Conference hips::uk_audioo

    I would concur with your analysis.
    
    I have an LFD Integrated Zero amplifier, and to me it is superb.
    
    Tim

    Well, 
    
    I'll certainly second your opinion on Sugden, and I'd like to 
    stick my hand up for Naim. I have a Naim Nait III, and I'm
    very happy with it. By the way, I'm still a convinced Vinyl man. 
    
    On the vexing question of choosing a CD playerm, I intend to replace
    (but not sell!) my little Marantz CD 63 with a hefty upgrade.. it
    was all part of the plan.
    
    After a lot of auditioning, my choice is down to a machine from either
    Naim or Sugden. Now this might sound a bit odd, but I've never really
    listened to a Sugden CD machine. I include it on the list because of 
    the very strong recommendation given by a former colleague, and also
    because I've listened extensively to an older Sugden amp.. superb.
    
    The trouble is that having spoken to one of the directors at Sugden
    (he just happened to be the one who picked the phone up) there are
    very few dealers in England who stock them.. needs must.. I guess it's
    a day trip up north to stem any "what if" nagging doubts.
    
    Any opinions?
    
    John  

    If you can afford it Sugdens Stemfoort transport is a good choice, but
    even the one box player can rival quite a few dac/transport
    combinations. The sugden cd range starts at around 1100 pounds for the
    basic one box player.  Give Patrick at Sugden a ring and he'll be able
    to put you in touch with your nearest dealer.

    Thanks for the reply.
    
    John

    While a brand name isn't everything, I wouldn't advocate blindly
    ignoring them. When in the market for equipment, it is in your interest
    to be as unblinkered as possible - we would be annoyed if the dealer
    were as blinkered as some customers can be. Linn, Naim, Mission et al are
    major players in the mid to high end market, but not the only ones
    worth listening to. 
    
    As I stated before, at this level, different manufacturers will generally 
    sound different, not better/worse as some people seem to blindly state.
    I like the Linn sound as timing is important to me, Naim is too harsh
    for my tastes and Sugden too woolly and unfocoused (again for my tastes). 
    
    It's the enjoyment of the music that is important, not the equipment it
    is played on. The equipment merely conveys the music in a form
    that we find enjoyable. For example, a friend of a friend was came
    round a wee while ago and at naturally wanted to know what "all the
    boxes" did. I explained the about active speakers and DAC's etc and put
    on some music he liked. He thought it was very nice, but added that
    sometimes all this gear could be a hinderance - sometimes songs sound
    better on a radio/cassette player. Now it's an opinion that I would
    disagree with, but it's his point of view - concerned with less with
    high accuracy and more with the music.
    
    D.
    
    PS:	Regarding the "sounds closer to the source" comment, my sister is a
    regualar on Radio 4 and BBC TV. I know her voice, and through a my Linn
    system, it is pretty damn accurate. How do you know "what the source
    sounds like"?
     

    My friend runs his own promotions company and so I have been able to
    hear thousands of live bands over a ten year span. I have also a large
    collecttion of demo tapes and transcription discs which I have gathered
    from my friends at Capital records, Geffen and Emi. I am a fully
    qualified sound engineer and have worked in test and design for Ariston
    Accoustics and Systemdek. My previous sytem as reviewed by Jonathan
    Kettle in Cyberfi and found to be extremely well matched. Jonathan has
    several years experience in the field of hi-fi having written for
    Audiophile magazine before running the cyberfi website. System matching
    is imperative, Sugden equipment doesn't match with Linn equipment, eg.
    a Sugden amp is best partnered with speakers from ProAc, Neat, Harbeth, 
    Musical Technology, or Systemdek. Partnered ith the right equipment
    Sugden sounds extremely open and dynamic.

    Very, err, impressive, but it wasn't quite what I was interested in.
    I too have been to many gigs and have the same material on vinyl or CD,
    and, not surprisingly, they do not sound the same. Had I heard the
    group in the studio and then heard the end product - as bought from a
    shop - then this would be a good test of how a system extracts and
    reproduces the originally recorded music. Not that this is always a
    desirable thing.
    
    You appear to be in a far better position to do this sort of test than 
    many of us and so your knowledge will probably interest many people 
    here, however, like many of us, I rely on the end product and how that
    sounds. I've already mentioned why I like Linn and so I won't go into
    that, but if anything, the most important thing you said was almost a
    throwaway comment: "when correctly matched". I would add once again
    "when correctly set up". A friend of mine raves about his Naim setup,
    and found the Linn kit very backward in coming forward until I set it
    properly. Now he finds it a very enthralling sound; detailed, tight and
    rhythmic. In short, good systems can easily sound bad when not
    carefully setup and matched.
    
    As to denouncing manufacturer's as only ever producing one good piece of 
    kit, this came across as a sweeping opinion. The Karik/Numerik CD/DAC
    has been praised extensively in several HiFi journals. Can you remember
    what systems that you heard the other Linn products in? I will admit
    now, that if was was a reveiw from What HiFi - I'm not interested; they
    couldn't find their arse with a map.
    
    Dave
    

    I would agree that equipment setup is extremely imporant and would add
    that the choice of cacling is also vital. Poorly matched speaker cable
    or interconnects can severely degrade the sound quality of a system. 
    I would agree that the cd dac/transport combination can give an
    excellent performance, but only when partnered with the right
    equipment. It sounded dull and lacked dynamcs when played through my
    friends Audio Note Ongaku and Sonus Fabers, but through a much cheaper
    Incatech Claymore and Musical Technology Harriers, it sounded extremely
    impressive. The equipment I normally use for refence purposes is a
    Sugden A21a, Harbeth P3's Furukawa F15s/F35s speaker cable bi-wired and
    Audio Note  interconnects. Hi Fi World also uses a similar combination
    for refence purposes. I would echo your comment on What Hi Fi which
    seems to give the best reviews to  their biggest advertisers. I have
    found Hi Fi World, Hi Fi News, and Cyberfi offer the most unbiased
    reviews.
    I have heard Wet Wet Wet, Deacon Blue, Simple Minds and Fish/Marillion
    recording in the studios, and I use their best recordings reference,
    along ith some of my favourite tracks. My musical taste ranges from
    rock, female vocal and blues to classical and I select a few choice
    tracks from each of these fields when I am auditioning new
    equipment.This way I know that the system will sound good  with a wide
    spectrum of musical tastes.                                        

    Re: last few replies
    
    (no criticism of any individual, musical taste, equipment or otherwise
    intended - just my reaction to what I have been reading)
    
    Several noters have described their experience at hearing "studio
    sound" and presumably "concert sound" and have based their assessment
    of audio equipment on how close the equipment sounds to the "original".
    At first, this may sound like a valid thing to do. However, is this a
    valid comparison? I have two reasons for this heretical question. 
    
    The first is the acoustics of the listening space. Even accepting the
    fact that a stereo playback pair cannot fully reproduce 3D acoustics,
    the domestic room will not have the same qualities as the monitoring
    studio of the concert hall/arena (esp. the arena!). Can we expect to
    hear the same sound? When a reviewer compares reproduced with
    "original" sound, and assuming that they have a auditory memory that
    allows them to make valid comparisons at large-ish time intervals, are
    they implicitly making an allowance for the room acoustics? How? How
    much? How do they describe this allowance to their own audience
    (magazine readers, fellow noters, whatever)? I play the saxophone, and
    I am very aware of the difference in sound between the bedroom where I
    usually practise, and the large hall in which I take lessons. No-one
    can tell me that one is "right" and one is "wrong" - different they may
    be, but they both come from identical player/instrument combinations.
    Although there is a better and a poorer sound, they are both
    "accurate"! So, unless recording engineer and end listener both use
    (identical?) headphones, they will never hear the same thing! Makes it
    difficult to use the "closest approach to the original sound" technique
    to judge loudspeakers...
    
    The second point is that the comparisons described to date are not with
    "live" sound at all (with the notable exception of the contributor's
    sister's voice from radio/TV). The musical examples given are all
    electronically processed. It may be that the electronic processing is
    designed to pass through the acoustic instrument sounds with minimal
    distortion/noise etc, but I doubt it. Much of today's music depends on
    the creative use of distorting techniques, or artificially generated
    sounds from synthesisers. This is how much music achieves its
    individuality - pushing the frontiers of all the steps in the chain up
    to the point of committing it to vinyl/tape/CD. Because of this, I do 
    not know just how close the recording engineer and the sound engineer
    at a given "live" concert can get to the same sound. Is the "live"
    sound actually the same as went on to the CD? Could we ever get the
    "live" sound in our homes, however good our equipment? Maybe our home
    equipment is actually better than the equipment used in the live
    concerts, and what we are missing at home is actually some of that
    distortion/inaccuracy? Same goes for a truly acoustic, unreinforced,
    performance - I doubt that any performer can do _exactly_ the same
    thing twice running, but at least the sound of the instrument is likely
    to be repeatable, even if the nuances of the performance are not.
    
    The alternative is to use genuine acoustic sounds that we can
    accurately reproduce in our own homes. For example, a saxophone or our
    sister's voice! Just like the old "put a musician and a loudspeaker
    behind a curtain and let the audience guess which was playing"
    experiments that used to take place. However, both of these are
    inadequate for real testing, as they are much too simple a sound. The
    complex interactions of a full symphony orchestra or a live band with
    all its equipment are what we really want in our sitting rooms, just so
    we can switch between them and the reproduced sound to judge
    "accuracy".
    
    My own approach to playback equipment is, roughly in order of priority,
    a "clean" undistorted sound, good stereo imaging, and a wide frequency
    response (but a smooth response with limited range would be preferable
    to a wide range with exaggerated peaks and troughs). I know that my
    brain can interpolate much that my ears and equipment cannot supply - I
    just want to avoid hearing anything that should not be there. I have to
    admit to being quite unable to grasp the concept that audio equipment
    can somehow affect the "rhythm" of a piece of music. I do accept that
    the final, pyschological, link in the playback chain is quite as
    important as the more tangible components, and that is why I can accept
    that the live/reproduced sound comparison is basically flawed, that
    different pieces of equipment can sound different but all can be
    "right" in their own ways, that I will never, ever, hear in my own home
    the same sounds that I would hear in a concert hall, but that I _can_
    hear the same music in my head - and it is the music that matters!
    
    - Brian
    
    

    
    Very well put, Brian !
    
    Graham