Gadgetory

we got to tour the EVGA CEOs personal audio room a condo just outside of Taipei that's dedicated to the most impressive audio setup we've ever seen Andrew Hahn CEO of EVGA sees his audio room as a microcosm for his business and has invested over 20 years into tuning and tweaking his gear and acquiring part some of the components in the room are 100 years old or older and there are two major eye-catching pieces giant horns from Western Electric that were made in the early 1930s this setup gave us an opportunity to hear what is probably the best sound system we'll ever listen to but also to compare sound quality between cables digital and analog players and more before that this video is brought to you by US and the gamers Nexus anti-static mod map the GN anti-static magma is a four foot by two foot surface two millimeters thick of high-quality industrial grade anti-static material and includes a common ground point for earth a grounding wrist strap and it has on its electrical wiring diagrams that may prove useful a GPU silhouette and grid for your teardown efforts and other useful items go to store documents Nexus dotnet to pick up a GN mod mat today at one point in history Western Electric was the world's most powerful electrical engineering company Western Electric made military radios theater sound systems home electronics government electronics commercial speakers and power components and more Western Electric was officially founded in 1869 but its engineers began producing electrical equipment and prototypes in the early 1800s Western Electric was routinely leveraged as a workaround to antitrust regulations pertaining to Bell and AT&T and owned half of Bell Labs while also manufacturing most of the equipment that AT&T used and deployed back before the split from the government monopoly crackdown this company also produced high-end audio equipment including the Western Electric horn 15a and the first ever hi-fi sound driver the sound system we saw consists of decades of research and finding rare audio equipment then working to design custom parts to make it all fit in the audio room the most immediately intimidating part would be again the Western electric horn 50 nays that flanked the room each of which stand upwards of 13 feet high from top to bottom and have five foot wide openings for symphonic audio these horns weigh 140 pounds and are primarily made of wood built back around 1930 originally as for the driver that's hooked into the end of the horn that's the we5 five five and it's from 1926 the driver is mounted 3.1 meters behind the horn opening and output sound waves it down the horn tubing until it ricochets out the end this is the first hi-fi driver made and has a range of 120 Hertz to 4,500 Hertz the horn had to be made large enough to make the range work though and other frequencies are filled in by the subwoofer and the tweeter the total range of the system is 80 Hertz to 10 kilohertz with the we5 9:7 a tweeter handling 4500 hertz and up and the subwoofer handling 120 hertz and below the driver takes the middle range for those other parts the tweeter was made in 1930 and is the five nine seven a the subwoofer is an 18-inch sub with a paper cone made of palm leaves so it's extremely fragile but it provides the best sound possible collecting these parts is hard particularly as some of them have corroded over the years or just vanished in general a han had to have custom wooden paneling made for the horn to recreate the original look and I was done by a professional reproduction company in Italy as the original wood had decayed long ago the stands to hold the horns were also custom-designed as each horn weighs 140 pounds before accounting for the woofer box underneath and that's another major element the wooden panels in front of the subwoofer are carefully angled to influence the direction of the sound it's by design and engineering not just to look cool and the rear paper-thin flaps are in place to ensure that the sound doesn't get trapped within the lower chamber also located in the back of the horn there's one large inductor coil at the base of each rated at 16 milli henries and it acts as a part of the high-pass filter to the subwoofer there's one microfarad a capacitor located on top of the horn originally from Western Electric which is also part of the driver set up for a canonical view of the sound system it works like this the sound originates at the record where a sound specific cartridge attachment reads the record Hahn has a container for his cartridges and can choose the best one for a given record or genre for this player the sound system is using an SME 32 R 12 inch needle which leverages its length the better reduce torque and provide a better sound quality overall an air pump is located under the player and is used to pump air under the record to float the record when in use with a record clamp keeping the vinyl level during rotation when playing digital CDs instead Hani's is an older students CD 3 which he says produces better sound than the DSC equipment that he just got in this step-up transformer is fed a signal by the tech das MC phono cartridge TDC o1 which sits at the end of the record player needle and outputs at about 0.45 millivolts the step-up transformer takes that voltage and amplifies it by about 600 times after the step-up transformer the sound feeds into a preamp which then magnifies the voltage again the real amplifiers are the audio notes gaaah Kwan's which use united 211 tubes and copper plated amplifier boxes in the back of the setup this was the final United 211 tube in production these tubes run at about 30 watts each for the copper plated amps and rectifiers and feed into the driver tweeter and subwoofer as for what's powering all of this there are two primary sources there's the preamp power which isn't all that exciting or different and then there are the tongue guard bulbs these were made by GE in 1916 and are the oldest part of the setup that we were able to locate they were originally used for AC to DC battery charging and the name tongue guard comes from the construction of the bulb these use a tungsten filament and argon gas and were used all the way up through these 70s in various forms the tongue guard bulbs pushed seven volts for the driver and twenty four volts for the woofer powering each horn assembly separately but from one box the tongue guard bulbs have interesting thermal characteristics too and take some literal warming up to get peak sound quality out of them as for wattage the driver cable is dealing with five watts or less so it's actually not that much power at the of the day we had an opportunity to listen for differences between analog and digital sound sources as a full disclosure because this is extremely subjective we entered this experiment extremely skeptical this was something that we assumed we would never hear a difference from whatsoever and it didn't take long though to identify some differences between analog and digital with analog sounding slightly fuller and deeper and tone this we think is primarily a result of two things one is the digital to analog converter and the other one is the fact that this speaker system is likely the best we'll ever hear in our lifetime on a lesser system with an equivalent D to a we'd expect the analog versus digital differences to be minimized or impossible to hear but for this high-end audio setup it's just barely noticeable cables were another interesting point of discussion for all the audiophile tendencies of EVGA CEO Andrew Hahn he tells us that he doesn't believe high-end cables make a difference in his specific setup although Huynh tested cables that cost several thousand dollars for a meter he ultimately hand built his own cables for under 150 bucks and says that there is no audible difference in sound between the two the sound itself is impressive hands down is highly directional with the best listening position about five rows back so to speak and in the center of the two horns because the driver is positioned three meters behind the horn opening with the tweeter in the middle of the horn and the sub below it the sound comes out with great depth you can hear the distance of each sound one from the other especially given that the entire assembly is 13 feet tall for the setup or larger and it's got a five foot wide mouth sound is very specific to each setup as always and this setup makes it feel like musicians are in the room literally positioned behind the horn openings it's an interesting effect from a long gating the sound wave from the driver and works best with symphonic and orchestral music this isn't a surround system it's highly directional and closest replicates a concert venue from again a few rows back where someone managing the sound might sit some of these parts are a hundred years old but managed to produce the best sound we've ever heard as for why EVGA Cee put all this together he sees it again as a microcosm for his business han tells us that he spent two decades collecting all these parts about as long as he spent building EVGA and he is now in fine tuning stages of his business han told us that he is also tuning EVGA to continually improve operations just like he's doing with his high-end sound system on also set the system up personally did all the research and got hands-on with assembly he sees this as a way to remain in tune with the enthusiasts customers who like to build things and takes great pride in remaining active and enthusiasts hardware assembly EVGA CEO calls some of the parts priceless giving great credit to eBay and Google for affording him the tools to find individuals all over the world who had these parts in storage or in lingering use that concludes our walkthrough of this extremely high-end and unique sound system let us know what you think below subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow and exit up side directly and go to store that gamers nexus net to pick up one of our mod mats or other products I'll see you all next time