[TheVinylRipper]

I've been lurking here off and on for quite a while, great forum with lots of fascinating information.

Finally joined, since I have some questions to which I cannot find the answers.

First, I have a pair of Signet TK22's which I have owned since I bought them new in about 1982. I really like the sound and love the comfort but they have a problem with the cord on one side, that side only plays if you bend the cord where it enters the can to a fairly sharp angle. A new cord is needed but I can see no obvious way to disassemble the cans. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Next, I have my eye on a pair of TK33's on ebay, would these be a worthwhile purchase if they work well? I don't particularly care about cosmetics and these are cosmetically in poor shape but the seller claims they work well and I know they will be comfortable for me since they strongly resemble my TK22's.

Do the TK33's have decent bass? I'm pretty sure that mids and highs will be smooth but have no idea about the bass. I don't mind EQ'ing to get the bass where I want it, but I do want a strong bottom.

I'm ripping an extensive vinyl collection and want something with which to monitor the process, she who must be obeyed complains when I turn it up enough on the speakers to hear nuances with my ancient ears

Another choice might be Fostex T50RP cans, they are reasonably priced, have an extended frequency range and from what I read are quite comfortable.

It must be said that money is tight, I've already spent enough on a new computer, software, flat phono preamp, test record, cartridge and sound card, so please, no high dollar recommendations.

What say you, headphonians?

 

[Dept_of_Alchemy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif A new cord is needed but I can see no obvious way to disassemble the cans. Does anyone have any suggestions?

You might be able to send it in to get it recabled or at least call to ask the company how to. If you don't feel comfortable recabling it yourself after all I'm sure somebody on these forums could help you out (just head on over to the DIY forum).

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif Next, I have my eye on a pair of TK33's on ebay, would these be a worthwhile purchase if they work well? I don't particularly care about cosmetics and these are cosmetically in poor shape but the seller claims they work well and I know they will be comfortable for me since they strongly resemble my TK22's.

These days the electro-stat headphones are really not in vogue (they haven't been for 20 years now). I think for the best value today it's better to go in a different direction. If you start another thread and ask what's the most comfortable headphone in your budget-range you will get some very good recommendations. Generally speaking, modern dynamic voice coil headphones will have a much better bottom end than vintage 'stats.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif so please, no high dollar recommendations.

"If I were you, I wouldn't think that way." - Richard Feynman

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif What say you, headphonians?

We're head-fiers. And welcome to head-fi, you know what they say.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I guess I'm an old guy and I kind of like old stuff.

My speakers are old Infinitys my amp is an old Yamaha and my turntable is an old Mitusbishi linear tracking unit. They all work perfectly though, I prefer to buy older, high quality stuff used than lower quality new stuff.

I haven't even seen my CD player in about ten years, it's in a closet somewhere although I'm not sure just which one.

All my music playing for the last ten years or so has been on my computer(s). (Although I *am* currently putting together a "new" one with an old ATX aluminum case and a new Pentium D, mobo, audiophile 2496 soundcard, 256 meg PCIe x16 graphics card, etc.).

She who must be obeyed has the TV and the home theater system, I have the computer and the stereo system. It's a simple division, but it works for us.

"Surely you are joking, Mr Feynman"

 

[steviebee]

Welcome, VR! Just wanted to say I love your avatar!
Takes me back to those golden years of scifi...tho I wasn't around then, some of my favourite writers were.

 

[Dept_of_Alchemy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif I prefer to buy older, high quality stuff used than lower quality new stuff.

How about a pair of used HD580 or HD600 from the FS subforums here? The 580 goes for a little less than $100 and the 600 a little less than $200. They're supposed to be very comfortable and were the flagship products from Sennheiser (late 80's~mid 90's). You'd need an amp to drive them properly, though, and their sound signature is somewhat different from 'stats in that they emphasize the lower frequencies more. It was mainly these that killed the 'stats. Also you might like headphones from the Grado line, they have that vintage look to them and emphasize more on detail, I have a feeling that you might like them a lot. Their range goes from the SR-60 to the RS-1 (um, and beyond).

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif I haven't even seen my CD player in about ten years, it's in a closet somewhere although I'm not sure just which one.

Vintage CD players go for big bucks these days. Check out their prices on eBay, it's incredible. So you might score a pretty penny for your unit if it's in good condition... man, I never understood baby boomers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif "Surely you are joking, Mr.Feynman"

"During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas." - Richard Feynman

You know, like electrostatic headphones.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by steviebee /img/forum/go_quote.gif Welcome, VR! Just wanted to say I love your avatar! Takes me back to those golden years of scifi...tho I wasn't around then, some of my favourite writers were.

Hi steviebee,

Thanks for the welcome.

Your avatar is from one of my all time favorite bands, although my favorite album by them is probably "The Soft Parade".

"The soft parade has now begun, listen to the engines hum."

For my favorite rock artist it's probably a tossup between Jim Morrison and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. I plan on having "Brothers In Arms" played at my funeral along with "Shaman's Blues" by the Doors. I would do "Crawling Kingsnake" but that would probably freak out some of the mourners.

My avatar is from a Kelley Freas painting for an "Analog" cover. I've subscribed to Analog since about 1963 or so. Does that make me one of the fen?

*You* don't understand boomers, hell, I don't understand 'em and I are one.

My daughter and son in law are Gen X'ers and I don't understand them either.

Cheers,

Jon

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Hmm... the SR-60's look like I could live with them. I really prefer open air headphones that sit on the ear over closed over the ear types. Checking ebay, it looks like they are going for around $40 to $50 shipped in not terribly good cosmetic but excellent working shape.

By the way, I got steviebee and you confused in my last post, consider the remark about boomers to be aimed at you..

I got impulsive and bought a pair of Yamaha HP-3's a little while ago on ebay. They probably aren't very comfortable but I'm intrigued by the technology.

If I don't like 'em I'll just put 'em back up on ebay with much better pictures and a glowing description of the sound. I'm quite good at overselling stuff on ebay.

On edit: I'm off to check out the FS forum(s).

 

[003]

Are you opposed to getting new headphones?

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 003 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Are you opposed to getting new headphones?

I'm opposed to buying new stuff on principle, unless there is an obvious benefit to doing so.

I don't particularly like the throwaway culture we have today.

Our newest car is 93 Infinity J30t with over 250k on it. It runs, drives, handles and looks nearly like new. It is basically a four door 300zx, same engine, transmission, engine, suspension and brakes and drives like it. 3k between oil changes and it still needs no oil topups.

Most people would have traded it in long ago, but I prefer to put a little money in maintenance and repairs and save the dollars that would go to the bank in interest payments on a new car. In the last 150k I have put an alternator, a water pump, a timing belt and brakes on it. Total cost, under $2k.

I already have our next car set up, a 2000 Acura 3.2tl, it belongs to my son in law and next year when he buys the 2003 Infiniti G35 six speed he is lusting after, I will buy the tl from him because the dealer won't give him crap for it as a trade in.

Even with my computer, I'm recycling. I've got a new motherboard, processor, graphics card, memory and power supply for my top quality aluminum ATX case. Total cost under $250 and I'm going to have a dual core Pentium with a 256 meg graphics card and a gig of DDR2 ram.

Ebay is your friend..

 

[Happy Camper]

TVR,
Welcome to the best little website in audio. You know (since you have been lurking) that budget has to be established before we can spend your money.

Grados are the best entry point for the treble challenged. Good call. You should also consider an amp as those oldies do sound so much better with some help. The details will jump out without having to crank it to bleeding levels. And when you do want to bleed, it's there.

The head-fly hits the water.......

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Hi HC,

Thanks for the welcome.

Budget is basically as little as I can get away with.

If you read my last post, you know I'm not a fan of buying new unless there is an obvious benefit. The last pair of SR-60's here went for $50 delivered and moved very quickly, so I suspect that they will be a little hard to find.

I have a real liking for unusual (some would say bizarre) technology. Hence the orthodynamics and the electrets appeal to me strictly on aesthetic grounds, even if they do not perform quite as well as do the latest "regular" dynamics.

From what I read on the forums here after a bit of searching is that the TK33's do indeed sound quite good when EQ'ed a bit. I have Diamond Cut Audio's "DC6" installed on my box and it essentially allows me to run an unlimited number of bandbass, highpass, lowpass and notch filters, paragraphic eq's, fft continuous noise reduction, dynamic noise reduction and impulse noise reduction all in series while playing live through my sound card while I record both the straight off the vinyl sound and the DSP sound to my hard drive simultaneously. DC6 is basically a forensic audio application that performs DSP. That's why I need a dual core processor, multithreading is a specialty of dual core processors and all that DSP is going to multithread all the way to Timbuktu and back.

So, EQ is not a problem for me.

I'm quite familiar with DSP in the imaging field, I have been processing astronomical images for about a decade with a sophisticated dedicated program called "AstroArt" and I'm also very familiar with Photoshop, GIMP and Paint Shop Pro.

Astronomical imaging is all about "pulling signal out of noise", if you saw the raw Hubble Space Telescope images you would be shocked. They look nothing like the finished product which is the result of some extremely powerful and sophisticated code. By now cosmic radiation has done considerable damage to the sensors on HST and they have numerous dead pixels and a lot more that are damaged. All of this is compensated for in software on the ground.

Restoring damaged vinyl is also all about "pulling signal out of noise" and DC6 lets me do just that. Tweaking the settings is the name of the game. You would be surprised how many records have hum encoded right into the grooves. One of my favorite examples was a record that had hum at 90.2 Hz, 105.4 Hz and 120.1 Hz, all of which I eliminated with notch filters. That is in addition to the 60 Hz, 120 Hz, 180 Hz and 240 Hz hum from my equipment which I have already compensated for in preset filters. Records also have rumble, crackle and a variety of other sounds, just about all of which can be cancelled out with the proper filters.

Umm.. I tend to get carried away when I talk about my obsessions. Hope I haven't bored you.

Cheers,

Jon

 

[Dept_of_Alchemy]

That was the most interesting post I've read in a while. Hmm, didn't know that about the HST, sounds like a fun job. A friend of mine worked on analyzing data from the HETE for a while, but somehow that seemed rather dull...

What you said about vinyl sounds really interesting. It makes sense, digital noise reduction works (sometimes elegantly, sometimes not), one potential problem I see is how transparent are the ADC and DAC? What about jitter?

So. Speaking of new/exotic technology, check out this thread.

 

[Carl]

I doubt you'll find SR60s much (if any) of a leap over your old 'stats.

If you like old planar-type headphones, I say go for it, the best of 70s technology is pretty cheap now. Suggestions; Stax SR-X mk3, Stax SR-5N, Fostex T50 (the original one, not the rubbish modern ones with the same model number), Sony ECR-500, Beyer ET-1000, and perhaps the Jecklin Float 'stats if you can find one at a sane price.

Stax SR-X + a nice tube amp = love.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Thanks for the compliment.

A lot of the stuff I find utterly fascinating just bores the bejeezus out of everyone around me so I tend to keep it to myself a lot and then when I do let it out it all comes in a rush. Every member of my family but my son in law just rolls their eyes when I wax rhapsodic over some geeky thing or other. Son in law is going for a Masters in IT and now is starting to pay some attention to me, since he is starting to realize that my brain is worth picking, even if only for new ideas for his papers. You would think that someone going for a MSc would have heard of RAID, eh? When I told him about data striping over LAN's his eyes about bugged out.

As for jitter and such, I have an Audiophile 2496 card ready to go in the new box when I finally get it finished (I think the motherboard is borked and I just got a new one off ebay last night). My current card is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz which has excellent specs and 18 bit A/D converters, my measured noise level is 72 dB below clipping and software noise reduction can take that well below 80 dB. The very best analog records have a dynamic range of about 55 dB so I think 72 dB is an adequate figure. The TBSC can be had for a song on ebay, since it doesn't have all the latest jillion channel playback for games and home theater. Two channels, properly implemented, are fine for me and the TBSC does that very well.

I forgot to mention in my last post, but I have what is known as a "flat" phono preamp on the way. Essentially it is a phono level preamp with no RIAA eq built in, hence the term "flat". The eq is all done in software, 32 bit floating point so it is far more accurate than mere resistors and capacitors can manage. Along with the test record I have coming as well, this will allow me to completely calibrate my recording system, all the way from the stylus to the A/D converters and tweak everything until it is as flat as a Kansas wheat field. If you know exactly what the record is supposed to be putting out and you see a difference in the spectrum analyzer then you can use paragraphic eq to tweak everything just so for absolutely flat frequency response.

Once you have done that, you then save that tweak as a preset and use it when ripping the vinyl. It may not be absolutely perfect but it is far closer to it than can be achieved with hardware alone.

The RIAA recording curve has a strong boost in the highs and a cut in the lows for technical reasons I can go into if you wish. What this means is that the sound coming straight off the vinyl has a lot of treble and not much bass. This emphasizes the impulse noise and much of the hiss and makes it even easier to detect and eliminate it in software. You do the software RIAA eq, which is the mirror image of the recording eq, *after* the impulse noise and hiss removal and the resulting noise floor is even lower than it would be without the flat phono preamp.

Here is the "noise fingerprint" of a record I was working on last night, note the strong peak at 25.6 Hz and the smaller ones at just over 90 Hz and at 120 Hz. This is after I have compensated for all the noise in my system, so it is basically the surface noise from the vinyl. Note also from the VU meters that the overall noise level is only about 41 dB or so below clipping. The 90 Hz hum was very noticeable with the volume turned up to "ear bleeding" levels, taking out made a distinct improvement in the recording.

 

[F107plus5]

Hi there Old Dude, and Welcome!

You're old enough to take charge of your own wallet, so I won't use the standard Head-Fi greeting of: "Welcome to Head-Fi and Sorry About your Wallet!"

I see you also tend to share my Moms' favorite saying: "Use it up; wear it out. Make it do or do without"! Yeah! My motorcycle is a 74 Triumph Trident I bought back in 73, and my four wheeled vehicle is an 87 Wrangler that I bought right after they came out in 86 cause the Wife felt the CJs were too uncivilized! Our family car is a 90 Dodge Caravan we bought when we inherited four of our grandkids right after I retired back in '00, so budgeting is something we are familiar with also!

Vinyl is a sad point since all my albums beginning in the 50s died a sad death when we had four hurricanes come through in 04 and turned them into a homogenious blob of plastic cardboard and paper all fused into a 400lb block.

Very sad.

I'm a great fan of tried-and-true technology for keep-it-forever kind of stuff, but I can also appreciate the new stuff if it can prove it has a reason to be here other than just a new-tech answer looking for a darn good question!

Anyway.....

Oh.....I have MS2i and HD600 and love them both!

....I had to say SOMETHING about phones so this wouldn't just be another post-count-increasing frivolous post!

Welcome!
Rich.