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-   -   The Audiophoolery Thread. (https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=140332)

Valvepower 30th Aug 2021 11:11 am

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Hi,

I use the Wolfson (now Cirrus) WM8805 interface receiver, which uses PLL and an Elastic Buffer – I’ve always smiled at the name Elastic Buffer as I visualize a small rubber band sitting in the IC stretching the data :), anyway I’ve had this receiver working at 192Kb/s using a Toshiba receiver and a good quality short optical lead (from memory less than a tenner).

There is an AES paper, which I have found on the net, as once it was actually on the Wolfson web site before they were sadly sold to Cirrus, but for obvious reasons have not put the PDF on the forum. This can be found by going to the Wiki page link below and going to Refence 12 at the bottom of the page.

A_high_performance_SPDIF_receiver_Oct_2006.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/PDIF

Terry

Valvepower 30th Aug 2021 12:27 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Valvepower (Post 1402412)
Hi,

I’ve had this receiver working at 192Kb/s using a Toshiba receiver

Terry

Oops...., sorry captain cock-up paid me a visit and it should have been... working at sample Rate of 192KHz using a Toshiba receiver....

The Philpott 30th Sep 2021 12:05 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
For idle interest readers may want to visit the website of SW1X Audio Design. They are part of the Clartes Group (?)

In the interests of balance there is genuine effort being put into their bespoke products, but the conspicuous lack of a price list (if you have to ask, you can't afford it presumably) and a delve into the text is revealing. Numerous spelling & grammar mistakes, and esoteric language like 'transparent' and 'holography' keep cropping up.

Note they apparently have a vacancy for an Assembler, but this requires experience with using surface mount components....SMD is not something i would want to see if i was ever of a mind to spend thousands of pounds on equipment. Anyone interested?

If they should ever happen to read this, i'm not having a pop lads, i'm just telling it the way it is. I would happily proof read and copy edit their website, but i would certainly charge for it.

Dave

Craig Sawyers 30th Sep 2021 12:42 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Very many high quality or high end audio products use surface mount now. There is a dwindling quantity of through hole parts, particularly but not uniquely, semiconductors.

Even the obsolete and lamented BC560C/BC550C lives on as the BC860C/BC850C. Same piece of silicon, but in surface mount rather than through hole. The only downside is lower power handling.

But looking at SW1X's site it is all valved, and through hole. Can't find a surface mount board on the internal pictures.

Craig

Welsh Anorak 30th Sep 2021 12:48 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Having recently had a high end valved amplifer on the bench which used tagstrips, rat's nest and copious amounts of hot-melt, give me well-engineered surface-mount any day!
Of course point-to-point can be a masterpiece of execution, but certainly not all, even at these prices.

The Philpott 30th Sep 2021 2:55 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Exactly Craig, which makes it odd that they require someone with SMD experience..(i suppose double sided boards could be concealing things)
dave

M0AFJ, Tim 30th Sep 2021 3:09 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by The Philpott (Post 1410592)
For idle interest readers may want to visit the website of SW1X Audio Design. They are part of the Clartes Group (?)

In the interests of balance there is genuine effort being put into their bespoke products, but the conspicuous lack of a price list (if you have to ask, you can't afford it presumably) and a delve into the text is revealing. Numerous spelling & grammar mistakes, and esoteric language like 'transparent' and 'holography' keep cropping up.

Note they apparently have a vacancy for an Assembler, but this requires experience with using surface mount components....SMD is not something i would want to see if i was ever of a mind to spend thousands of pounds on equipment. Anyone interested?

If they should ever happen to read this, i'm not having a pop lads, i'm just telling it the way it is. I would happily proof read and copy edit their website, but i would certainly charge for it.

Dave

Hope you are sitting down


https://sw1xad.co.uk/wp-content/uplo..._list_2020.pdf

Guest 30th Sep 2021 3:25 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
The DACs use SMT.

The Philpott 30th Sep 2021 3:55 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
All the way up to £90k! Thanks Tim, i was sitting down, mainly due to my big toe. (£250 to sort that out next month now seems quite reasonable)
Dave

Malcolm G6ANZ 30th Sep 2021 5:40 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Strange how all the inc vat prices are nice round numbers.

Craig Sawyers 30th Sep 2021 5:59 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Well spotted regarding VAT!

Lets do some ball park calculations. And we'll assume some bonkers components - teflon capacitors, tantalum resistors etc. So lets say £1k for the guts. And there are some expensive looking transformers in there. So lets say £1k for those. Add £1k for the rest of the hardware, case, connectors etc. Suppose it takes a week to build, so add £1k for that.

That looks like £4k. Add to that 6 months development, prototype costs amortised over 20 units. So around £30k divided by 20 to get £1.5k per unit. Add facilities cost (rent, heating, lighting, admin etc). That has to be added across the product range and volume, but call that another k per unit.

So the total all-up cost is £6.5k per unit. If we assume an average unit selling price of £50k, that looks like a decent margin!

Craig

Craig Sawyers 30th Sep 2021 6:09 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
However, the flip side is - it is ****** hard to make money out of hifi.

Back 30 years I spent a torrid couple of years as CTO of Wharfedale. And it was very difficult to make profit. In our case, although we made of order 100,000 pairs of speakers a year, the selling chain was long. We sold to distributors, who would sell to retailers. Distributors would take a 50% margin, and retailers a 30-40% margin. So, per speaker pair, Wharfedale made less profit than the distributors and retailers. It was even worse shipping overseas.

So although the calculation above looks stark, I suspect that their volumes are very low. The higher the price, the lower the volume. Simple really.

And the audio market is volatile. Recession hits, or people are worried about some other thing, and ****! sales plummet. It regularly kills small audio companies, and some larger ones too, often rescued by being sold to the Chinese.

Craig

elanman99 30th Sep 2021 6:12 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Malcolm G6ANZ (Post 1410699)
Strange how all the inc vat prices are nice round numbers.

Quite normal to market products at particular retail price points, whether its £19.99 or £23.00 the Pre-VAT price will have been adjusted to suit the price tag.

One could say that SW1X are being quite open on their price list.


Ian

Craig Sawyers 30th Sep 2021 6:14 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Is the starred out mild profanity thing automatic? I don't use rude words, (at least in posts)! So I just use words like ***** and *********.;D

Craig Sawyers 16th Nov 2021 11:39 am

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Here we go - cables with no characteristic impedance. You heard it here first.

https://www.audioquest.com/resource/...oes-cables.pdf

Craig Sawyers 16th Nov 2021 11:47 am

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Just for reference: "AudioQuest Dragon price for 8 feet full-range: $27,500/pair USD or $48,600/pair USD for BiWire configuration."

Radio Wrangler 16th Nov 2021 1:34 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers (Post 1424773)
Here we go - cables with no characteristic impedance. You heard it here first.

Perfectly easy. Nothing new. Characteristic impedance is a paramerter, one of many. To make a cable without a characteristic impedance, just set the length parameter to zero.

These cables are very cheap, and you can have any number of them you like, any number less than infinity that is.

But with a sub-infinite number of them concatenated, their overall length is still zero, and your speakers must be bolted right onto the terminals of your amplifier.

I see that firm do bi-wiring the idea being that special cables better carry different frequencies. So in music we have about 88 different notes on a piano as a guide to the number of fundamentals flying around (a couple more on a Bosendorfer) so why aren't the really top end speakers strung with 88+ speaker cables? Each carefully optimised.

David

Ted Kendall 16th Nov 2021 2:12 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
:-)

Craig Sawyers 16th Nov 2021 3:03 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Biwire? My speakers are quintuple wired. Well in fairness they do use an active crossover and a separate amp for each driver.

Precisely like this https://www.linkwitzlab.com/LX521/LX521_4.htm .

Siegfried Linkwitz spent his working life at HP, designing microwave test equipment. Now alas gone to the great hifi emporium in the sky, but left a legacy of landmark open baffle and monpole designs. The Linkwitz-Riley crossover alignment bears his name, and that of another lifelong HP guy, Russ Riley (also now designing gear upstairs).

Craig

Valvepower 16th Nov 2021 3:33 pm

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 
Next time I’m doing EMC compliance testing and I encounter some susceptibility problems with inputs or outputs I’ll use those ZERO Technology cables and it will doubt solve the problem straight away.…. At that point the hardened EMC engineers will drag me out into the carpark for ritual humiliation :D


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