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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Just opened up TDS Audiophile unit. posted by Jon L on April 9, 2002 at 09:59:31:
Could the TDS unit be just tranformer-based interface without the volume control? It would make sense...What the TDS is is basically a passive distortion generator. They use what amounts to poor quality transformers (which are being used more as autoformers since it provides no ground isolation) in order to produce the distortion. The result is a significant amount of third, fifth and seventh harmonic distortion (as well as a good amount of second harmonic), a rather large notch in the midrange and a big resonant spike at about 70 kHz.
I'm not saying this to slam TDS. I'm saying this because this is precisely what it was designed and intended to do. While their less than honest marketing literature denies this (i.e. specifically denying that the TDS is a distortion generator), they make no secret of this fact in their patent (5,361,306). From the abstract:
The present invention includes a field inducing coil through which input electronic audio signals are to be transmitted to set up an electromagnetic field. The field inducing coil is weakly coupled to an electromagnetic field receptor such that when an input electronic audio signal is transmitted through the inducing coil only a small portion of the electromagnetic field cuts or passes through the field receptor in order to produce an induced electronic audio signal having a greater harmonic content than the input electronic audio signal.
In their patent they describe how they built the prototype unit using the voice coils out of some replacement radio speakers from Radio Shack to produce a transformer with poor primary/secondary coupling in order to generate the distortion.
Basically, the reason you like the TDS so much is because of the distortion it adds to the signal and the signal it sucks out of the midrange via the notch and possibly any side-effects due to the high frequency resonance. It's also a good example of why I don't obsess over objective perfection. Sometimes the objectively worse result produces a better subjective result.
So don't take this post as criticism. The only thing I'm critical of with regard to TDS is the blatant dishonesty of some of their marketing claims.
se
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Follow Ups
- Re: Just opened up TDS Audiophile unit. - Steve Eddy 11:13:20 04/09/02 (6)
- What does this unit do in the audio chain? Thanks - Tanker 17:02:22 04/09/02 (1)
- Sound - Jon L 12:42:33 04/10/02 (0)
- How interesting - Jon L 11:33:21 04/09/02 (3)
- Re: How interesting - Steve Eddy 12:05:06 04/09/02 (0)
- Re: How interesting - Saurav 11:45:24 04/09/02 (1)
- Re: How interesting - Steve Eddy 12:12:14 04/09/02 (0)
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