I wonder if my old receiver had a compression filter that the manual doesn’t mention…
Until recently, the “out loud” portion of my setup was a temporary afterthought. I was primarily interested in my headphone setup - I did almost all of my listening in my headphones.
As a nod to having speakers for those occasions where more than just I wanted something to listen to, I was using a late ‘80’s era Yamaha stereo receiver (RX-385)as a power amp, feeding it off the RCA outs from my Vioelectric HPA-V281 - which makes a very capable preamp if your dac can gather your various digital sources. I leave my headphones plugged into the XLR port on the front, and use the headphone/line out selection buttons to switch between them or the speaker setup. I was using the yamaha to power a pair of Boston Acoustics HD5’s mated to a yamaha YST-SW50 sub. Since the whole getup cost me $50, I’ve been very impressed overall for the “afterthought” level setup it was supposed to represent.
Fast forward a bit, and everyone in the house has started to refer to my desk as “the good system” and I find myself playing music out loud on the speakers more than in my headphones. So naturally, I want to upgrade…
As a first stop, I grabbed a Fosi ZA3 and a pair of first-generation NHT SuperOne speakers. Sticking with the SW50 for the moment. Overall, I am happy with this as an intermediary on my way to the system I’m ultimately aiming for. I’m getting plenty of those magic moments where you hear details you’ve never noticed in familiar recordings, and very much enjoying the ride.
However, there are a few recordings of orchestral music I’ve gotten pretty familiar with where there are some subtle details getting lost in the background that I used to hear clearly. It doesn’t seem to be a frequency thing - cello, bassoon, french horn, violin, and flute are all victims from time to time - it seems more related to spatial presentation and volume. Low, quiet, supportive and background parts seem to be further in the background, suppressed towards the black floor, while foreground instruments are more ‘in your face’. I can turn up the volume on the V281, and get real clarity on those background details, so I know they’re not entirely lost, but doing so means listening to the whole piece at a noticeably loud overall volume.
Playing with the volume pots on both the preamp and the ZA3, I can reclaim a smidge of the lost details by turning the ZA3 way down, allowing me to get the V281 knob up past the 12 o’clock position, but that runs the danger of me absentmindedly hitting the “headphone” button and blasting my eardrums out, because the 9 o’clock position is comfortably loud in my headphones, and I think I’ve deliberately turned them up past 10 O’clock maybe twice since I’ve owned them.
So… Can an upgrade in amp and speakers expand the dynamic range of the overall sound, despite the same source recording, dac, and pre-amp? Did 1980’s and 90’s receivers commonly apply compression filters? I had the variable loudness set to “flat” and volume at ~80% on the yamaha in an attempt to approximate unity gain because I had read somewhere that most consumer electronics volume pots were almost entirely attenuators, with only a bit of boost in the upper register, but that the most transparent they would be is around 80%. I have similarly read that the ZA3 volume pot is handled digitally and that there’s no sonic penalty for any volume position, so I’ve been playing with gain staging - which is how I found that I can recapture some small portion of the now quieter supporting background details.
