Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

Cheers Richie. That'll do. I spied some Yamaha studio monitors down there I liked the look of.

Home AV setup help.
Currently I have a Panasonic blu-ray player that doubles as an amp for my surround sound (5.1 it all came together)
looking at upgrading my TV to a bigger, shinier one, and coupling it with an AV tuner (this will help as the TV im looking at only has 2 HDMI ports and I need at least 3)
The tuner I'm looking at has dolby 7.2 support.
I am a n00b with all this jazz and was wondering, if I just plug my current 5.1 speakers/sub in and if I buy a new sub and couple of speakers later, can I just plug them in too and get the full 7.2 experience? or will i need to match the speakers/ sub to the ones i currently have? Power wise (i have no idea what the wattage of my current sub is)
Or is 7.2 complete overkill in a fairly small 1bed flat

You should be able to run the new amp in 5.1 mode fine.
You can then add additional speakers to take it to 7.1 (or .2 with an extra sub..) - the amps usually have a hideous number of configurations etc to deal with all the possible variations.

I would say that 7.2 is overkill for a small / non dedicated room (in fact I would argue that for 95% of movies a 2.0 or 2.1 system is far better than 5.1)

I would also worry about trying to match up sub resopnse using 2 different subs - for effects speakers you should be fine, but getting crossovers and positioning sorted with 2 different subs will be challenging. There is also the fact that at the frequencies that a subwoofer operates you only hear in mono anyway.

If you want to spend more on speakers - I would perhaps upgrade the front's and then the sub and last of all the rears.

Superb, thanks for the help.
I doubt I'll go 2 subs, but just wondering really.

So my cousins beat me to it baggsied the good stuff. They got the B&O turntable, NAD amp and the Denon speakers leaving me with some tatty older stuff he'd had in storage since he upgraded. Hmmm. Ah well.

Still, it did include some rather nice big ol'd Wharfedales which seem to work and sound fine and a funky early 70s Akai receiver. Still fault finding with that at the moment. I have a question with it also. It has a big clunky speaker selection knob offering A/B/A&B/Off. Which is awesome but... the output seems ot be only +/- for L&R. So what's the selector for?

aaa, families hey! Hope they will actually use and enjoy it, and not just grabbing random shit that looks expensive? Like some of mine does....

Anyone care to answer my question? It would be appreciated.

Edit - I would trawl through a DAB thread looking for an answer but this thread is too general to trawl through.

Hi James,

Just get something functional. DAB isn't that bad, especially the higher bit-rate services like BBC Radio, but it's not going to make a massive difference if you pay a lot more, as MPEG decoders all follow the same spec, and there's a ceiling which you can't push past regarding audio quality.

The easiest way to get relatively high quality radio is decoding it using a Freeview/Freesat/Sky box.

I hope those speakers you have turn out to be Tannoys!

Roddy

It has a big clunky speaker selection knob offering A/B/A&B/Off. Which is awesome but... the output seems ot be only +/- for L&R. So what's the selector for?

Forced mono on the "A&B" selection? Who knows.

I replaced a 3.5mm headphone jack with one I bought online because the original had really choppy sound - thing is the newer jack doesn't sound as good as the older one did - is this normal?

(in fact I would argue that for 95% of movies a 2.0 or 2.1 system is far better than 5.1)

Just wanted to add my general agreement to this statement. Buying fewer higher quality speakers generally gives much better sound in regular living rooms. Unless your chair is away from all the walls and the speakers are optimally placed, 5.1 usually sounds worse than two channel.

A guy from work has got me thinking about getting a Digital-to-Audio converter, all the ones he has suggested are £100+, can you get decent ones for less?

What's the purpose of the converter?

I got a little headphone amp that was a DAC as well for my laptop, using USB. It's pretty good, but I think it's been discontinued and was around £100 I think.

It depends on the source - cd player, computer etc but often an external DAC can sound a lot better than the internal one in the source device.

I have an old Beresford DAC which iirc was ~£100

You should be able to pick up a NOS (non-oversampling) DAC for <£100 - quite a few of these sound really good

Cheers, i'll have a look at them.

@mattioats, was looking at something either to do computer to headphones, or computer to amp

If you don't need portability you've probably got a wider choice. That may or may not be a good thing, haha.

I just found this list someone made a year ago, might yield some ideas.

So my Denon UD-M3 mini system, bought new in 2000 or 2001 (like this one)

Seems to be on its last legs - it won't play CDs now and the volume control, which has been a bit flakey for a while, has got worse, sometimes the volume just jumps up massively with no warning :o

The obvious thing would be to replace it with the latest equivalent, the Denon DM-39, which gets good reviews, but the DM-39 only has two phono inputs, my UD-M3 has three, all of which are used (record player, Airport Express, which lets us play music from our various computers, and an input direct from my Mac to get around the Airport Express lag issue), so the DM-39 has one input too few.

So I'm looking at getting a 'proper' amp, and the Marantz PM6004 is looking like the favourite at the moment.

What I'd really like to do though, if maybe not straight away, is turn all my CDs into FLAC files and have a way of playing them when the computers are switched off, so I guess through some kind of NAS type thing? Not sure what my options are... halp?

I think I'd need a decent Analogue to Digital Converter too, right?

Sonos is great but pricey.

Most modern amps will have a digital in, with DAC.or your player will have a DAC. Only very high end systems have dedicated DACs really.

Chalfie, pointed me in the direction of this thread as I've got an old Harman Kardon HK 6150 amp, which I'm looking to get repaired/serviced, potentiometers are gone I believe.
Anyone know where I can get it repaired, preferably south based.

Thanking you..

mojo audio on lordship lane

i need to take mine down there.

will give them a ring tomorrow.

thanks

no wuckers

If thy are just crackly or if the volume jumps, them you could always try a skoosh of Servisol contact cleaner.

tried the contact cleaner method, okay for a week or two, then old crackly service is resumed.
got some good speakers to use with it, and I'm so over listening to tunes out of the sound sticks. So whilst I've got a little bit of cash, time to get it fixed. Properly.