks only a mother could love on a good day now we have something that looks much more normal and since you will put images behind our two Talking Heads MH the people that actually watch this will actually see what the new models look like but before we get there before we even get to that we need to know the name of the company and what what is we'll get there we'll get there so to cover what this is and why I like it so much we need to cover different types of headphone drivers now if I was to ask you what the most common most often used headphone type driver is what would you say I think by far it would be the the dynamic driver correct and so a dynamic driver would either be a core or a dome mhm to which we attach a cylinder that is glued to the middle of the cone or Dome mhm around that cylinder we Wrap aluminum or copper or silver wire mhm which becomes the voice coil so then we immerse our voice coil the coils of wire that are on The Voice call former glued to the core or Dome into a donut shaped magnet and now as we apply signal to the voice coil the voice coil inside the magnetic field moves up and down mhm and since the core of doome is attached to the voice coil it's trying to follow that movement against the resistive and restorative force of divisible rubber surround and the hidden second suspension which is called the spider which helps to Center The Voice call inside the Gap it just said connect are we still are we still good yeah I think we're still good I just maybe we let's start that again you dropped off then not me which is kind of weird okay let's let's let's take it from the top San immersing the voice call in a donut so now we are immersing our voice call inside a donut shaped magnet so we have the voice call surrounded or in a magnetic force field and as we apply signal the voice call wants to move up and down and being attached to the cone or Dome the cone or Dome is trying to follow the voice call movement against the resistive force of the visible surround M which is usually rubber could also be fo and there's a hidden inner suspension that centers the voice call so with a dynamic driver we have a lot of extra moving Mass the moving mass is the sum of the cone or Dome the surround the voice call The Voice call former and the inner suspension and our amplifier doesn't actually drive the driver our amplifier is driving the voice coil and then the voice call is transferring the movement to the cor or Dome that's trying to not lose its shape the good thing about the dynamic driver is it's completely open to the front there's nothing obscuring it a slight negative is that right behind it sits a magnet and that magnet becomes a barrier for first Reflections where the rear wave of the cor or Dome hits the magnet and then wants to return right back through the diaphragm apparently the first Dynamic driver was invented by Edward kellock and Chester rice in 1925 so it's 100 year old technology wow okay now that we've covered that what in a headphone would you say is the next most popular type of driver I think that would have to be a pler magnetic type driver correct and what that is is we're taking a plastic IC non-conductive foil and we are stretching it on a round or oval or even a square shaped frame like a drum skin now at top that that toally stretched foil we etch a voice call that can either be concentric or spiral shaped or it could be zigzag like Serpentine MH that's now our voice callil which is conductive to which we apply our signal and for the magnetic field to immerse that voice coil we need what's called Stave or window shutter magnets which go at least on one side of the foil but with a balanced motor on both sides of our driver so when the driver looks at the world or in our case at our ear it's like in jail it looks through a window through a window with bars okay so 50 % of that driver's surface is basically covered up and that again becomes a source of first reflections of resonances of air turbulence and of phase shift but the moving mass of that driver is a lot lower than that of a dynamic driver so that's the planer magnetic or planer driver mhm can you think of another type of driver that we use in headphones so the is the stacks headphone which is an electrostat exactly so the electrostat is not that dis similar in that it has a central membrane that is very thin but this time it's conductive and to that membrane we apply a permanent standing DC voltage usually around 550 volts could be up to 620 so our film is elect is electrically charged and we putting it between two opposingly charged plates MH that have holes in them so that the sound can go through no magnets we're not using electromagnetic force we're using static electricity to move that membrane in the middle mhm the probably most famous loudspeakers of their sort were the original Martin Logan yeah and sta is the original company that I believe popularized electrostatic loudspeakers but today we also have Dan Clark we have HiFi man we have Sennheiser Odyssey and we have Warwick okay now there's yet another one that happens to come from your city of Berlin okay oh you mean driver type yes so we're talking you're talking about the head audio their headphone that uses the uh air motion Transformer or AMT that that they pulled basically the topology from their speaker Tweeter and put it in a headphone with some significant tweaks to ensure that it covers as much of the audible range as possible although headphone 2 doesn't go much below 40 htz so an AMT is very similar to a plom magnetic driver in that we have a non-conductive foil which happens to be very long on that foil we apply voice call traces mhm but now unlike the planer we fold those voice we fold our film so it looks like an accordion with pleats and as we apply magnetic force to that voice call it's like an accordion either we are pushing or we are pulling so we're either squeezing air out from behind from between the pleats or we're sucking it back in mhm and now there is a fifth type driver which happens to be what is in that oddl looking headphone that we talked about and that is a ribbon okay now if I took the driver that is inside that headphone out it would look like this so you have here's one I made earlier so it's like a it's like a metal piece in a tray and but the metal piece is looks like it's it's corrugated it's wavy correct and the only thing that is missing from this narrow but long sliver of corrugated aluminum mhm are the magnets on either side on the long sides so unlike the plan of magnetic driver which is Edge clamped all around on the ribbon it's really only attached on the two narrow sides and it's completely free to move in between because the sides here are not attached so the longer sides it's free to move on on the two so it's it's like a long rectangle corrugated aluminium if you live in Europe and on the the two sort of pins ends it's it's it's held in place but it can move so wouldn't it move more in the middle than at the ends yes exactly it would move more in the middle and this particular driver has plus minus 4 millimet of xmax of Excursion potential okay now the interesting thing is that first of all there is nothing in front or behind the actual radiating surface it's completely open which is why it is possible in this type of oddl looking design to have open baffles we don't need an ear cup this is like an open baffle speaker that has radiation coming out the front and then anti-phase coming out the rear and the ribbon sits right here in the middle and you're not putting the driver in jail so it doesn't have to fire through magnets or anything like that right because the magnets are the the short ends right the magnets are on the long side the long side okay okay yeah right now the unusual thing is that we don't need a voice call on this because the entire aluminum or aluminium is conductive that means our amplifier drives every single portion or atom of this Mass okay directly right the problem is that because this thing is fully conductive it has nearly no resistance the impedance of this driver is 0.018 OHM okay that's like nearly a short circuit which is why when you see a ribbon tweter in the speaker invisible behind the tweter sits a Transformer mhm in a square little box yeah and that Transformer converts the low impedance to a high impedance so that the amplifier doesn't see a a virtual dead short but it sees six or eight ohms that it expects to see okay but because you can't put two Transformers on either side of our head it would be too heavy and it would be very unsightly what the designer of these ribbon headphones has done is he puts the transformer in a separate box that is shaped like a headphone stand ah okay so it's it's way down the signal like the C the other end of the cable right exactly so one end of the stand SL Transformer has a cable that will plug into the 6.3 or XLR 4 mil output of your standard headphone amplifier yeah and then the other side of the stand SL Transformer will have the regular headphone cable that plugs into the headphones but don't audio make an amplifier specific for that headphone that has the Transformer built into the chassis oh the chair is moving we can hear the chair it talks okay so you've got that then by the look of it so it's the yodenheim but it is for that particular ribbon type of headphone right it's the yodenheim r it is a direct drive amplifier made to drive dve that insanely low impedance but it's discontinued no already it's I didn't know that okay huh so in order to not rely on so-called direct drive ribbon amplifiers Alexander of raal which is the name of the company in Serbia that makes these headphones has designed this interface box okay so you can now connect those ribbon headphones to any ordinary headphone amplifier that puts out maybe two watts into 32 ohms because that's the impedance that the Transformer box will present to the amplifier it will think that it's seeing 32 ohms oh okay these two new headphones under the name r 1995 so not R requisite as the original brand and not ra ribbon as the loudspeaker Tweeter manufacturer is your cat Jo Shan does your cat want to say something about about yet not yet I'm sure I could hear him so we have two new models called the Magna and the immanis MH the Magna sells for 5700 without vat and the Imus sells for 8600 without vat so this is reallyit yeah yeah okay but now we have ear pillows we have ear cups we have a regular headband we are now having housebroken ribbons ribbon headphones that look like you would expect an expensive headphone to look like there should be images behind our two Talking Heads so people can see what they will look like they're not out yet they're being built as we speak and they will have their public Premiere at the heidleberg it's called the world of headphone is an event that's taking place next month okay and then they will also be at the Munich hen show at the OT and they will also have an exhibit at the parallel show in the Marriot and there's also upcoming a headfi meet called can jam in New York City but don't ask me about the date I I didn't memorize that I think canjam has moved this year I think it used to be in middle of February now it's I think it's early March I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure it is so it's a little bit later in the year but that's the Time Square at the hotel and Time Square very very popular event that that can jam in New York as they all are really but that one in New York is especially busy so I think it be yeah it'll be for me like this is interesting because I would never ever pick up a pair of those ra requisite ribbons that you have if I saw them on a table i' be like no because for me a head a headphones Joy is not just his sound it's his comfort being enveloped and you know having that kind of easy relaxed feeling and I look at the rils and go oh no that's just going to put me on edge and I will be sat like with a excuse my my saying this with a pole at my ass like this like like no I'm not not doing that so I think it would be this is the right move even though the pricing is only for certain people but is to yeah make um it's almost like domesticating a rib exact a ribbon headphone right it I call it house broken Salon fa yes the unique thing about these new ones is that the Marner uses two ribbons in parallel and the amanus is using three okay and they're wired up in serious so that the impedance goes up rather than going down right and now I will explain why this is my preferred headphone driver and we already covered the fact that there's nothing in front there's nothing behind there's no extra moving Mass this can't store any energy energy and on the open baffle the right ear hears what the left channel is doing and the Left Channel here's what the right ear is doing it's a little bit more like speaker listening due to the open baffles and even the new circum model models they have an open area in the front of the ear in the ear cup that again deliberately leaks some sound so we have some cross feed going on it's a little bit more similar to speaker listening than this complete locked in the head Imaging y yeah now most likely the most transparent headphone would have probably been considered a Stacks electrostat but we would we would have described it as being very fast very open very transparent zero Distortion unbelievable trouble out to bad land but not so much not so much base no a little a little lightweight and maybe not as dynamic as we would like or as we are used to from dynamic driv mhm and the ribbons to my ears are what Falls between an electrostat for Speed transparency and all of that more Dynamics than a dynamic driver because it's a lot faster it has no moving Mass uh it responds much faster it stops much faster and unlike you might think a ribbon in close proximity to the ear can actually do low base okay now these open bath ribbon were limited to about the mid-30s because there's some cancellation going on of phase and so without DSP or an analog EQ they can't really be made to go lower and so that's why on these new ones he's increasing the surface area time two or times three and he is having some air that is trapped between the driver and the ear it's like loading it's like boundary loading just like when you put speakers really close to the wall so you get more lower louder Bas mhm and so what I would say to people that have listened to where these will be showing I would simply say that if you are the kind of person that would not say no to being handed the key to a Lamborghini or Ferrari and the guy says here you want to take it for a test drive for half an hour just make sure you bring it back without a scratch if you're the type of person who would say yes I would suggest if you have an opportunity go listen to these even if you have no interest in headfire whatsoever I think that this will give you an experience of what's possible and the reason why that can be interesting is that ever since I got these four years ago I found fault with my speaker systems I heard everything that they couldn't do okay less extension in the treble less Dynamics more congested sounding more thick and woly and especially in the base much slower stoppage so when the when these stop instantaneously so a clap is a clap and it's not like and you hear the bo that's what I wanted and it's taken me four years and a lot of listening and money to sort of change my speaker systems to approach so not equal what these ribbon headphones can do I'll add an iceing to that that point about pricing is that these new models are going to sell for a similar price to that which I spent on fitting this office out with acoustic treatments and obviously with headphones you sidestep all that nonsense completely so I mean if I guess I mean These acoustic treatments I've got here are probably a great a great way to show the advantages of headphones you know you could put all the money from that into a pair of these new R 1995 headphones and that's it done correct and I think that you will probably make better sound than most people will ever be able to achieve with loudspeakers no matter the kind of money you have I think that's and the other thing that's very obvious to headphone lovers not so much to people that don't ever do headphones is that you cut out the room you cut out noise leakage so you don't bother somebody next door which means you can listen when you want to the kind of music you want add the volumes you want which with loudspeakers is not the case if we have neighbors or signific and others we are always limited mhm and also because the headphones take out the room in my mind and I think you would agree is that if you really want to know what is on your recordings in terms of detail that's not lost by distance and in terms of the recorded tonal balance as to how much space should there be and how tight or wooly or warm or or or or dry the recorded base really is you need headphones if if you're listening in a room even with treatments that won't be effective below 200 htz you're still not quite clear what the what the base really should listen should sound like before the room messes it all up absolutely I mean there's nothing going on behind me that is is touching anything below three well maybe 100 is probably as low as some of these base traps up here go but even then low Bas forget it headphones are a light years ahead of loudspeakers in a room and I guess is the the kind of the the a fact that I get frustrated with but I know it's true because I would much prefer to sit in in front of loudspeakers in a room but I know that for example these headphones I'm wearing the mes 109 109 Pro you know it's like having a five grand like loudspeaker system on my head and they're like 80099 yeah yeah just I just think it's that kind of leveling so it's it's a bit frustrating for for us as loudspeaker listeners yeah to get the key to the Ferrari and then we have to go back to our Ford Fiesta you know it's I don't know and one last uh thing that I learned just today is that uh it takes raw one man working eight hours a day to make two and a half ribbons wow so for the IM Manus with six of them one guy has to work 2 and a half days just to make the drivers and I'm told that that's why ribbons don't lend themselves to mass manufacturer unlike other drivers that makes sense there's so much manual labor involved it is so time consuming that in order to make him well you can't make very many of them at any one time and they will be expensive I think these headphones will be sold out before they even come to Market they already are the first run is sold out there we go yeah limited Supply and all that yeah so Johan I think our work is done here and I want to thank you for sticking through this fairly challenging podcast recording what listeners and viewers might not know but if you see the the kind of jump Cuts is that my internet dropped out one two three four times during this recording and we had to kind of restart and resume so San thanks for joining us and thanks for your patience thank you see you next time
