Neurochrome HP-1

Many people find tube distortion to be more euphonic than solid state distortion for guitar amps. Comes down to personal preference, genre of music, the guitar itself, the guitarist's playing style, rest of the guitarist's gear chain, etc. in addition the the specific amp you're talking about. There are good and bad tube amps, just as there are good and bad solid state amps.

That's my understanding of his original post.

 

For all the objectivist blabber, you still have to use your objectively designed products recreate a perceivable subjective reality. If the aural reality being recreated by the gear is not high-fidelity to the original recording which is high fidelity to usually at least the lead instrument or vocals even if slammed to hell, then that piece of gear is not suited for high-fidelity playback.

Think an equation where your answer or estimate is just grossly wrong. I don't particularly care how much love and affection you put into your equation if the answer is wrong, then it's wrong. The Neurochrome HP-1 sounds off, overdamped, and compressed and costs 4-5 times as much as amps that do not from reputable mass manufacturers like Schiit. It's not audibly transparent at all as it doesn't get out of the way or even let you "hear through it" like some warmer amps with a tiny bit of bloom but not enough to mask the lower mids do. The HP-1 has problems up top and with sustain though.

No idea. It's usually the stuff with tons of overall negative feedback to reduce various distortion and linearize crap that compresses transients and spacing as negative feedback tends to "dampen" sound. There is actually a Japanese amp, the EPA-007x, that has the gimmick of a dampening knob that actually adjusts the amount of negative feedback being applied. I have joked about buying one just to fool around with but it's just too gimmicky and would need a good step down transformer.

There just comes a point where the compression goes beyond staging and treble transients into the actual reproduction of instruments. This is most noticeable with kick drums, timpanis , horns, strings, high grain death/black metal guitars, and super fat guitar tones. If the Arion Metal Master searing TV static pedal or Tony Iommi's custom pickups on his Gibson are not being done justice, then classical music will certainly be ass. If you can't do the opening to the "Anvil of Crom" from Poledouris's Conan score, how the hell are you going to reproduce Beethoven?

Yes it sounds like compressed trash. Chop that up into strips and compress those some more and that's the sound. Paper shredding of a recording!

Hitmanfluffy's Gungnir Multibit. Maybe my Modi 2U AK4396 too but I don't remember what we hooked that up to. Neurochrome HP-1 wasn't good either way.

GSX mk2 goes beyond normal audiophile terms to describe treble problems. @sheldaze put it best "It sounds like a salt shaker."

Stuff recorded on analog tape in basements, garages, and barns and "mixed" by dubbing down on Tascam 4 tracks is more musical and dynamic than many solid state amps whatever the numbers say. Transilvanian Hunger is music; the O2/RNHP/Neurochrome/GSX2/QVC88 (or whatever) and Chifi garbage cannot reproduce that music and certainly not decently mixed orchestral recordings.

Yeah Hands, you are more sensitive to DACs while I can tolerate non-ESS Sabre Delta Sigma DACs or the shittier Wolfson/Cirrus ones. Op-amps and overall negative feedback in DACs don't produce nearly as much crap and compression as the ones in amps do. Headphone amps (and amps meant for near fields but less so) are much worse than speaker amps in this regard due to not having the air and room attenuate treble.

Oh and NOS sounds like shit to me. The Pavane and Holo Spring DAC were decent but still NOS bs (Holo Spring oversampling is so bad). PCM1704 is inherently trashy too, just like the recent "Velvet Sound" AKM chips. I can see why you would like the less grainy NOS's for a less fatiguing sound though. NOS DACs as a whole just aren't very high fidelity to me with spacing, treble, or real bass.

Que? It's a headphone amp......

Metal is great for testing timbre and tone. Black Sabbath is great for proper sustain and there's also a lot of fuckups and recording things that have to be properly presented that lower fidelity gear will not do. I use Immortal's Pure Holocaust to test for warmth and bloom as Immortal's drummer quit after the photo session but before recording the album so Immortal got their vocalist to just play some basic beats slowly and sped up the tape, pitch shifting the drums up so if the kicks start sounding normal or punchy, something's up. It's f'ing retarded but good for testing for bloom.

Also the rhythm guitars in Angel Witch - Angel Witch - "Angel Witch" or Iron Maiden - "Aces High" are good for testing for excessive mud and bloom to see if they get overwhelmed.

Yep, not transparent at all.

Yes. Solid state guitar amps and Axe Effects trash usually sound like shit unless you dial in a razor wire/chainsaw/whatever high gain tone. Even that still usually sounds like shit unless you multitrack or compress hte hell out of them.

Entombed famously used a crappy practice amp (Peavy Bandit 30w or 40w combo I think? that would put it above average for SS) and a Boss HM-2 pedal but they double tracked the HM-2, added in a track of another distortion pedal, and everything was ran through the compressors of a broken mixing console and that tone only sounds right through that one individual mixing console. When the producer who owned the studio fixed it, the tone sounded bad so they stuck the "broken" (for everything else) parts back in. This goes to show you how bad the tone of a typical solid state amp is. The Marshall Valvestates used in a lot of early Florida death metal mostly sound godawful.

It's all on the recording. The recording will also often have the distortion cut back from real life levels though compression to make other things more audible. For a death metal example of records you will never listen to, see Dismember's Like an Ever-flowing Stream versus their next (and inferior) full length Indecent and Obscene where they compressed the hell out of the guitars to make sure they didn't frequency mask everything else with their ridiculously fat and distorted tone which is what happened on the more life-like Like an Ever flowing Stream. Every other instrument gets frequency masked by dimed JCM 900 beeswarm amps in real life.

Note I am not talking about an amp reproducing the real life level and length of distortion, but that on the recording. The Neurochrome HP-1 fails at this.

 

LOL, the EPA-007 is actually my main amplifier for easy to drive dynamic headphones. I use a switch mode power conditioner + 220V to 100V step down transformer powering it. I usually set the "Damping/NFB" knob at 8 o'clock position. The sound is well worth of the hassles.

I believe "good sounding" headphone amplifier has to be an effect box (in @tomchr's term), to add/simulate the room acoustics effects people usually hear, which are missing from most close in headphone designs.

From another perspective, most recordings are mixed to sound good on mainstream (i.e. technically flawed) gear by adding effects (e.g. compression) . This make sense because you want the 10 million iPhone users listening music in subway, rather than the 10000 HD800 owners to be your target market. My experience tells me that these "mainstream" recordings will often sound weird on "innovative" designed, often considered higher end gears (e.g. HD800, electrostatics headphones, etc)

 

Psalm,

So basically you don't like solid-state amps. And because the HP-1 is a solid-state amp you don't like it and see it as your personal obligation to trash it completely so you can destroy the business I've spent the past 5-6 years building. And somehow, I'm expected to just sit back and enjoy this. That's great. Thank you for your valuable input. I am sure readers here can see your post in the appropriate context.

I do want to point out that you were the one who brought up your preference for the Haas Effect (mixing proportions of the L and R channels to create illusion of depth) in your earlier post. In the same post you also mentioned that you prefer amps that are non-causal and add sustain to the distortion products but not to the fundamental causing the distortion. I wish you the best of luck finding an amp that does that. The Neurochrome HP-1 will *not* do that and no product on my current road map will. So I don't have anything for you to buy. Sorry. My design philosophy doesn't meet your demands and wishes. I'm OK with this.

Tom

 

Hang in there, Tom. The market for your amp is bigger than one person's preferences. It seems like you've designed it very carefully and with a certain goal in mind, and I bet a lot of people will respond with their wallets out for that.

 

Feedback is like any other tool in the designer's toolbox. It's very powerful if used correctly but can be a disaster if it isn't. Most designs fall somewhere on that continuum. Whether you like it or not, there's no such thing as an amp without feedback. Even a humble grounded cathode stage has feedback between the internal (dynamic) resistance of the cathode circuit and rp on the anode.

Thank you.

Tom

 

Thank you. I'll hang in there. One person out of 6 billion doesn't like my amp. Oh no! The folks at the Calgary Head-Fi meet as well as the Focal event at The Audio Room (including the two Focal reps) were very impressed with the amp. So some of the 6B people in the world, other than me, seem to like the amp.

Tom

 

Yeah, this is a textbook case of how not to respond to negative criticism.

 

I gave a list of solid state headphone amps I thought were good in my initial post in this thread (Black WIdow 2 is too bloomy for most recordings on most setups while Jot is too glare-filled though) and generally prefer them to all but the best tube amps. I hate super "tubey" tube amps like Woo bullshit and the vanilla Crack (the Speedball can by synergized with stuff that doesn't punch well like the Bifrost Multibit). The cheapest tube amp I think is good is the Valhalla 2; Vali 2 is too rolled and has a mini pot.

Your HP-1 amp is just mediocre but there are far, far worse. Many of the best sound engineers and amp builders are just tinkerers at heart who have some EE knowledge. Perhaps you should have approached your solid state amp with a better design philosophy to get a better end result rather than building something you thought listeners wouldn't be able to hear the flaws of, and then flinging hilarious "witch trials of audio" type accusations when told what the amp doesn't accurately reproduce. I've had this done before when I pointed out how I could pretty much make the horrific O2 clip at will on Head-fi. Your amp is at least better than the O2, GSX-2, and QVC-08.

The Haas effect is on the recording. That's what the guitar preamps do in real life and what can also be accomplished through mixing. The precedence effect is why tremolo-picked distorted guitars have sounded good since the 50s.

 

While I did not compare directly, from memory I do not think the Asgard2 is as capable as the HP-1... but that said, I generally do not get along with the Schiit sound. Horses for courses.

While I had the HP-1, admittedly I wasn't in love with it. Now that it's gone though, I find myself missing it. I got a new Prism dac recently and miss the HP-1's surgical ability which was useful when I first got the Modi earlier. I honestly find the comments about it being compressed confusing, but perhaps my usage of the term is different. I'll agree with comments about the amp feeling dry, but disagree with those who think it lacks resolution.

When I was comparing it with whatever other toys I had on the table, I found myself "enjoying" other amps more, but the HP-1 always served as a palate cleanser in between. Not in a negative way, just in a cleanliness way.

 

Often times it's not what you say, but how you say it

 

I'm not crapping on him or the effort he put in, I'm being honest with how his amp actually sounds and what it isn't particularly good at: high fidelity amplification of recordings of certain musical instruments. I wish him all the best in his business but we're not here to sell mediocre amps; we're here to help others achieve higher fidelity sound. Buying a better amp for less money and using the savings to upgrade other gear is a very easy way to do that.

I'm not speculating on the psychological or financial motivations behind the product, I am describing the product and what the product is not particularly good at reproducing. Nobody has pointed out otherwise, they've just argued I am cold-hearted, delusional, or deaf.

Should I break out the catalog and matrix codes of the CD masters, track numbers, and time codes for the passages of the recordings I used at high volumes with HD 600s and HD 650s to judge the amp? Who wants to listen to some 90 db average SPL metal on headphones for a semi-realistic volume you can air drum along to like Christian Bale playing the autistic guy with the glass eye in The Big Short? Sure you'll look stupid doing it but the constant, almost metronomic snare blasting will make it super tempting and fun! Can you keep up?

 

^ me too

Sad to see this thread go on like this though

 

I will do my best. I do have a business reputation to defend, though.

I wouldn't want it to be. I can't afford the $600/month minimum protection fee "others" charge. I do appreciate a good discussion, but let's be civil, shall we?!

Really? Post #223 suggests otherwise.

Sounds like you need more power. Is it possible that you drove the HP-1 to clipping? That would explain a lot of what I think you're saying. Do you have a sense of how much power you'd like to have?

Tom

 

You are trained in psychology. Do you really think that by writing the things you wrote you'll prove @Psalmanazar wrong? Even if your amp really is the second coming in amp form, there will be folk who will dislike it. You don't need to prove anything to anyone, to my knowledge your amp is the best measuring thing out there and as an amp designer that's the best you can hope for. Now, as a designer for user experience all you can do is take a few punches and move on. You can't prove people's feelings wrong.

Heck, maybe Ultra or some other poor sod will like your amp and thus might fight the battle of opinions for you.