Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

Let start from far away….

Sometime in the past, while I was fighting with bad electricity, I was trying a variety of symmetric transformers. I do not know if they were implemented as good as they should (I doubt) but I detected an interesting common tendency with the entire class of those units. In addition to objectively and subjectively cleaning up what they call “harmonic noise”, substantially minimizing all possible loops and “enriching’ the lower bass the balanced transformers did something that forced me to abandon their use. Along with that harmonic noise reducing they subtract from music a lot of useful information, namely they artificially expedited upper-bass/lower-midrange (something that I call an “audio seriousness zone”), created a generic lower bass++, and the most important they inappropriately sharpen the parabola with which the notes roll to it’s pitch, making sound too “sharp”. I understand why the wide audiophiles community very welcome to those affects with their unfortunate addiction to the immediately beneficial Sound but I personally find this Sound very appalling.

Later, I made some experiments with powering my phonostages and I detected that a sympatric half way rectification with consequential voltage doubling produce quite similar effects. However, in the power supplies the effect was less revolting and there were many opportunities to mask out the result with use of the different type of capacitors, to use different damping sound by LC chain or some other means. With a proper selection of a symmetric rectification and “complementary” filtering methods it was possible to get a good balance between speed, accelerations and harmonic acoustic-like saturations, however the effect of that none-intelligent striping harmonics by use of symmetric application still manifested itself…

Lately I made many experiments with open baffles type of speakers. I always liked them for certain things but something unnamed bothered me when I listened them and I did not know what it was. A month or so ago I come up with an revelation. I made a realization that in sound character of an open baffle I taste the well known to me signature of symmetric applications. The open baffles always sound very attractive; the interesting question is why they so hugely eliminate the dependencies of sonic result from a quality of drivers and from the way in witch the drivers were used electrically. There is always a point with open baffles where a speaker suddenly flips out, stop radiate a “personalized sound” and fill a room with a generic sound. Does it happen when the open baffles at their lower knee starts to act as a dipole and those hidden rules of symmetric applications begin to take over? Isn’t is why the open baffles, regardless of the driver’s quality, produce the same “assisted sound” in their lower bass? What happens when the positive and negative fronts of the waves meet and compliment themselves and why they act so remarkably similar-negatively in acoustic and electronics? Has it anything to do with the fact that in live sound we most likely do not have any natural dipoles and that we are not tuned to the symmetric acoustics?  Or perhaps there are some idiosyncrasies of the symmetric implementations that might be important and that would be responsible for the result?

Anyhow, I detect that the “symmetric things”, if they used, then they should be used very watchful and observant as I learned that there are some long-term negative consequences of this “assisted symmetric sound”.  With the dipoles, very similar to the symmetric electronic topologies, the listing awareness become too instantly contented and the most important become addicted to be gratified to instantly and to effortlessly. This leads to a “thinner” less challenged musical appreciation. Not a good thing, I have to mention….

I do like the open baffles; I do like the symmetric power supplies… Now, the question is why the rest of topologies sound like Sound but the Symmetric Sound sounds like a Sound Attempt instead of a Sound Result?

I’m wondering….

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site