Subsonic filter is supposed to cut down on the woofer pump - that excessive woofer movement you can actually see while playing records. My vintage Technics amp has this button and it really works. That pioneer turntable is absolutely beautiful btw!
I have watched several of your videos. I didn't realize you are from Nashville. I moved back to western Kentucky four years ago after living in Madison for almost thirty. We might have been flipping through vinyl at the same time at Grimey's, Great Escape, or Phonoluxe. Good luck with that Sony.
Good video. How fun it is to have music on many different formats. Each format has their own strengths and weaknesses. I have been lately listening to cassettes as one of my 5 different formats to listen to music on. Using a great player with plenty of sound improving mods; I often feel like the sound quality is otherwordly good from a cassette. So smooth and liquid with that flowing seamless continuity that tape sound is known for. Believe it or not, I don't even think I am noticing any lack of dynamics with my latest cassette deck mods; which means I think, that lps and cds are often not giving us the full dynamic range that those formats are capable of giving us. You must have one amazing lp collection to not have warped records. Many people find its hard to find one lp in their collection that doesn't have at least some warping. While a record is playing, look at your tonearm at eye level, crouching down or kneeling down off to the side. If the cartridge and headshell is going up and down a little bit, there is a warp. It's estimated that over 90% of records are warped to some degree. Tone controls are a must for me. As the famous late audio designer James Bongiorno of G.A.S. used to say, "I have never met a room with a flat frequency response. A bass and treble control with turnover frequencies where you can adjust at what frequencies the controls take theiraction is priceless. Records all have their own frequency response and so do rooms. Before the 1980s, almost everything had tone controls. High end preamps and then integrated amps started appearing without tone controls. Shortening the signal path and removing things from the signal path gave a slight improvement in transparency, openness etc., but IMO the benefits were not big enough to have to listen to records or cds that were too dull or too bright. Actually I don't think it was a very bright idea at all. They could have given us tone controls with a tone defeat button. And what about older people? If you go to an audio show, that's mostly what you see; older audiophiles. Hearing loss is common with them, especially at high frequencies. And hearing loss also often is worse in one ear than another. Without a balance control, someone like that has to listen to off centered vocals the rest of their life. Some things don't make it easy or ideal for the majority of audiophiles, who are older in age. Will things ever change and go back?
Another interesting thing is that back in the 1980s when the average audiophiles age might have been 25, when tone controls started disappearing from preamps due to the likes of companies like PS Audio, Audio Research, etc., needing a high frequency boost due to having older ears was not nearly as big a factor as it is now. Maybe now the most common age for an audiophile is 65 years old. Will audio change to accommodate them and a real need, with tone controls and balance controls again? Or would any such preamp and integrated amp be doomed upon release, as they got it ingrained into peoples minds that no tone controls sound best and the only eay to go.... Maybe so, if your average audiophile nowadays was 25 iyears old nstead of 65. Melinda Murphy did a comparison on her channel yesterday (for what its woth) comparing a cheap vintage Pioneer turntable with her over $3,500 turntable and cartridge. You can guess which one won. They say about 1/5 of a piece of equipments retail price is what it costs the manufacturer to actually build the product. You can do a lot more in manufacture for over $700 than for $80. So she wasn't mainly comparing old technology versus new, but cheap versus expensive. Where they can afford not to make as many serious compromises. And her phono cartridge that came with the turntable cost near $3,000. Some many of her out to lunch viewers from her comment section were vehemently recommending she try cartridges in the $3,000 price range; which she already has and has been using for years.
Did you get the Sony opened up yet? I have one, and it’s the most fiendishly complicated automatic turntable I’ve ever worked on. It seems like it has twice the number of moving parts as a Technics, JVC, CEC, etc. to do the same thing. Even after extensive cleaning I was not able to get mine to operate properly (and you can’t even use the cueing lever unless the mechanicals are working). However, it was surprisingly easy to remove the automatic mechanism entirely, in (almost) one piece, and it works fine as a manual turntable.
I haven't had time to dive in yet but I'm preparing for what you describe your experience to be unfortunately. I'm a little worried this might end up being a manual table like yours. Thanks for letting me know of the complication though, it will make me feel better if I can't figure it out myself lol!
Something I don't understand; you're featuring the Zen Phono stage yet, you're using two (well only one working) turntable. I'm wondering why you're using vintage turntables but you've not shared why. What's you amplification source, I guess one that doesn't have a phone stage built in? Thanks!
@@ForeverAnalog Right, but what are you running your source into? I saw you had a beast of a vintage receiver in the trunk. If it works, I'm sure it has a built in phono stage.
Looks to be a very nice phono pre and not just a bland squarish box! Not needing one right now, but will keep it in mind for down the road. Looking forward to hearing more about that receiver. 🙂
Oof - my back still hurts from moving that sucker around. I'm taking it to my tech friend to give it a once over and then get a video shot for it. Thanks for watching!
"Basically".................................. is a word I wish Reviewers would stop using so frequently when describing any function or design etc. It's insulting. As if we, the proletariat, are just too stupid to understand the full whole of an operation, process or what have you. Acid Jazz, Funk & Brass 🔈🔉🔊
I do like comparison videos.could you compare this phono stage to something a bit more spendy? like the Vincent tube phono stage? wondering if the money correlates to the quality of sound.
Did I hear banjo music when you went through that ghost town? Quite a haul! I am moving and I emptied my store room. I found my 80s Pioneer turntable. It has a Pickering cartridge with a dust brush. You have to add an extra gram of tracking to counter the upward force of the brush. The belt is bad of course.
My admittedly limited experience with subsonic filters is that either #1 i hear no difference, #2 it cuts most of the rumble, or #3 it cuts rumble and even some of the sub frequencies out of the music. I've asked some very knowledgeable friends about it and was told that if there is no issue with the record then i should hear no discernable difference with it on or off. Was told that the sign of a good filter is when they've set the cutoff frequency right in the sweet spot between the rumble and the music. Granted, like yourself, I don't hold on to any records that have significant issues like that. Thanks so much for the review. I believe that this is one of the first few vids I've seen of yours and i really like the content. I appreciate the fact that you used the equipment for at least a couple weeks before sharing your experience. You're doing a good job. Subbed!
5:52 Aaron, I have that same cool model of Sony turntable which has a nice "meaty" aluminum platter (pretty heavy duty). I bought it from an eBay seller about 25 years ago for roughly $50 and an additional $50 to ship it to Canada. The main reason I bought it was because the seller had converted it to play 78s; not just 45s and 33 rpm records as originally designed. The only downside was that his alterations made the turntable totally manual with a mechanical flip switch added to change speeds, but no auto start or auto return or record size settings any longer, but he did include two Shure cartridges; one for playing 45s and 33 rpm records and the other for playing 78s. It really came in handy when playing my collection of 1920s to 1960s 78 rpm jazz and swing records by Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, etc. (as well as fox trots, exotica, popular artists of the 40s and 50s, and classical music). :)
@@ForeverAnalog , thanks! After watching Ken Burns' 10-episode 'Jazz' documentary series back in 2001, I became obsessed with jazz and thought it would be cool to collect 78s that existed during the jazz artists' lifetimes, so I bought an Empire hand-crank floor model record player from a local antiques mall vendor and then proceeded to buy jazz 78s and 4-record album sets on eBay fairly cheaply in the early-2000s before prices and shipping charges rose significantly as part of the vinyl record revival (even though 78s are not vinyl, of course). :)
Hey Aaron ... likes for not vlogging while driving! For the "subsonic filter" ... AKA Rumble Filter ... These generally operate in the 0 to 5 hz range and there's nothing to hear when turning them on or off. However; if you watch the cones on your woofers you may notice some very strange behaviour with the filter off. On any decent amp/receiver you would see the woofer cones moving in and out randomly and quite slowly. If you touch the side of the headshell (gently, of course) you would see them jump around like scared monkeys! The filter is to prevent these very low frequency events from reaching your other electronics and potentially either overheating your power amp or burning out the voice coil in your woofers. This happens because of interaction between the tone arm and stylus during normal play. The needle tracking the record moves a little bit sideways before overcoming the friction of the tone arm pivot. The tone arm now moves over with it's inertia causing it to get a tiny bit ahead of the needle, which then catches up; and so on. Since the two do not always move exactly together they can and often do produce powerful but random ultra low frequency signals as a result. It was not uncommon to see the woofer cones jump to their limits on the run-outs between tracks. This effect can also be exaggerated by off-centre records and even drafts in the room.
Subsonic filter is supposed to cut down on the woofer pump - that excessive woofer movement you can actually see while playing records. My vintage Technics amp has this button and it really works.
That pioneer turntable is absolutely beautiful btw!
Thanks for the info! Yeah I love this table a lot. Thanks for watching!
I have watched several of your videos. I didn't realize you are from Nashville. I moved back to western Kentucky four years ago after living in Madison for almost thirty. We might have been flipping through vinyl at the same time at Grimey's, Great Escape, or Phonoluxe. Good luck with that Sony.
Awesome. I'm approaching 30 years in the Nashville area as well so I'm sure we did some shopping together at some point! Thanks for watching!
Good video. How fun it is to have music on many different formats. Each format has their own strengths and weaknesses. I have been lately listening to cassettes as one of my 5 different formats to listen to music on. Using a great player with plenty of sound improving mods; I often feel like the sound quality is otherwordly good from a cassette. So smooth and liquid with that flowing seamless continuity that tape sound is known for. Believe it or not, I don't even think I am noticing any lack of dynamics with my latest cassette deck mods; which means I think, that lps and cds are often not giving us the full dynamic range that those formats are capable of giving us.
You must have one amazing lp collection to not have warped records. Many people find its hard to find one lp in their collection that doesn't have at least some warping. While a record is playing, look at your tonearm at eye level, crouching down or kneeling down off to the side. If the cartridge and headshell is going up and down a little bit, there is a warp. It's estimated that over 90% of records are warped to some degree.
Tone controls are a must for me. As the famous late audio designer James Bongiorno of G.A.S. used to say, "I have never met a room with a flat frequency response. A bass and treble control with turnover frequencies where you can adjust at what frequencies the controls take theiraction is priceless. Records all have their own frequency response and so do rooms. Before the 1980s, almost everything had tone controls. High end preamps and then integrated amps started appearing without tone controls. Shortening the signal path and removing things from the signal path gave a slight improvement in transparency, openness etc., but IMO the benefits were not big enough to have to listen to records or cds that were too dull or too bright. Actually I don't think it was a very bright idea at all. They could have given us tone controls with a tone defeat button. And what about older people? If you go to an audio show, that's mostly what you see; older audiophiles. Hearing loss is common with them, especially at high frequencies. And hearing loss also often is worse in one ear than another. Without a balance control, someone like that has to listen to off centered vocals the rest of their life. Some things don't make it easy or ideal for the majority of audiophiles, who are older in age. Will things ever change and go back?
Thanks for sharing and watching!
Another interesting thing is that back in the 1980s when the average audiophiles age might have been 25, when tone controls started disappearing from preamps due to the likes of companies like PS Audio, Audio Research, etc., needing a high frequency boost due to having older ears was not nearly as big a factor as it is now. Maybe now the most common age for an audiophile is 65 years old. Will audio change to accommodate them and a real need, with tone controls and balance controls again? Or would any such preamp and integrated amp be doomed upon release, as they got it ingrained into peoples minds that no tone controls sound best and the only eay to go.... Maybe so, if your average audiophile nowadays was 25 iyears old nstead of 65.
Melinda Murphy did a comparison on her channel yesterday (for what its woth) comparing a cheap vintage Pioneer turntable with her over $3,500 turntable and cartridge. You can guess which one won. They say about 1/5 of a piece of equipments retail price is what it costs the manufacturer to actually build the product. You can do a lot more in manufacture for over $700 than for $80. So she wasn't mainly comparing old technology versus new, but cheap versus expensive. Where they can afford not to make as many serious compromises. And her phono cartridge that came with the turntable cost near $3,000. Some many of her out to lunch viewers from her comment section were vehemently recommending she try cartridges in the $3,000 price range; which she already has and has been using for years.
the turntable is the same as my sony ps-11
Nice! Thanks for watching!
Did you get the Sony opened up yet? I have one, and it’s the most fiendishly complicated automatic turntable I’ve ever worked on. It seems like it has twice the number of moving parts as a Technics, JVC, CEC, etc. to do the same thing. Even after extensive cleaning I was not able to get mine to operate properly (and you can’t even use the cueing lever unless the mechanicals are working). However, it was surprisingly easy to remove the automatic mechanism entirely, in (almost) one piece, and it works fine as a manual turntable.
I haven't had time to dive in yet but I'm preparing for what you describe your experience to be unfortunately. I'm a little worried this might end up being a manual table like yours. Thanks for letting me know of the complication though, it will make me feel better if I can't figure it out myself lol!
Something I don't understand; you're featuring the Zen Phono stage yet, you're using two (well only one working) turntable. I'm wondering why you're using vintage turntables but you've not shared why. What's you amplification source, I guess one that doesn't have a phone stage built in? Thanks!
I love vintage turntables and iFi asked me to review the Zen Phono 3 so I combined the two in this video. Thanks for watching!
@@ForeverAnalog Right, but what are you running your source into? I saw you had a beast of a vintage receiver in the trunk. If it works, I'm sure it has a built in phono stage.
Looks to be a very nice phono pre and not just a bland squarish box! Not needing one right now, but will keep it in mind for down the road. Looking forward to hearing more about that receiver. 🙂
Oof - my back still hurts from moving that sucker around. I'm taking it to my tech friend to give it a once over and then get a video shot for it. Thanks for watching!
"Basically"..................................
is a word I wish Reviewers would stop using so frequently when describing any function or design etc. It's insulting. As if we, the proletariat, are just too stupid to understand the full whole of an operation, process or what have you.
Acid Jazz, Funk & Brass 🔈🔉🔊
Sorry to break it to you but many are just that stupid.
lol - you should see how many words I edit out before posting
@@ForeverAnalog .
I don't understand. What?
@@TriAmpHiFi
We know.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 .
😁
I do like comparison videos.could you compare this phono stage to something a bit more spendy? like the Vincent tube phono stage? wondering if the money correlates to the quality of sound.
Yeah I’ll probably do a best of under a certain price level soon. Just need Ryu get my hands on some others
Did I hear banjo music when you went through that ghost town? Quite a haul! I am moving and I emptied my store room. I found my 80s Pioneer turntable. It has a Pickering cartridge with a dust brush. You have to add an extra gram of tracking to counter the upward force of the brush. The belt is bad of course.
I was playing REM too loud to notice!
Maybe I missed it, but what was the receiver you promised to tell use about . BTW what is your favorite dac?
The receiver is going to be a surprise for a future video!
My admittedly limited experience with subsonic filters is that either #1 i hear no difference, #2 it cuts most of the rumble, or #3 it cuts rumble and even some of the sub frequencies out of the music. I've asked some very knowledgeable friends about it and was told that if there is no issue with the record then i should hear no discernable difference with it on or off. Was told that the sign of a good filter is when they've set the cutoff frequency right in the sweet spot between the rumble and the music. Granted, like yourself, I don't hold on to any records that have significant issues like that.
Thanks so much for the review. I believe that this is one of the first few vids I've seen of yours and i really like the content. I appreciate the fact that you used the equipment for at least a couple weeks before sharing your experience. You're doing a good job. Subbed!
Thank you for watching and the kind words!
5:52 Aaron, I have that same cool model of Sony turntable which has a nice "meaty" aluminum platter (pretty heavy duty). I bought it from an eBay seller about 25 years ago for roughly $50 and an additional $50 to ship it to Canada.
The main reason I bought it was because the seller had converted it to play 78s; not just 45s and 33 rpm records as originally designed. The only downside was that his alterations made the turntable totally manual with a mechanical flip switch added to change speeds, but no auto start or auto return or record size settings any longer, but he did include two Shure cartridges; one for playing 45s and 33 rpm records and the other for playing 78s.
It really came in handy when playing my collection of 1920s to 1960s 78 rpm jazz and swing records by Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, etc. (as well as fox trots, exotica, popular artists of the 40s and 50s, and classical music). :)
That 78 collection sounds amazing! I have a few on hand but nothing too impressive, lol.
@@ForeverAnalog , thanks! After watching Ken Burns' 10-episode 'Jazz' documentary series back in 2001, I became obsessed with jazz and thought it would be cool to collect 78s that existed during the jazz artists' lifetimes, so I bought an Empire hand-crank floor model record player from a local antiques mall vendor and then proceeded to buy jazz 78s and 4-record album sets on eBay fairly cheaply in the early-2000s before prices and shipping charges rose significantly as part of the vinyl record revival (even though 78s are not vinyl, of course). :)
Hey Aaron ... likes for not vlogging while driving!
For the "subsonic filter" ... AKA Rumble Filter ... These generally operate in the 0 to 5 hz range and there's nothing to hear when turning them on or off.
However; if you watch the cones on your woofers you may notice some very strange behaviour with the filter off. On any decent amp/receiver you would see the woofer cones moving in and out randomly and quite slowly. If you touch the side of the headshell (gently, of course) you would see them jump around like scared monkeys! The filter is to prevent these very low frequency events from reaching your other electronics and potentially either overheating your power amp or burning out the voice coil in your woofers.
This happens because of interaction between the tone arm and stylus during normal play. The needle tracking the record moves a little bit sideways before overcoming the friction of the tone arm pivot. The tone arm now moves over with it's inertia causing it to get a tiny bit ahead of the needle, which then catches up; and so on. Since the two do not always move exactly together they can and often do produce powerful but random ultra low frequency signals as a result. It was not uncommon to see the woofer cones jump to their limits on the run-outs between tracks. This effect can also be exaggerated by off-centre records and even drafts in the room.
Thanks!
@@ForeverAnalog
You're welcome ... information is power, my friend.
Thumbnail kinda deceits
Thanks for the feedback.