We’ve all been there. We need a new amp or a new pair of speakers, so we head out into the world wide web looking for reviews, forum posts, or any piece of advice we can find that will help us determine if a particular piece of gear is the right one for our system. In the end, we won’t really know if it’s right until we hook it up and start listening.
And even then, it can take time to reveal the equipment’s true character. Things we like at first may, down the road, turn out to be much less desirable than we originally thought. Or the good things we hear may be good things, but might also come with other things that are not so good.
Let’s face it, building a great sounding analog audio system is just plain hard.
Several years ago I set out to rebuild my system. I’ve since transformed what was a fairly typical and underwhelming sounding audiophile system into a system that sounds as neutral, uncolored, and highly revealing as any I’ve heard. Not to mention that it also sounds pretty damn good!
When I started, I’m not sure I really know what having a neutral sounding system meant exactly. All I knew was that Tom Port said building such a system would be the best way to get every last bit of gloriousness out of a Hot Stamper. And with the handful of Hot Stampers I had at the time already sounding pretty wonderful to me, I could only imagine then what he was talking about.
Now I no longer need to imagine. I can hear exactly what Tom has talked about over and over the many years he’s extolled the virtues of Hot Stampers and the shootout process he’s developed to find them. Hot Stampers, and records with the qualities they have, just sound right, and the more neutral the system the more right they sound.
It also turns out that a neutral sounding system is ideal for evaluating equipment. If I introduce a different component in my system and it doesn’t sound right, it will stick out like a sore thumb. Power and phono amps are especially easy for me to evaluate. I’ve tried several and with each I knew in about 60 seconds whether I liked them or not.
Interconnects have been a little trickier. I’ve used 5 different ICs since I started changing my system, managing on several occasions to find a different set that could push my system one more step forward. Along the way, I’ve tried several others, and it’s pretty clear to me now what the right set of ICs must do for me to keep them.
Any cable, or really anything at all I use in my system, must enhance my system’s best qualities without adding anything unwanted or subtracting anything essential. Which is to say, the right cable or system change must allow my system to sound even more right than it already does.
I expect some of you reading this might be asking this question – what in the heck do you mean by “right”? How can a qualitative word be a meaningful descriptor? Aren’t you using a subjective viewpoint in place of an objective observation? Aren’t you just saying it sounds “right” to you?
The thing is, when you spend a lot of time doing shootouts – playing and evaluating different copies of the same record, you eventually hear a record in a way that is convincingly appropriate for the music on it. As you do this for more and more titles, you start to get a clearer and clearer sense of when any record sounds right, or not.
Perhaps I could use an only slightly more (or less?) helpful word – musical. When a record sounds right, it will invariably sound musical.
Records and systems that sound musical are as free of distracting artificiality as possible. When a record plays on an audio system and it sounds musical, we can relax, settle in and enjoy the music. We are engaged by these records in a way that other, less musical sounding records don’t engage us.
When we play a record on our system and that record sounds right and it sounds musical, we are approaching the endgame in audio. With these records we don’t feel the need to evaluate the sound anymore. We can stop being an audiophile, for a little while anyway, and bask in the sheer joy of being a music lover. We’re free to lose our self in the music.
For this reason I advocate for building both our audio systems as well as our record collections with the goal of finding the right sound for the music we love. This approach has yielded results for myself and a handful of others that have exceeded any expectations I ever had for what a stereo could sound like.
It is with this goal in mind that I continue seeking ways to improve my system. Sometimes I find great success with seemingly small changes. Sometimes I make mistakes that slow my progress. Fortunately, even these mistakes eventually lead to useful knowledge and insights that ultimately lead to better sound.
The following is an example of a mistake I made that taught me something extremely useful. It also taught me a lesson that I feel more audiophiles need to learn – just because the science behind something suggests it ought to work, doesn’t necessarily mean it will.
Recently I submitted an article to the Audiophile Foundation for their newsletter. I was then asked in advance of this article’s release to post my system in the “Members Systems” section of their forum, which I did.
This fellow member, let’s call him Frank, saw my post and decided to contact me.
F – Would love to hear it some time. I am retired in San Jose. I am the ferrite evangelist, and can recommend/demo a few other tweaks.
While by default skeptical, I managed to stay open to the idea of having Frank over and we arranged a day and time. When he did come, we established a good rapport fairly quickly and then jumped right into some listening.
I played a few records, and then Frank suggested we try putting a couple of the ferrite collars he’d brought on the power cord for my amp, which we did. I could tell right away the sound had changed, and seemingly for the better. The record, a fantastic recording of Bizet’s Carmen, sounded more transparent and the bass clearer with more presence.
Before he left, Frank left me some of his ferrite collars to continue playing with in my system. Over the next few weeks I added the ferrite collars, one at a time, to my power cords, interconnects and phono cables.
Each time I added another, the sound of my system seemed to become more transparent. I was struck by how much easier it was for me to hear the bass and those elements of the music that were recorded further from the microphone at the back of the studio or hall. Seemingly, the ferrite collars were allowing me to “see” more easily “into” the recording.
I sent Frank an email:
Me – The ferrites are a revelation! With each one my system gets more and more transparent. They seem to have the biggest effect on my phono cables and interconnects, but I haven’t had the big chunk of time I’ll need to really dive into serious testing. So far I love what they do for the sound of my records. Thank you!
At this point I had about 30 ferrite collars and had added most of them to my PCs, IC and phono cable. I’m not alway at liberty to listen at the volume I prefer, and during most of this time I’d been listening at lower volume.
When I had the chance to really dive in and listen at higher volume, the story changed. I started to hear things I didn’t like. I started to realize that these ferrites were not helping the sound of my system the way I had originally thought.
I sent Frank another, very looooong email.
Me – I’ve been focusing much of my audiophile time and energy over the past several weeks on using ferrite collars in my system and attempting to better understand how they affect its sound and, more importantly, the sound of my records and the recordings on them.
Before I get into that, I wanted to extend a sincere thank you for taking the time to come to my listening room and introduce me to these fascinating little devices. I’d say that my experience with ferrite collars since your visit has been one of the single most important learning experiences I’ve had as an audiophile.
As you may recall, when you were here we added 2 to the power cord for my “amp”, and you then left me with 4 more to add as I wished. I added 2 of those to the power cord to my EAR 324 phono preamp, one to my interconnects and one to the wired phono cable from my Triplanar tonearm.
Adding these ferrite collars to these wires initially reinforced my earlier assessment that each one I added audibly and appreciably improved transparency in my system. I was struck by how I seemed to be able to “hear into” the recordings I played. For instance, on the Sonny Rollins album The Bridge, the bass that opens the track “God Bless The Child” sounded more weighty and present. It also seemed to go deeper.
On Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, I heard a similarly fleshed out and more clearly defined bass on the opening track “So What.” I’ve always found it tough getting clarity in the bass with that album, and it’s one of the things that I’ve found that sets the better copies apart from the lesser ones. With more ferrite collars on my wires, I seemed to be hearing it better than I’d ever remembered.
On Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Deja Vu, I found I could make out the vocal tracks more easily. There seemed to be more clarity to the voices, and the individual character of each singer seemed easier for me to appreciate.
On a handful of my classical LPs I was also hearing things differently than I had before. On Mercury SR90300, with Byron Janis playing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Moscow philharmonic, I was astonished by how I could make out each of the instruments with much greater ease.
Likewise with the Stravinsky record I loaned you, the Pulcinella Suite on the first side seemed to come to life in a way I hadn’t experienced before. And once again, it seemed I was having an easier time making out the instruments, as though I could choose to tune into each and every instrument in the orchestra at will.
I ordered 30 of my own ferrite collars, and these turned out to be identical to the ones you loaned me. When those arrived, I added more to both sets of ICs, and more to both PCs and returned your 6. I added them one at a time and found that with each one, the effects I’d been hearing and that I describe above only increased.
At this point it’s important to state the following – I did much of this listening at “lower” levels. My listening room is adjacent to the workspace that my wife and I use to see clients. I often listen when I’m in between clients, and very often at the same time my wife is working. Therefore, I need to keep the volume down to a level that prevents my listening from being a distraction for her.
When I had the opportunity to listen at the volume I prefer, more in the 70 to 80 db range I’d guess, I first played the Byron Janis record again. And again, I was struck by how every instrument in the orchestra seemed to jump out at me at the same time. It was exciting! Almost overwhelming.
But the piano, which I’m used to hearing as weighty and prominent at center stage, sounded more vague, and seemed somehow lost in all the excitement.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the sound of this record was, in fact, overwhelming. That’s when I started to realize that there was something about this sound that was wrong.
A couple of weekends ago we had some friends visiting and they wanted to hear my stereo. We went down after dinner and I played Joni Mitchell’s Blue for my friend Tammy, who’s a big Joni fan. My stereo, again at lower levels, had been sounding wonderful earlier that day, so I expected to be blown away by it. It sounded pretty good, but again, there was something not right. The record sounded too thin and harmonically off in some way.
Next I played Black Sabbath’s debut for Tammy’s husband Scott, as I knew he was a Sabbath fan. If you’re not already familiar with the album, it opens with a massive rain storm. Thunder cracks crack, sheets of rain fall, it can be quite thrilling on the right copy.
Except, it wasn’t. The thunder claps were clearer, but lacked size and impact. The rain didn’t sound as “wet.” It sounded good, but not as I expected it to and not as I had heard from this copy on other occasions. I was disappointed. And when the band came in and the music started, again it sounded thin and unremarkable.
Next, figuring if Tammy was a Joni fan she’d be into David Crosby, I played her a track off his debut, “Laughing”. I have an excellent copy of this record, and again, I was expecting to love it. Instead, something was immediately off with the vocal track. It seemed somehow lost in the back of the mix, and overall the sound lacked the room-filling warmth this album typically has.
Whenever I demo my stereo for friends and my wife is there, she always wants me to play a track off of the Queen album News of the World called “Get Down, Make Love”. I played it this particular evening, and it sounded incredible! At the time I thought this was the best I’d ever heard it sound. As Scott put it, it was so intense it sounded like the speakers were going to tear apart. We ended with this track so I quickly forgot about the other, less impressive songs from the demo.
We left for a couple of days with me thinking about how great that Queen song sounded. My sense that the ferrite collars were, as I put it to you in an earlier email, “a revelation” persisted. I was really looking forward to getting back and playing some more of my records.
When I did manage to have another serious listening session, I decided to pull out a London Records release of Chabrier’s Espana with Ansermet conducting the L’Orchestra de la Suisse Romande. I hadn’t played it in a while, but it had always blown me away with its size, space, power and highly articulate presentation.
I put it on and I quickly heard a distinct lack of weight in the low end of the recording. Soon after, an awful glare rose from the string section. I immediately knew something was terribly off. I adjusted the VTA and unplugged every appliance I could and still it wasn’t right.
Then I thought of some advice a friend had given me about using Cat Stevens’ Tea For the Tillerman as a test disc. I put on the opening track and quickly realized something wasn’t right about how that record was sounding either.
When you were here you spoke about how (I’m paraphrasing here) when we remove noise from a system, we start to hear things on the record as they actually sound, not how they sound when the noise is there. I believe you said something along these lines, and I’ve had that statement in the back of my mind through this whole experience.
My rudimentary understanding of how these ferrite collars work is that they remove radio frequency from the signal, and therefore remove a type of noise that can interfere with the sound of our system. The more you add, the more they do this and the more transparent and open sounding our records sound. It’s like magic!
Only, I was beginning to hear that they weren’t just removing noise, they were changing the tonality of the music, and even rolling off the high and low end. On Tea For the Tillerman, the acoustic guitars sounded overly metallic, aggressive and lacking in harmonic sweetness.
This was the last straw! I started to remove the ferrite collars from my cables and, low and behold, the sound of my system started to improve.
Once I had the ferrites totally off my IC’s and phono cable, Tillerman was sounding dramatically better. Then I started taking them off the PC to my EAR 324 and once they were all off, the correct harmonic tone of the acoustic guitar came back, and the vocal sounded more natural and more naturally “placed” in the listening room.
I went back to the Chabrier and that was sounding better also, but there was still some glare on the strings and horns that I didn’t like and that I didn’t think needed to be there. I then proceeded to remove the remaining ferrite collars from the PC to my amp and the glare was reduced significantly. I expect I could remove the glare nearly altogether if I used my Talisman on my system and unplugged more appliances, but it wasn’t practical to do that at the time.
I was really hoping, actually, that these ferrite collars would allow me to not have to do any serious unplugging and still get the same level of size, space and transparency I’d experienced on the occasions I have been able to unplug a lot of things. Unplugging appliances is not always practical or even possible, and for a while, it seemed, that what unplugging does for the sound was what the ferrite collars were doing.
But unfortunately, while they may be doing some of that, they are also doing a whole lot else that is simply not acceptable. Beyond the specific examples I’ve given, the overall effect seems to be that while they do remove noise, they are also removing subtle transients and rolling off the top end (thus the glare and distortion of harmonics). In a way, they do for my system what the Triad power conditioner* did – make my records sound more like CDs.
*Frank had also recommended I try a particular power isolation device.
On that Queen song, for instance, the instruments and vocals are very closely mic’d, which is partly why the song can sound so intense. With the ferrites, I’d guess, the “effect” the band was going for with the recording was enhanced, but it’s not a track that I would necessarily call “musical,” as they go.
I’m under the impression that you’re “all in,” as they say, on these ferrite collars. And since you’re using the Triad power conditioners, which in my experience cause a similar mischief as these ferrites, your system is likely already missing a lot of what the ferrite collars seem to take away. Therefore the differences may not be as obvious to you as they were to me.
This is the advantage of using comparisons of records, or what is commonly known record shootouts, as the basis for system building. When you play a lot of different copies of the same title, and you do that for more and more titles, you really begin to develop your ear for what the “right” sound for a piece of music is. From there you can begin to hear when records and the system playing them sound “right” or not. It’s a huge help in avoiding the sort of pitfalls that, IMO, things like ferrite collars and power conditioners land us in.
You may not be interested in the advice of someone whose system you found to be merely “listenable,” but I feel it is my duty to encourage you to backpedal on these and see what happens. I have a very hard time believing these are not affecting your system in a way very similar to the way they did mine. And the way they were affecting mine is to make it sound less much musical and frankly less engaging to listen to.
A little while later, Frank responded, addressing one of the statements I’d made in my email.
F – The ferrites cannot remove anything from the signal which is carried buy the differential mode on the hot and return conductors in all line-level and power cables because the magnetic fields around the desired hot and return currents essentially cancel each other out before they get to the ferrite.
Granted, this is not exactly true unless it is a coaxial cable with well distributed currents, but it will be very, very close to true in most realistic situations. The ferrites efficiently remove common mode noise propagating on the cables which is a priori undesirable.
As example of the source of such undesired common-mode RF is the current spikes in the power rectifiers when some charge has left the storage capacitors. The common-mode RF is not a problem in itself: its RF and we can’t hear it and most speakers cannot transduce it. I hypothesize that there are demodulation processes that “detect” the RF back into the audio band where it corrupts the signals.
So, as far as I can see, it is theoretically impossible for the ferrites to remove signal, they only remove noise.
While I appreciated the lesson in electrical engineering, I could see that Frank and I were quickly approaching an impasse. I’d seen a photo of Frank’s stereo and knew he was using into the hundreds of these ferrite collars in his system. He therefore seemed pretty convinced of their benefits.
I, on the other hand, am convinced of the opposite. And no matter how compelling the reasons might be for why these ferrite collars should improve the sound of my system, my experience showed me otherwise.
I’m all for understanding how things work in this world, but I’m of the growing opinion that when it comes the many questions that arise in audio, sometimes there just are no good answers, even from very smart people who understand the science behind the questions.
Why is it, for instance, that a cheap, mass production amplifier made back in the 1970s and never meant for the audiophile market outperforms every “audiophile” amp I’ve heard. So far I have found no satisfying answer to that question, and I somehow doubt I ever will.
And you know, I’m fine with that. I don’t need to understand everything there is to understand about audio. All I need to do is to keep finding and playing great sounding records and to keep searching for the equipment and tweaks that help my system play those records even better.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave the science to the scientists and just get on with the business of getting better sound.