manu4panjab
New Member
go for rotel
Amp upgrade with Canton speakers: Feasibility study
- Thread starter Asit
- Start date
Hi Asit,
Congrats, on your new amp and your sons excellent performance.
If you ever get the itch to tube roll,try out the BEL el84's.There are several NOS BEL tubes available at reasonable prices in most electronic markets in India (Rs.150-300 each)depending on seller.You should be able to find them easily in Calcutta.
These are very good tubes and are exact replicas of the original Mullard/Philips tubes,as they were made with machines and tooling supplied by Mullard.They have the same warm mids sweet highs and tight bass of the legendary Mullards.
Look for the BEl tubes with the "O"getter ring on top and which looks like this as there are some russian tubes branded as BEL in the market.The russian tubes are built differently.
BEL EL84 1970s 2 - Bangalore India
BEL EL84 1970s 1 - Bangalore India
??????
Regards
Rajiv
Congrats, on your new amp and your sons excellent performance.
If you ever get the itch to tube roll,try out the BEL el84's.There are several NOS BEL tubes available at reasonable prices in most electronic markets in India (Rs.150-300 each)depending on seller.You should be able to find them easily in Calcutta.
These are very good tubes and are exact replicas of the original Mullard/Philips tubes,as they were made with machines and tooling supplied by Mullard.They have the same warm mids sweet highs and tight bass of the legendary Mullards.
Look for the BEl tubes with the "O"getter ring on top and which looks like this as there are some russian tubes branded as BEL in the market.The russian tubes are built differently.
BEL EL84 1970s 2 - Bangalore India
BEL EL84 1970s 1 - Bangalore India
??????
Regards
Rajiv
Hi Arj,
I do not think any EL34's were made in India.
Mullards may be hard to come by but RFT(east german) should be available in the market. They may be branded Philips/Telefunken /Siemens etc.You can identify them by the dimple on the top of the tube.EL34's were used in a lot of cinema amps and are availabe with some cinema spares dealers.In the bylanes around Kempegowda Road(where all the movie theaters are) there are some cinema spares dealers .
The RFT tubes are very good I have used them and they are better than the JJ EL34's . Telefunken/Siemens were selling RFT tubes under their brand names once EL34 production stopped in the west.Another good reasonably priced EL 34 is the Matsushita.
Regards
Rajiv
I do not think any EL34's were made in India.
Mullards may be hard to come by but RFT(east german) should be available in the market. They may be branded Philips/Telefunken /Siemens etc.You can identify them by the dimple on the top of the tube.EL34's were used in a lot of cinema amps and are availabe with some cinema spares dealers.In the bylanes around Kempegowda Road(where all the movie theaters are) there are some cinema spares dealers .
The RFT tubes are very good I have used them and they are better than the JJ EL34's . Telefunken/Siemens were selling RFT tubes under their brand names once EL34 production stopped in the west.Another good reasonably priced EL 34 is the Matsushita.
Regards
Rajiv
Last edited:
Hi
Congratulations for the superb performance of your son. Wish him all the success. Hope he carries on with his cricket too. Sport (cricket/tennis) is my first love and cars/bikes/audio etc etc are way down the line. I still turn up for my club every saturday and play a 35/40 overs game and i enjoy it as much now as when i was a boy. Just watching Gilchrist demolish Delhi daredevils. What a player!!!!! The bigger the occasion the better the performance.
Please post some pics of the rack with the new amplifier.
BTW imaginary sweets will not do. Next time u visit bbay i must get a taste of some authentic Ras gulla s!!!!!!!
Rgds
Congratulations for the superb performance of your son. Wish him all the success. Hope he carries on with his cricket too. Sport (cricket/tennis) is my first love and cars/bikes/audio etc etc are way down the line. I still turn up for my club every saturday and play a 35/40 overs game and i enjoy it as much now as when i was a boy. Just watching Gilchrist demolish Delhi daredevils. What a player!!!!! The bigger the occasion the better the performance.
Please post some pics of the rack with the new amplifier.
BTW imaginary sweets will not do. Next time u visit bbay i must get a taste of some authentic Ras gulla s!!!!!!!
Rgds
Last edited:
anm
Well-Known Member
wonder what instt in kolkata would be running that kind of super computer? Has to be ISI?
regards
regards
moserw
New Member
Sorry Kamal bro. We Hyderabadis enjoyed it very much...
Hahaha sorry Kamal ji.
Such a knock one has to just marvel at. The way mumbai has been performing its best to be a 'neutral'. Anyway Gilly has done this on a number on occasions (WC finals) to better bowlers so no need to feel peeved.
Sorry for all the cricket talk Mod.
Rgds
Such a knock one has to just marvel at. The way mumbai has been performing its best to be a 'neutral'. Anyway Gilly has done this on a number on occasions (WC finals) to better bowlers so no need to feel peeved.
Sorry for all the cricket talk Mod.
Rgds
Asit,
I am reading this thread a bit late.
Congratulations on your son's success in CBSE. I can understand your anxiety as I went through the same a few years ago.
I am sure your son will do you proud in the coming days.
Cheers
I am reading this thread a bit late.
Congratulations on your son's success in CBSE. I can understand your anxiety as I went through the same a few years ago.
I am sure your son will do you proud in the coming days.
Cheers
Asit, thanks for the invitation. We will surely meet up some day.
Right now i am also busy with my daughter's joint entrance exams and my business committments as well.
Regards
Vasu
Thanks everybody for more congratulatory posts.
After working very very hard, for the first time in my life, I have been able to upload pictures using imageshack in this forum. At first, they were becoming huge, then ultimately I managed it. Now I have put up 8 pictures in the "showcase" thread. Please take a look.
Anm, it's not Indian Statistical Institute. I think that's what you meant.
After working very very hard, for the first time in my life, I have been able to upload pictures using imageshack in this forum. At first, they were becoming huge, then ultimately I managed it. Now I have put up 8 pictures in the "showcase" thread. Please take a look.
Anm, it's not Indian Statistical Institute. I think that's what you meant.
Last edited:
Sounds mysterious !!!!! Are you working for RAW by any chance?
One a more serious note, I had developed a parallel Fortran for CDAC a long time ago. This could use 128 processors at the same time. Are you by any chance using such a tool? I am not even sure CDAC is deploying such tools nowadays. Just curious.
Cheers
Hello guys,
It hurts to see Kumble's team losing the final, I think that's the way it's going to be. But judging the way it has gone in 2008 and 2009, Kolkata will be the champ in 2010.
That's a great one, venkat. I work for Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. It's a national institute dedicated to basic research in many areas in Physics and Biophysics (not just Nuclear Physics, that is still kept for historical reason, founded by Prof Meghnad Saha in 1951).
We use C codes with MPI parallel library. I have used "Parallel Fortran" called CM Fortran for a "Thinking Machines" "Connection Machine" in early 90s. I have used a Cray since 1986. We are going to get another much much bigger Cray in a month and a half in our Theory Division project.
Dinyaar, you shall be happy to know that the VDH D102MKIII cable has worked wonders as an IC between my cassette deck and the Leben. The Cassette deck is sounding really really superb with the Leben and that IC. The Leben is surely turning out to be something!
It hurts to see Kumble's team losing the final, I think that's the way it's going to be. But judging the way it has gone in 2008 and 2009, Kolkata will be the champ in 2010.
That's a great one, venkat. I work for Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. It's a national institute dedicated to basic research in many areas in Physics and Biophysics (not just Nuclear Physics, that is still kept for historical reason, founded by Prof Meghnad Saha in 1951).
We use C codes with MPI parallel library. I have used "Parallel Fortran" called CM Fortran for a "Thinking Machines" "Connection Machine" in early 90s. I have used a Cray since 1986. We are going to get another much much bigger Cray in a month and a half in our Theory Division project.
Dinyaar, you shall be happy to know that the VDH D102MKIII cable has worked wonders as an IC between my cassette deck and the Leben. The Cassette deck is sounding really really superb with the Leben and that IC. The Leben is surely turning out to be something!
Last edited:
Hello friends,
At first, let me apologise for my absence from the forum for the last week or two. I am going to give an update.
But before that, let me just say a word or two on the cyclone we faced recently. There were so many trees uprooted in our locality that our mobility was severly restricted for a few days after the cyclone. We live on the 6th floor and we have 3 sides (North, East and South) completely open. Between 1PM and 3 PM, the wind was so severe that the glass windows were bending to noticeable degrees and there was a frightening rattling noise from door and window frames. Any time the windows could have broken, and since my AV rig is housed in the living room which has one one side completely open with only sliding glass door protection, I dismantled my whole AV rig and quickly put all the items away in places where they were safer. I could not remove the LCD TV, and so I had to cover it up with whatever I could find and also secured the covers with clips to some extent. I had to do similar things to many other objects in our whole apartment. Luckily, and thanks to good construction, nothing happened except some flooding inside the apartment through small holes located at the bottom of the window frames. Next year we are to move to a new apartment on the 13th floor (again with open South and East), and already I am wondering if the windows of that apartment would be good enough to withstand a similar cyclone.
The Internet connection was intact during and just after the cyclone was over. But since then it is gone and till now it has not come back yet. So I cannot be on the net from home. It's a BSNL broadband.
After a couple of days, I put back all the AV stuff.
The Leben is alive and kicking, kicking very well in fact. Unfortunately, I have been extremely extremely busy at work during the last couple of weeks and came home late and tired. So the breaking-in has not been sufficient in this period. But still certain improvements are quite noticeable and I shall describe them to you in the following.
One thing that I forgot to mention already in my earlier posts (and that has improved even further now) is that the sound of any drums (especially tabla) is superlative. It is very difficult to pinpoint what was missing before the Leben arrived. But now it is as if the famous tabla players are actually sitting in our living room and playing, everything is just right.
Other thing I noticed was that some CDs (mastered and pressed abroad) I did not particularly enjoy before (both because of lack of proper tonality and lack of punch/microdynamics) is now sounding really well. Let me give one example. There is dual CD set from "Chhanda-dhara" in Germany of a 70 year celebratory live concert of Ravishankar in London, and I had a hard time enjoying those 2 CDs before on my HK and Nad amps. Now it's a different story. I am listening to CD1 once every couple of days.
I want to also mention the VAST improvement of my cassette deck performance. I always had a so-so impression on my present cassette deck. I found that the cassettes recorded with dolby C was losing too much on the S/N ratio (if I listen with dolby C on) on this deck. However, on my earlier 3 head deck that was not a problem. So recently, I was listening to cassettes (recorded with dolby C) without dolby at all, and hence there was a bit of noise. But with the Leben, somehow this problem has gone to a large extent. I actually have not understood how the Leben has addressed this problem. But now, the cassettes are sounding very very lively and I am listening to cassettes a lot more lately.
Currently, I am using the Audio Art IC-3 directional cable for the CDP to amp connectivity and the VDH D102MKIII cable for cassette player to amp connectivity. My understanding is that the Audio Art cable needs a lot more breaking-in than the VDH and since usually I listen to CDs a lot more than the cassettes, I had the above connectivity. But once everything breaks in, I will try all possible combinations. Could the huge improvement in cassette player performance be partly due to the new VDH IC? Before I was using QED Qunex.
Although the Leben produces a big soundstage as I have mentioned before, I am still not perfectly happy with the imaging which is not bad but is still not absolutely precise. Does this improve with full breaking in of the amp and all cables? I would particularly like to know about this from arj and sridhar. In user reports and pro reviews, people have generally praised imaging whereevr it is mentioned. In my case, however, my speakers' positioning is far from ideal (which I have mentioned a few times before in this thread and all of you can check on this from the pictures I have provided in the "showcase" thread). Can that mess up the imaging a bit? Ideally I like to know the positioning of the musicians precisely.
Oh, I forgot to mention also that the separation of everything is really remarkable with this amp. It can separate the two voices from dual vocals quite easily and the sound of the drone instrument (tanpura) comes out very very distinctly. This separation, I believe, also has something to do with imaging, and hence I am a little puzzled. While the separation is impeccable, the imaging is still not as good.
At first, let me apologise for my absence from the forum for the last week or two. I am going to give an update.
But before that, let me just say a word or two on the cyclone we faced recently. There were so many trees uprooted in our locality that our mobility was severly restricted for a few days after the cyclone. We live on the 6th floor and we have 3 sides (North, East and South) completely open. Between 1PM and 3 PM, the wind was so severe that the glass windows were bending to noticeable degrees and there was a frightening rattling noise from door and window frames. Any time the windows could have broken, and since my AV rig is housed in the living room which has one one side completely open with only sliding glass door protection, I dismantled my whole AV rig and quickly put all the items away in places where they were safer. I could not remove the LCD TV, and so I had to cover it up with whatever I could find and also secured the covers with clips to some extent. I had to do similar things to many other objects in our whole apartment. Luckily, and thanks to good construction, nothing happened except some flooding inside the apartment through small holes located at the bottom of the window frames. Next year we are to move to a new apartment on the 13th floor (again with open South and East), and already I am wondering if the windows of that apartment would be good enough to withstand a similar cyclone.
The Internet connection was intact during and just after the cyclone was over. But since then it is gone and till now it has not come back yet. So I cannot be on the net from home. It's a BSNL broadband.
After a couple of days, I put back all the AV stuff.
The Leben is alive and kicking, kicking very well in fact. Unfortunately, I have been extremely extremely busy at work during the last couple of weeks and came home late and tired. So the breaking-in has not been sufficient in this period. But still certain improvements are quite noticeable and I shall describe them to you in the following.
One thing that I forgot to mention already in my earlier posts (and that has improved even further now) is that the sound of any drums (especially tabla) is superlative. It is very difficult to pinpoint what was missing before the Leben arrived. But now it is as if the famous tabla players are actually sitting in our living room and playing, everything is just right.
Other thing I noticed was that some CDs (mastered and pressed abroad) I did not particularly enjoy before (both because of lack of proper tonality and lack of punch/microdynamics) is now sounding really well. Let me give one example. There is dual CD set from "Chhanda-dhara" in Germany of a 70 year celebratory live concert of Ravishankar in London, and I had a hard time enjoying those 2 CDs before on my HK and Nad amps. Now it's a different story. I am listening to CD1 once every couple of days.
I want to also mention the VAST improvement of my cassette deck performance. I always had a so-so impression on my present cassette deck. I found that the cassettes recorded with dolby C was losing too much on the S/N ratio (if I listen with dolby C on) on this deck. However, on my earlier 3 head deck that was not a problem. So recently, I was listening to cassettes (recorded with dolby C) without dolby at all, and hence there was a bit of noise. But with the Leben, somehow this problem has gone to a large extent. I actually have not understood how the Leben has addressed this problem. But now, the cassettes are sounding very very lively and I am listening to cassettes a lot more lately.
Currently, I am using the Audio Art IC-3 directional cable for the CDP to amp connectivity and the VDH D102MKIII cable for cassette player to amp connectivity. My understanding is that the Audio Art cable needs a lot more breaking-in than the VDH and since usually I listen to CDs a lot more than the cassettes, I had the above connectivity. But once everything breaks in, I will try all possible combinations. Could the huge improvement in cassette player performance be partly due to the new VDH IC? Before I was using QED Qunex.
Although the Leben produces a big soundstage as I have mentioned before, I am still not perfectly happy with the imaging which is not bad but is still not absolutely precise. Does this improve with full breaking in of the amp and all cables? I would particularly like to know about this from arj and sridhar. In user reports and pro reviews, people have generally praised imaging whereevr it is mentioned. In my case, however, my speakers' positioning is far from ideal (which I have mentioned a few times before in this thread and all of you can check on this from the pictures I have provided in the "showcase" thread). Can that mess up the imaging a bit? Ideally I like to know the positioning of the musicians precisely.
Oh, I forgot to mention also that the separation of everything is really remarkable with this amp. It can separate the two voices from dual vocals quite easily and the sound of the drone instrument (tanpura) comes out very very distinctly. This separation, I believe, also has something to do with imaging, and hence I am a little puzzled. While the separation is impeccable, the imaging is still not as good.
Next time there is a cyclone warning, get some 8x4 sheets of 6mm plywood and nail them in the the window sills. You can also add narrow planks cross-beam in an X to lend support.
Glad to hear about your setup. The imaging for my setup became a little more focused after I placed a 6mm plywood in the rear wall to cover a window. I believe the rear wall has to be a little reflective - correct me if I am wrong.
Cheers
Glad to hear about your setup. The imaging for my setup became a little more focused after I placed a 6mm plywood in the rear wall to cover a window. I believe the rear wall has to be a little reflective - correct me if I am wrong.
Cheers
square_wave
Well-Known Member
Hi Asit,
Imaging is mostly a function of speaker placement. If the amp is resolving enough to separate sounds clearly, Imaging will not be an issue. A new amp usually requires a bit of tweak with the speaker placement.
Imaging is mostly a function of speaker placement. If the amp is resolving enough to separate sounds clearly, Imaging will not be an issue. A new amp usually requires a bit of tweak with the speaker placement.
Instrument separation and imaging are two different things. As SQ_wave mentioned, the imaging will depend most on (assuming that the source through speakers can clearly resolve without muddling - which your setup is doing fine) speaker position and relative position to your ear. Try downloading some test tracks which you can use for imaging (some recording which places the sound at the center is a good simple start) and then adjust your placement accordingly. Yes, break-in will make a difference for sure amp and cables. How many hours of playing time do you have on it now?
cheers
sridhar
Hi Gobble,
Thanks for the suggestions on the windows. But the windows have metal (Aluminium I guess) frames, so no way to nail any ply boards on them.
Sq-wave, Sridhar
Thanks for pointing out some insights into imaging. Right now, I do not have a lot of freedom of moving my speakers. However, last night I tried moving outwards from their positions as much as possible and also tried a bit of toeing-in and it improved the imaging with the 2 CDs I listened to last night. I have plans for better speaker placement in future, cannot do it immediately.
At the moment, I have about 30 hours on the amp, I would think. Slow progress, sorry, but just did not find more time. But the amp is already showing signs of magical qualities. Last couple of sessions was truely truely magical. It is doing wonders with vocals, both male and female. The detail is incredible, and without any harshness.
I forgot to mention before that while warming up (that is no load) the amp can get very hot. I usually warm up for half an hour to one hour. When music is being played from a source, it becomes better, the hotness reduces a bit, but still quite hot. I guess that is normal with class A push-pull.
Thanks for the suggestions on the windows. But the windows have metal (Aluminium I guess) frames, so no way to nail any ply boards on them.
Sq-wave, Sridhar
Thanks for pointing out some insights into imaging. Right now, I do not have a lot of freedom of moving my speakers. However, last night I tried moving outwards from their positions as much as possible and also tried a bit of toeing-in and it improved the imaging with the 2 CDs I listened to last night. I have plans for better speaker placement in future, cannot do it immediately.
At the moment, I have about 30 hours on the amp, I would think. Slow progress, sorry, but just did not find more time. But the amp is already showing signs of magical qualities. Last couple of sessions was truely truely magical. It is doing wonders with vocals, both male and female. The detail is incredible, and without any harshness.
I forgot to mention before that while warming up (that is no load) the amp can get very hot. I usually warm up for half an hour to one hour. When music is being played from a source, it becomes better, the hotness reduces a bit, but still quite hot. I guess that is normal with class A push-pull.
Get the Wharfedale EVO 4.2 3-Way Standmount Speakers at a Special Offer Price.
Similar threads
