Manley Stingray II Owner's Manual

Contents

Manley Stingray II Owner's Manual Manual pdf 11 page image

OPTIMIZING YOUR SOUND SYSTEMThis section is full of little hints that may help you get the most out of your stereo - and it may not costanything or cost very little. Probably, you know most of this, but hopefully some of it may be new or refresh yourmemory or just be refreshing reading in a manual.A very important factor is your speakers. Hopefully you have good speakers and they are appropriate for thisintegrated amplifier. What is appropriate? Well, with 50 watt of tube power per side and probably a limited budgetwe would hope for reasonably efficient speakers so that the system will get loud enough for the music you listento. The “spec” to look for is “sensitivity” or “efficiency”. A speaker that is 95 dB efficient will easily get as loudwith these 50 watts as 85 db speakers with 150 watts. “85” will do if you only listen to folk or chamber music.Usually you pay about the same for high sensitivity speakers but in amplifiers more watts is more $. By the way,many reviewers confirm that 50 tube watts is similar to 100 solid state watts. If you are buying speakers, it is wis-est to carefully listen to them before buying. You will most likely like them longer if they tend to sound natural andreal rather than over-emphasized in some area. In other words, think “accurate reproduction”, not “numbers” and“hype”.The price of speakers is often directly related to the low frequency response. Great lows generally requiredeep pockets and plenty of power. Thanks to “home theatre” there are a lot of powered subwoofers available thatwon’t drain your resources. Get one that connects to speaker outputs (or the SUB OUT RCA jacks on your StingrayII) so that it follows your input selection and volume control. This makes connecting them pretty easy.There are some very interesting speaker tricks. Most people just place them wherever it is convenient. Spouseapproval is a real factor. We suggest that you experiment with speaker placement, then when they sound 100%better you bring in the spouse and demonstrate the difference. They should be able to hear the improvement andmay totally agree with your choice. You should aim for equal distances between your listening position to eachspeaker and from speaker to speaker. The ideal is an “equilateral triangle”. Try to get the speakers off the floor,and away from the walls (both side and back). The angle of the tweeter or speaker front panel to your face is alsocritical and experiment with that too. You should be getting a smooth frequency response so that highs and lows arebalanced and mids not too prominent or distant. It should simply sound “natural”. When we buy color TVs the firstthing most of us relate to is flesh tones because it is something we all relate to and know when they are right. Theequivalent thing in audio is vocal tone. We have evolved amazing discrimination for the varieties of human voiceand much less for other instruments. Use a few well recorded CDs with vocals and adjust the speakers to get themost natural voices. If you are lucky, you will end up with a system that creates a 3D picture of the music that notonly has left/right width but a solid distinct center. It should also make some sounds seem in front of the speakersand some behind. We have heard some systems with great components even give an illusion of the height of theindividual musicians. Most rooms are longer in one dimension. Some systems sound best with the speakers acrossthe short dimension and the listening position part way back but not right at the back wall. Some systems are betteracross the long dimension. The only way to find out is to try.If you are getting this amazing imaging and soundstage, you may be interested to know why you suddenlyhave it now that you have the Stingray II. These are very audible effects that seem to be beyond normal measure-ment technique or textbook electronic theory. This effect is directly related to the amount of negative feedback usedin a design. The less feedback the greater the imaging. In transistor amplifiers it has been common practice to usemore than 80 dB of negative feedback. Conventional designs need it because transistors are not particularly lineardevices and it forces the circuit to get low distortion figures as well as very high damping factors. Tubes are muchmore linear and inherently low distortion. Tube amplifier designs use far less negative feedback (less than 20 dB) asa result . We speculate that the negative feedback may have a negative effect on transient accuracy. It is reasonablydocumented that the feedback does reduce the lower order harmonics in distortion but can raise higher order har-monics that are more audible. Feedback also makes the transition from clean to clipping very abrupt and abundantwith high order harmonics. The best audio devices always seem to be simple & aesthetically balanced, with formfollowing function.11