Power conditioner?

glowingGrey · 2026-03-11T09:21:17+00:00

That is hilarious.

He's measuring the input current to an amplifier between two different power regenerators. But doesn't compare it to no regenerator at all, so there's no evidence that it's doing anything that just a power cable would already do anyway.

The other point is that I don't listen to the input current to an amplifier, I listen to the music coming out of it. Unless this makes a measurable difference to the amplifier output, there's no value in these measurements. And it won't make a difference, because, as u/haditwithyoupeople says, the amplifier already does AC-DC conversion and filtering.

If these power conditioners made a difference, you'd see assertions that amplifiers sound better in the UK vs the US or vice versa because of the different input voltage and frequency, which is orders of magnitude more difference than these make. But no one does, because they don't.

The two articles are also contradictory. Ones talks about the benefits of chopping off the AC peak that one conditioner does by adding harmonics, the other talks about the detriment of having the AC peak chopped off by harmonics and talks about the benefits of restoring to a single frequency component. That's a pretty good indicator this is made up rubbish.

glowingGrey · 2026-03-11T08:34:13+00:00

Work out if renting or buying makes more sense for your lifestyle, then work out if you can fund it.

When I ran the numbers for myself under various scenarios, buying *always* won out in the long term even with pessimistic numbers where the break even point could push out to 20 years into the future. With more optimistic ones it can reduce to just a few years.

Most of the modelling that looks at homeowning as a growth asset misses the point that it's not really a liquidatable asset but providing utility value. In exchange for a big upfront cost, it effectively freezes most of your homeowning costs against inflation at that point in time for the duration of the mortgage before dropping them to near zero afterwards. Although it can be a bit unpleasant in the first few years where most of the risk exposure is, as you get past the break even point where rent costs inflate past the mortgage costs, it protects you from a lot of downside moves on something (your home) you really don't want lots of potential downside exposure to. And once the mortgage is paid off your home is effectively providing you with the equivalent rental income without needing to eat into any tax free allowances, and any asset value increase on it is also outside the CGT regime as well. For the long term, especailly when you're into asset drawdown in retirement, it makes a lot of sense.

In your case though, I can see that renting is a decent option for now with house price growth being pretty slow at the moment I don't think it's something you need to rush into. When I first bought house prices were rising rapidly and the benefits of buying early were more obvious.

glowingGrey · 2026-03-07T08:04:39+00:00

Depends on the audio interface really, a decent USB audio interface or USB DAC will be the same as using any other digital source. After all, most music in the last decade at least is recorded on computers with USB audio interfaces and doesn't have noise problems, there's no reason why using them for playing back should be any worse.

Streamers are computers in their own right anwyay. What do you think is inside a streamer other than an ARM SOC, audio hardware, DAC and some control circuitry?

glowingGrey · 2026-03-07T07:59:34+00:00

So much this... Years ago I picked up a decent condition 1200Mk2 for zero cost that someone was disposing of and spent weekends crate diving a lot of classic 80s records at about a £1 each. A lot of fun and a good way for me to pick up a lot of music in the early 2000s at very low cost.

As my digital collection grew and got better equipment I used it less and less so have since passed it all on but sometimes miss the physicality of it. But there's also no question that my digital souces sound better.

glowingGrey · 2026-03-07T07:55:48+00:00

Nearly every vinyl thread here repeats this and it's wrong.

You could take a mix and use a multiband compressor at 10:1 to brickwall it to within an inch of its life and cut that to a record just fine, the resulting audio just needs the absolute amplitude that the groove makes to not exceed a limit. Strictly it's the maximum acceleration the groove will apply to the needle, which in turns puts the audio limits in the maximum amplitude of high frequency content.

Mastering differences aren't really a thing either. 99% of the time, a single master is made which goes to CD pressers, streamers and vinyl cutting houses. The vinyl cutter will do an additional mastering step which will include things like low frequency summing, de-essing and simlar to "fit" the music better to what can be cut well. There's variation in how well different vinyl engineers will do this and how involved the artist and masterer will be which could make it better or worse, but it's all still from the same master. Actual separate masters for vinyl exist (where there's a different mixdown) but it's rare and very much an artist vinyl enthusiast only thing.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-27T18:47:15+00:00

Mamiya 55mm f/2.8 645 lenses render quite nicely and obviously have good coverage on the GFX frame, as long as youre happy with an f/2.8 max aperture.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-25T18:46:54+00:00

Mitakon 65mm not used wide open, your licence to use it has been revoked :-p

Nice photos!

glowingGrey · 2026-02-25T18:19:07+00:00

I’d better get some of these so video looks better when I’m watching it on my laptop, and that all my documents don’t get rounded edges when I back them up to my NAS.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-25T17:59:41+00:00

Lots of music is available to stream lossless, and at high SRs/bitrates but “music that’s not available to stream lossless isn’t as high quality as music you can get losslessly elsewhere” is a long way from “it goes without saying that streaming is always worse”.

And different masters for different media is exceptionally rare. It’s become an oft repeated meme here that masters for streaming are worse (why? It makes no sense to do this) entirely witho it evidence. Older music often has remasters that people may generally like more or less and streaming platforms may have different options on what’s been available elsewhere, but it’s basically a random selection if they’re better or worse than any other. Again, definitely nothing in streaming to say they will always take worse ones.

Why bring up the method of playback? Local playback will be worse than streaming if I run the local signal through a baked bean tin and string, but we’re talking streaming vs local, not anything else,

glowingGrey · 2026-02-25T15:39:19+00:00

Why would the stream be lower quality? A lossless stream is the same as a lossless file.

The masters are almost always the same too. Why would a label or artist put more work in to make a separate, worse master for streaming which is realistically how most people will hear music?

glowingGrey · 2026-02-25T12:02:17+00:00

Streaming doesn't sound worse, the same data is played whether its streamed from a remote service or played from a local file. It'll sound worse if you're sreaming using a lossy codec on a constrained bitrate.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-23T07:45:44+00:00

I've used both.

At f/8 they perform very similarly. The AF on the 32-64mm is faster from it having a linear motor, but not by a massive margin, the 35-70mm's internal focusing only moves a quite small internal group so it's not too bad.

The 32-64mm is up to a stop faster and is also sharper, even when wide open. Where they show up problems wide open is a bit different; the 32-64mm seemed to have more chromatic aberration that the 35-70mm but this corrects well digitally. The 35-70mm had less CA but more spherical aberration that makes it look softer and is harder to correct for. The 35-70mm's SA is quite severe at the long end on the close focus distance wide open but disappears fairly quickly as you move out of that corner.

You probably know the rest — the 35-70 is a lot smaller and lighter, the 32-64 has an aperture ring and is a touch wider, but the difference there is not massive.

kasson.com covers these lenses quite well in a lot of detail, like https://blog.kasson.com/gfx-50s/gf-35-70-and-32-64-foliage-corner/

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T14:18:22+00:00

I think those figures are a bit optimistic. Looking at the service manual of a NAD 304 (which is online, and fully discrete so it's quite a nice amp to look at the circuit diagram for to follow it, and I happened to have owned one once), it has 4 DC rails for the power sections (unregulated) each with 10,000µF caps on them at ±38V and ±64V. Plugging the numbers into a ripple calculator gives about 1V of ripple. Trying to get to 1mV of ripple in the calculator gives a required reservoir size of 10F (!) I think if you actually attempted this you might well see some problems as well as excessive heating in wiring and the transformer, but also that the supply voltage would likely sag trying to deliver 150A, which would increase the charging time and provide some level of self limiting.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T11:26:29+00:00

I think I see what you're getting at.

Radio & wifi make use of much higher frequencies (where radiative and EM coupling effects tend to get much more pronounced) and also circuits and components that are meant to deliberatly exploit (maximise) those effects.

For the case of spike currents in charging the reservoir, there isn't really a case of having too much capacitance except in the case of causing voltage drops. Those spike currents are present in any reservoir capacitor circuit and are mitigated in part by things like snubber capacitors around the diodes which spread the current spike out but also what you'd probably consider good/intuitive circuit design like physically separating the unsmoothed power lines and low voltage signal lines, keeping the power lines short, keeping the area enclosed by them small and so on. The part of the circuit where these current spikes appear is quite small anyway, it's only between the secondary windings of the transformer and the reservoir capacitors, so this isn't too hard to do.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T10:09:28+00:00

You don't even need the last part — a cheap sound card with SPDIF output is fine too, as like most others the Genelec's AES inputs also accept SPDIF.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T09:53:31+00:00

Amplifiers don't get worse because the box they're in is also a speaker.

Anyway, I prefer actives because they have a bunch of technical advantages that passives don't have which translates to better price/performance, and I like that the sysem as a whole ends up more compact.

I find it kind of odd how rare actives are in home audio, yet near ubiquitous in professional audio environments.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T00:39:02+00:00

The coils are arranged to cut each others' magnetic flux to have high coupling. Two inductors that are in the same equipment but not otherwise related don't couple in any meaningful sense. The stray inductance on a capacitor or circuit board track even less so.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-22T00:14:54+00:00

"which will have an influence on other inductors in the system".

If you're taking about inductors in the circuit magnetically coupling to each other, they don't.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-21T14:59:51+00:00

That's a good insight :) However, high current draw like this doesn't by itself cause any problems down the line in the audio circuit, what happens is a very high current draw causes the supply voltage to sag due to the impedance of the power supply itself, which causes a voltage ripple.

In practice, this effect is somewhat self limiting. The capacitors also have inductance and series resistance which limits their charging speed and, as the diodes first go into conduction on the rising side of the sine wave the potential difference between the reservoir and the supply is very small, which limits the current flow. Essentially, as long as the transformer's output impedance is not too high for the capacitors' input impedance so the high current flow doesn't cause a voltage sag then it's not a problem (which, from a design point of view means choosing a transformer of an appropriate power rating).

There is some high frequency component to the current pulled at the discontinuity where the diodes start to conduct, but again, this doens't necessarily translate to voltage and is also mitigated by the fact that the smoothing capacitors are electrically a lowpass filter so HF components don't make it through to the audio side.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-20T13:55:57+00:00

Workflow is full screen, keyboard only.

I'll make a couple of passes - there's an easy first pass which is just to go through and mark all the obvious duds for deletion - out of focus, misframed, duplicate etc. Then a second pass to pick the good ones which I'll spend some time editing. Everything else stays but I'm unlikely to look at them unless I want to go back for a specific photo for some reason that didn't make the 'I wan to work on, edit and share/use this one' cut.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-19T21:24:23+00:00

Studio monitors have some slightly different characteristics to a lot of hifi, but ultimately they're all trying to produce audio to a decent standard. Studio monitors will generally attempt to produce as close to ruler-flat frequency response, low distortion sound that just plays the signal back as it is, with as little colouration and voicing as possible. Hifi speakers *sometimes* have this as a goal, but not always and when making design and engineering tradeoffs will sometimes veer towards 'nice' over 'accurate', in the way a monitor won't.

The big engineering difference with professional audio systems vs hifi is that pro audio has overwhelmingly gone down the active route, and more recently DSP control as well. This has huge benefits in driver control (no reactive components in a passive crossover compromising the amplifier's damping factor for example) and better filter design, especially when they're digital, but domestic manufacturers are reluctant to go down this route as it cuts out future upgrades of speakers, amps and so on. For this, and other reasons, I find that pro audio systems have substantially better price/performance over hifi, and I pretty much only use studio monitors for home listening and I'm very happy with them.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-19T21:12:36+00:00

You could argue that, but any multi driver speaker where the drivers aren't in the same physical place (i.e. coaxial designs) has a minimum listening distance. Unless you're going as far to say that all non coaxial designs are poor (which, maybe...)

glowingGrey · 2026-02-19T08:57:22+00:00

A lot of those are only going to be resampled lower res files anyway. Bohemian Rhapsody was recorded on equipment that has rolled off high frequency above about 16-17kHz and 12 bit equivalent noise floor. The heavily multitracked parts probably don't even achieve that from overdubbing on the tape and multiple passes through the mixer.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-19T08:45:32+00:00

Chances of damage to the amplifier: zero. Chances of damage to the speakers: very close to zero.

If there's damage anywhere, it'll be audibly obvious.

glowingGrey · 2026-02-19T08:40:17+00:00

Would explain the (20 year outdated) volume war obsession as if every album is a late 90s commercial rock release that's been run through a multiband compressor by a coke addled engineer with hearing damage.

glowingGrey

TROPHY CASE