What is responsible for soundstage in a preamp design?

[capacitorless]

+1. I started playing guitar in the '70s with something called an Ampeg Stud, which was an SG shape with a laminated body, bolt on neck, crappy pickups and a knockoff Bigsby that you didn't use if you wanted to stay in tune. And very heavy.

I was recently gifted a Stagg SG copy with nice, resonant neck-thru body, well shaped neck profile and Gibson style bridge/tailpiece setup; the pickups and tuners were decent (nothing special - easy swap though). I don't think they could have made the Stagg to the price point it was designed for without CNC.

 

[Newmarket]

I know we love to get off topic here But I'm going to warn about getting into electric guitar debate. I don't mind but be aware you'll likely end up debating whether it's preferable to have the (not actually a) tremelo cover plate on or off. And Buzz Feiten tuning

 

[dai h.]

hi (FWIW) a 2012 thread on the same topic:

https://groupdiy.com/threads/mic-preamps-with-seemingly-deep-sound-stage-depth-of-field.47384/

 

[Tubetec]

The modern transformerless mic amp is ,in technical terms in almost perfect in every respect ,
thats not the same as saying it sounds better though .

 

[JohnRoberts]

Of course I have a story about cheap guitars.... It's been possible to buy things that look like guitars pretty cheaply from offshore for decades. I even recall guitars coming from Viet Nam made from old rubber trees ( heavy wood).

One guy I heard about, decided his get rich scheme was to order a container full of guitars from China for a couple dollars each, and resell them out of the trunk of his car (he lived in SoCal). The cheap crap was unplayable as it arrived. He lost his ***, having to pay US guitar technicians to get them good enough to sell. Many could not be saved. He learned an expensive lesson about sourcing gear offshore.

JR

 

[Ricardus]

Do you mean like this:

Yep.

 

[Ricardus]

“Good marketers keep the "expectations" high. High prices help feed those elevated expectations.”

Marketers bending the truth to ‘elevate expectations’ happens just as much at the lower end of town as it does at the higher end. Higher end products from certain brands being overpriced due to excess demand doesn’t ipso facto imply that budget products will sound just the same.

No one should expect a budget 5V desktop interface pre with much poorer specs on paper to sound as ‘3d’ or as good in any way. It’s targeted at teenagers and podcasters.

A bottom of the range Epiphone SG is not a top of the range Gibson SG, despite their superficial similarities. It doesn’t play the same, it doesn’t sound the same, it’s made from much cheaper timber and parts, and it took far less manual labour on the assembly line to produce. Hence why it costs so much less.

You’re suggesting these objective differences are ‘all in people’s heads’. Feel free to ask Jim and Paul whether they agree with you ...

This is called "a straw man argument."

It's classic. Along with moving the goalposts.

So let's play the two guitars next to each other behind a curtain and see which one you like then.

Now don't get me wrong. I would prefer a world without exploited labor where everyone making things gets paid more than a living wage. But that's not the argument here. The argument here is about whether it's "better" just because it's more expensive.

 

[Ricardus]

Looks like we have some medical experts here as well... good to know..

This is the part, like with the guy last month, where he starts getting defensive. Then the name-calling starts, then he gets banned. It's probably even the same guy with multiple accounts.

 

[nick_t]

Tubetec: "I also dont see what difference having a piece of gear powered from a 5v rail makes"

Yep, it's stepped up internally but has to be capable of being powered reliably from a standard USB port with a max draw of 500mA @ 5V. Based on that I'm making an assumption the entire MOTU M4 - pres + outputs + phones - draws about 2W.

Not sure which higher end converters you're referring to, but a Brooklyn draws 17W, Lavry Black maybe 20-24W, Benchmark 15W etc. I don't know any that run off a standard USB port.

Not knocking the M4 - for the price it looks like a pretty good product. But the premise of the OP was that the pres don't cut it compared to other units they've used. That doesn’t surprise me that much is all I was getting at.

 

[Tubetec]

I believe I said high spec , that doesnt nessesarily mean high priced or high end ,

The quality of the 5v power you give a bus powered interface can and does make a difference , 5volts off a big power hungry motherboard of a desktop monster is very unlikely to be satifactory ,a laptop on batteries is normally good , but with the mains charger connected and charging appreciable digital noise can get into your audio path .

 

[JohnRoberts]

I had been a student of marketing (advertising) for as long as I operated consumer facing businesses. I have read too many books about how to persuade customers (I listed several in one of the sundry book lists stickies). Sadly politicians also figured out there was benefit from using persuasion technology.

Here is today's TMI about advertising and my time at Peavey (last century). I was competing against Mackie while they were spending more money advertising one single mixer, than Peavey spent all year advertising over a thousand SKUs. I saw first hand (still have the scars) how well this worked. Dealers had customers walk into their stores pre-sold on the Mackie mixer. The path of least resistance was to give the customer what they want (the customer is always right, yadda yadda).

To compete against that overwhelming flood of advertising, I needed to secure a reasonable ad budget. I came up with a strategy to include my ad budget into the pricing approval for a new series of mixers. I forget the exact numbers but each new mixer we sold, contributed a few dollars to this dedicated mixer ad budget. Management was happy because the approved price, including advertising met corporate profit targets. I was happy because even just a couple dollars per unit adds up when selling hundreds/thousands of mixers every month.

I started out with a few full page ads. Within a few months the advertising began to deliver fruit, and even more ad pages. Of course it is never easy to change a large corporation. I encountered several hiccups along the way.

One notable problem was when my dealers could not get mixers, because the factory was not building enough. I ran down the factory scheduling guy and asked him why he ignored my advice to build more units. I had told him that I was placing more ads and that he should increase production. He told me that he had heard similar stories before from other product managers and the promised sales never arrived. Of course mine did.

The final insult came when an empty suit marketing executive that Hartley hired stole my ad budget and used it for general corporate ad programs.

So you can lead the horse to water, and even get it to start drinking, but old corporate habits are hard to break.

JR

 

[user 37518]

The modern transformerless mic amp is ,in technical terms in almost perfect in every respect ,
thats not the same as saying it sounds better though .

A good argument, however, what objective variable can be measured to determine what sounds good? In my opinion, it is the the modern transformless mic amp what sounds best. But if low THD and IMD, flat frequency response, etc are not the factors that determine whether something sounds good, then what is? One could make an argument that consensus of people who listen to it, but, then again, it depends on whether who agrees in that consensus. One must ask how many of the people who claim that the 1073 sounds amazing believe so because they in fact love it, or because of the fact that the 1073 sounds great has become dogma and people just accept it.

 

[k brown]

I had been a student of marketing (advertising) for as long as I operated consumer facing businesses. I have read too many books about how to persuade customers (I listed several in one of the sundry book lists stickies). Sadly politicians also figured out there was benefit from using persuasion technology.

Here is today's TMI about advertising and my time at Peavey (last century). I was competing against Mackie while they were spending more money advertising one single mixer, than Peavey spent all year advertising over a thousand SKUs. I saw first hand (still have the scars) how well this worked. Dealers had customers walk into their stores pre-sold on the Mackie mixer. The path of least resistance was to give the customer what they want (the customer is always right, yadda yadda).

To compete against that overwhelming flood of advertising, I needed to secure a reasonable ad budget. I came up with a strategy to include my ad budget into the pricing approval for a new series of mixers. I forget the exact numbers but each new mixer we sold, contributed a few dollars to this dedicated mixer ad budget. Management was happy because the approved price, including advertising met corporate profit targets. I was happy because even just a couple dollars per unit adds up when selling hundreds/thousands of mixers every month.

I started out with a few full page ads. Within a few months the advertising began to deliver fruit, and even more ad pages. Of course it is never easy to change a large corporation. I encountered several hiccups along the way.

One notable problem was when my dealers could not get mixers, because the factory was not building enough. I ran down the factory scheduling guy and asked him why he ignored my advice to build more units. I had told him that I was placing more ads and that he should increase production. He told me that he had heard similar stories before from other product managers and the promised sales never arrived. Of course mine did.

The final insult came when an empty suit marketing executive that Hartley hired stole my ad budget and used it for general corporate ad programs.

So you can lead the horse to water, and even get it to start drinking, but old corporate habits are hard to break.

JR

What model Peavy would you say was an upgrade from the Mackie 1202 (esp regarding mic pres)? I'll look for one on eBay.
(serious question - not trolling)

 

[JohnRoberts]

What model Peavy would you say was an upgrade from the Mackie 1202 (esp regarding mic pres)? I'll look for one on eBay.
(serious question - not trolling)

It's spelled "Peavey" and why buy an old mixer? FWIW back then the mic preamps we used were a two op amp variant Cohen topology, using ROHM 2sd786 low noise NPN transistors so quite good (IMO). One trick that Mackie used back then was to use marginal sized electrolytic capacitors in series with the mic pre gain pot, so at very high gain, the LF response would tail off, making the 1/F noise appear lower than it really was.

Nowadays I suspect Peavey is using mic preamp ICs just like everybody else. One thing that used to irritate me was how people ASSumed that multiple mic preamps inside mixers had to be inferior to stand alone mic preamps

JR

PS: I did some clever things with small mixer feature sets (don't get me started) since the electronic audio paths were already quite good .

 

[MicUlli]

I am quite overwhelmed regarding the whole discussion
The only issue the OP claims is a noticable sound difference between two preamps. Because sound differences are hard to describe he uses the wording "soundstage".
For sure an audible sound difference must reflect in different technical specs. What do we want? IMHO a preamp with flat frequency (and phase) response free of THD and IMD operating with no overload..
Perhaps others like a kind of "sound enhancement", i dont

 

[k brown]

It's spelled "Peavey" and why buy an old mixer? FWIW back then the mic preamps we used were a two op amp variant Cohen topology, using ROHM 2sd786 low noise NPN transistors so quite good (IMO). One trick that Mackie used back then was to use marginal sized electrolytic capacitors in series with the mic pre gain pot, so at very high gain, the LF response would tail off, making the 1/F noise appear lower than it really was.

Nowadays I suspect Peavey is using mic preamp ICs just like everybody else. One thing that used to irritate me was how people ASSumed that multiple mic preamps inside mixers had to be inferior to stand alone mic preamps

JR

PS: I did some clever things with small mixer feature sets (don't get me started) since the electronic audio paths were already quite good .

My appologies for wasting your time with an accidental misspelling and a stupid question . . .

I thought you would have taken my inquiry as a compliment - my mistake.

This is starting to feel more like Gearspace - pity.

 

[JohnRoberts]

My appologies for wasting your time with an accidental misspelling and a stupid question . . .

I don't recall saying that but I am not very interested in researching through my old designs to mate one to the Mackie 1202... from 30+ years ago

I thought you would have taken my inquiry as a compliment - my mistake.

We have a like button for that. This request sounded almost like homework.

The mixers I designed to compete with the 1202 were bare bones entry level stuff. Sonically the preamps and audio path were solid. The 1202 probably worked OK too... I don't remember if it was the 1202 or 1402 but one small Mackie from back then used an unbuffered insert point. That insert fed directly into a Baxandall tone control section, so if fed from too much source impedance the tone control's changing input impedance could show up as a small frequency response shift. I noticed this by accident when I switched the source impedance of my bench 8903 between 600 ohm and low z. Not a big deal, just a corner cut to reduce BOM cost.

This is starting to feel more like Gearspace - pity.

Not by a country mile... But some of the new posters might be happier over there if searching for vague etherial sonic properties.

JR

 

[Rusan]

Of course I have a story about cheap guitars.... It's been possible to buy things that look like guitars pretty cheaply from offshore for decades. I even recall guitars coming from Viet Nam made from old rubber trees ( heavy wood).

One guy I heard about, decided his get rich scheme was to order a container full of guitars from China for a couple dollars each, and resell them out of the trunk of his car (he lived in SoCal). The cheap crap was unplayable as it arrived. He lost his ***, having to pay US guitar technicians to get them good enough to sell. Many could not be saved. He learned an expensive lesson about sourcing gear offshore.

JR

Back about 2000, an area music store chain bought a bunch of very cheap drum kits from China. IIRC, it was a standard 5-piece with hats, ride and one crash. Their intent was to sell them to students in their music school. Everything went well for a while, until a student tried to replace a head. Every shell was a non-standard size that nobody made heads for, which they didn't think to check for beforehand. They contacted the importer, who said he wasn't a musical instrument dealer per se, and had no idea where to get replacement heads.

The store had to eat something like $25,000 USD worth of drum sets, and that location soon went out of business.

 

[k brown]

I don't recall saying that but I am not very interested in researching through my old designs to mate one to the Mackie 1202... from 30+ years ago

We have a like button for that. This request sounded almost like homework.

The mixers I designed to compete with the 1202 were bare bones entry level stuff. Sonically the preamps and audio path were solid. The 1202 probably worked OK too... I don't remember if it was the 1202 or 1402 but one small Mackie from back then used an unbuffered insert point. That insert fed directly into a Baxandall tone control section, so if fed from too much source impedance the tone control's changing input impedance could show up as a small frequency response shift. I noticed this by accident when I switched the source impedance of my bench 8903 between 600 ohm and low z. Not a big deal, just a corner cut to reduce BOM cost.

Not by a country mile... But some of the new posters might be happier over there if searching for vague etherial sonic properties.

JR

I found the schem for PV 8 - it has the dbl op amp / 2SD786 pres you described.

Feature-for-feature, pretty comparable to the 1202. I like that it also has channel inserts; not that common on smaller mixers.

 

[Gold]

I'm not a guitar player but from professional guitar players I hear that the 'custom shop' guitars ain't what they used to be. It seems the thing to do is go to your local big box retailer and got through every instrument of the type you want. Pick the best one and then put some money into it by replacing the cheap parts and having it set up well. You get a great guitar (better than a custom/american) for less than half the price.

I know the Korean Epiphone Jack Cassidy bass I have is excellent. Plays and sounds great. Stock.

oops wrong thread