Posted on Thursday, 22nd July 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I don’t like expensive cable. My most expensive one was Kimber, the lower one was Synergistic Research. But I was stunned when listened my friend’s Duelund interconnect 0.5 and 2.0. Now, Duelund launches their new interconnect, the 2.0 Rev 2. This Rev 2 means the improvement over the original 2.0. They said, this one has more silver and better (silk) insulation. Ok, I have put half of my feet on the water, there’s no way back, let’s go deeper (that means, go deep inside your pocket to get this one).

The main ingredients of this cable is Silver (oil impregnated) with Silk insulation.

If we are talking Duelund CAST Silver as the most expensive capacitor, their cable is not even close to the most expensive one (like Pear Cable, Kubala Sosna, or Nordost Valhalla). But still, spending over US$ 40 per foot/single cable has never been an easy job.

The appearance more likely like a silver tape with my old socks! Well, it’s a silk though!

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Tags: Cardas, Duelund, Interconnect
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Posted on Thursday, 22nd July 2010 by Jimmy Auw

Actually, this is an old recording. I listened the first few years ago in XRCD format. I lost the CD, and suddenly I saw a SACD one on an audio shop in Singapore. Surely I wouldn’t miss it. This record also available in JVC K2 HD format, at almost double the cost. I picked the SACD one then, since I didn’t really know the K2 HD style. This SACD has Proprius label, which also well know with the “Jazz at the Pawnshop”.

The SACD format used on this album is Hybrid Multichannel. It means that you can play in on your ordinary 20-years old CD Player or your new sophisticated US$ 5000 SACD multichannel player. All can do. The surround effect on this – I believe – was created on purpose for the SACD label. The original master shouldn’t have surround track. I don’t really care about it since my main focus is stereo only.

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Tags: Choirs, SACD
Posted in CD/DVD Review | Comments (3)

Posted on Wednesday, 21st July 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I love the Duelund CAST Resistor sound on my speaker crossover. Despite its cost, it’s better than some of my previous favorites, like Sfernice or Mills (YMMV). But since they are designed for crossover application, so they don’t have such high value. I manage to get special order one, custom value at 299R.

Definitely, 299R is not a common value at crossover application. Not even close.

One measured at 303.6R while the other measured at 305.6R. At 0.6-1.6% accuracy, I think it should be fine.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

I plan to put this cute black resistor on Grid application, on my tube preamp. Which preamp, we will see later

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Tags: Duelund, Duelund Cast Capacitor, Duelund Cast Resistor
Posted in Collectible Stuff | Comments (2)

Posted on Sunday, 18th July 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I this world, there are lot of tubes, with different filament supply. In most of my tube rectification application, I stand with two choice of rectifier, the one with 5 Volt filament (most Octal and UX type) and the others with 4 Volt filament (RGN or AZ families).

The best way to use two type of rectifier with different filament voltage is to use dedicated switch to select the exact filament voltage. You can also use Resistor to drop the filament voltage (up to 1V drop and 1A), but this way is not recommended due to a lot of heat must be dissipated (also not too good in terms of sound quality to).

I just finish the switch installation this afternoon. Now I can choose to use 4 Volt or 5 Volt filamen voltage. You can see the picture below.

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Tags: Aikido, preamp, RGN, tube rectifier
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Posted on Saturday, 17th July 2010 by Jimmy Auw

Due to my busy time, I haven’t written much on this blog. But in next few weeks, some hot entries will come -  as I have purchased some new toys. Wait and see…

Let’s fill the entry with some “light-weight” topic. I bought some CD during my business trip last week. Let’s enjoy some.

Standard CD, although considered as an obsolete formats for many years, but still become a most used audio format until now. We have seen DVD-Audio and SACD were the strongest candidates to terminte Red Book CD Audio. But still, CD Audio maintains its superiority as widely used audio format, until present time. Perhaps we can see the digital storage format like WAV or loseless stored in your giant HDD, someday will terminate the life of the CD Player. But before that time comes, we still enjoy the CD as the main audio source.

I knew JVC recording long time ago. It was XRCD (eXtended Resolution Compact Disc), continued with XRCD2 and XRCD24. About one or two years ago, they release K2 HD format, which claimed to provide better sound at standard Red Book CD Audio, without additional decoder. Could it be?

This is one recommended collection from FIM, contains various artist. All remastered with K2 HD technique.

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Tags: HDCD, JVC, K2 HD, SACD, XRCD
Posted in CD/DVD Review | Comments (1)

Posted on Wednesday, 23rd June 2010 by Jimmy Auw

This post is the 2nd episode of my Terratec Aureon 7.1 FireWire mod. You can check the 1st one here.

Below is the final appearance of my Aureon. Sigh… despite the colorful capacitors, I don’t see any reason to say it’s a beauty or an art

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Tags: aureon, Black Gate, mundorf, sound card, speaker
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Posted on Monday, 21st June 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I’ve been very busy later these days, almost no time even to refresh myself listening the music. Powering my tube amp, let them warm up won’t take less than 30 minutes. Well for next few weeks, I don’t think I have such time. Now, I spend most of my time in front of my Notebook, limited with poor onboard sound card and speakers.

After digging my cupboard, I found a pair of Altec Lansing MX5021 speakers and my old Terratec Aureon FireWire 7.1. Not the finest setup and my ears were irritated to hear the sound at first time, although they were better than my onboard combination. On a lazy Sunday evening, I fire up my soldering iron. Let’s see what we could do to improve the sound

You can check here for my previous introduction about the sound card.

The main improvement should be the power supply. I found “el cheapo” 1000 uF  /35 Volt. OK, this was the main filter, the most important, let’s change it to Black Gate NX Series 680 uF / 65 Volt. Also note another capacitor changed to the “purple” Os-Con. This was on the digital supply section.

Enough change for initial stage. Let’s power it up and test the sound. Wow, that was the first impression on the 1st second I heard the sound. The sound was very transparent, the staging, the tonal, all were improved. Not to the level that I was expected, but for a consumer grade sound card, this was OK.

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Tags: altec lansing, aureon, Black Gate, mundorf, mx5021, sound card, speaker
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Posted on Thursday, 20th May 2010 by Jimmy Auw

In just few days, world lost two big guys, well known in the audio/music world.

First was Gesang Martohartono (1 October 1917 – 20 May 2010), a renowned Indonesia singer and songwriter, especially in kroncong style. He was famous throughout Asia, not just in his own country, Indonesia. His most famous song was Bengawan Solo. One of his best recording was recorded by JVC Japan here.

The other was Dr. Fritz Sennheiser (9 May 1912 – 17 May 2010), founder of Sennheiser, well known as professional microphone and headphone manufacturer. Sennheiser has become a respected brand in current audio world.

Good bye to both of you.

God bless!

Tags: fritz sennheiser, gesang martohartono
Posted in Personal | Comments (1)

Posted on Sunday, 16th May 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I plan to compare some capacitors from Jensen and one from Audio Note. The two from Jensen are Jensen Copper Foil Paper-in-Oil (Paper Tube) and Jensen Copper Foil Paper-in-Oil (Copper Tube). From Audio Note, I have Copper Foil Mylar-in-Oil (I believe this is Copper Tube also). We gonna have a serious battle later since those 3 caps are using different “recipe”. Both Jensen are Paper in Oil type, but with different enclosure. While the Audio Note has similarity with one of the Jensen with Copper Tube, but with Mylar instead of Paper. Audio Note claims the Mylar will provide better combination between sonic reproduction and the reliability.

Shall we prove the result? Later… We must wait after the burn-in session, probably in 100+ hours.

For the burn-in session, I sealed the Copper Tube caps with plastic. This is to prevent the oxidation of the copper tube (both Audio Note and Jensen Copper Tube oxides very fast in my environment due to high humidity, thanks to the purity of the material used also). I should prepare a transparent heatshrink for a good looking appearance, but no time to find one now. Perhaps you will ask why there are 2 pair of Jensen Paper Tube? One is my friend’s, to join the burn-in session before used on his system.

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Tags: Aikido, audio note, Capacitor, Duelund, jensen, preamp, tube
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Posted on Sunday, 2nd May 2010 by Jimmy Auw

After reading my article about finding out capacitor inner-outer foil, some of my readers asked me to do the similar test on the resistor. Well, technically speaker, resistor shouldn’t have any inner or outer foil, since most likely it’s a piece of carbon or wire on the ceramic core. But let’s see the testing result. On this simple session, I used Kiwame (Carbon Film Resistor) and Mills (Wirewound). I also have some Riken or Shinkoh, but not really available in many values. For Kiwame, I used 1M, 470K, 100K, and 2K2. For Mills, I picked one value, 22K.

1 MegaOhm readings below showed 332 mV.

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Tags: oscilloscope, resistor
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Posted on Saturday, 24th April 2010 by Jimmy Auw

I just got my Oscilloscope, so I can play more fun with my DIY stuff. Ok, let’s start with some basic “game”, to find the inner and outer foil of a capacitor.

Basically, most of the capacitor, has what we call the inner foil and outer foil. Because, most of capacitor’s construction is based on the winding of paper or other conductor (silver, copper, gold, etc), so we will have a start position (the inner foil) and the finish position (the outer foil).

Although for the film type capacitor, it’s just fine to connect positive or negative to the inner or outer foil. But due to some reason, it’s preferable to connect the outer foil to negative side or to the “nearest” negative side (input side on coupling application).

Why? Because the outer foil will catch the outside interferences. So better if you can put this outer foil to the place nearest to ground or negative pole. So it could completely transfer those unwanted noise faster to the place where it should belong – the ground.

Some capacitor like Audio Note, Jensen, Auricap, Hovland, VCap, etc usually marks their capacitor with different color lead or print some black line to mark the negative side or input in the coupling application. Some other popular capacitor, like Mundorf, doesn’t seem to care about this, means no marks at all. So you got to check it by your own. Other capacitor like Duelund, which uses the Stacked Foil design, I believe doesn’t have any polarity (it’s not winded, but stacked).

How to do the test with Oscilloscope? Simple by testing both leads, and give some “interference” outside the capacitor (touch by hand or put some electric field interference e.g. high voltage cable, etc). The side with higher noise, means the outer foil.

Below are some picture from my own measurement on some capacitors.

Audio Note Oil Filled Mylar Capacitor. The black line marking on the capacitor’s body means the negative or input side. We can see the noise is quite big if we put the positive probe on the side which has black line marking.

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Tags: Capacitor, measurement, oscilloscope
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Posted on Sunday, 18th April 2010 by Jimmy Auw

The sign of a wear out tube? Time to grab some more… >.<

Tags: 26 tube, tube
Posted in Collectible Stuff | Comments (0)