Audio Output Distortion

Audio Output Distortion 

I am a relative noob to the world of pro audio equipment. I have made many speakers over the years, and they work well, but I have recently come across a strange problem with recent purchase and here I present my research notes and links to the various resources.

The Problem 

I have recently acquired an akai rhythm wolf drum machine,  and the main signal output is showing some strange behavior.

When I'm using a high quality pair of headphones such as Sennheiser HD280 Pro the sound quality from the rhythmolf is excellent. I am particularly interested in The Sound of the bass drum here.

So the bass drum or kick drum gives out very delicious low rich bass when using the headphones which is what I like the here . . .! . . . however when I plug the output into a speaker which I normally use for listening to music the bass drum sounds very thin and the hardly any bass is produced.

If you turn the volume on the kick drum too far then it starts to distort in a crackly sort of way so I'm trying to figure out what's going on there why am I getting thin bass when I'm using a speaker and what am I getting why am I getting good base when I'm using headphones.

I should say this behaviour repeats on 3 types of speaker:

• Small Sony Bluetooth Speaker - Works fine with synth, and other drum machines. 
• Soundboks 2 - Very heavy duty unit, works fine with synth, and other drum machines. 
• Home Made Speakers - 2 Large Active Speaker containing 4 x TPA Amplifiers and 4 x 10" subwoofers. Which when playing music from spotify are extremely loud. 

The Fix = Mix . . er

I contacted AKAI Support there response was:

"The problem with the weak, distorted kick drum might be expected as it is not recommended to directly connect a speaker to the rhythm wolf Main Out. Instead, use a standard 1/4" (6.35mm) TRS cable to connect this line-level output to the input of an audio interface, mixer, amplifier system, etc. Additionally, stereo headphones can be connected to this output. If the Synth Out is left unconnected, the Main Out will include the drum and bass synth voices. However, if a cable is connected to the Synth Out, the Main Out will include the drum voices only."

I also contacted the chap I bought it from:

Me: "Hey mate did you always run this through a mixer"

Seller: "Hi yes I did run it through a mixer. It has some serious sub on the unit, I'd check the EQ settings on your speaker and set it to "flat" is possible." 

Noob Fault Finding 

Below are musing on why this is happening. 

First Reaction 

An initial experiment I tried was to route the output to a headphone amplifier and then the headphone amplifier to the speaker. This didn't work. Very thin "sniky" bass drum. 

Research 

So something coming out of the Rhythm Wolf is the wrong level for the 3 speakers I have tried out. The output has too much power, or not enough, or the receiving speakers are expect something within a certain range and that isn't happening. So lets figure this out:

Impedance 

My HD280 Pros are 64 Ohms. 

"Most headphones have an impedance that is typically between 8-600 ohms."

https://www.headphonezone.in/blogs/audiophile-101/understanding-impedance 

"All these factors, make us arrive at something important known as Impedance Matching."

A guitar amplifier is high impedance. . . I plugged in the drum machine to a Yamaha GA15 and I get the same behaviour as I do with speakers, the kick drum sounds very very weak. I can turn up the snare drum and other outputs and they are very loud and distortion free. 

"An impedance mismatch in a circuit or along a transmission line will produce a reflection back to the source of the signal. When a signal reflects, the power transferred downstream towards a load is reduced. Impedance matching provides a dual role of enabling power transfer into a load by suppressing reflections."

https://resources.system-analysis.cadence.com/blog/msa2021-how-signal-reflection-and-impedance-mismatch-are-related

So it sounds like it could be impedance. But my guitar amp experiment doesn't work. It need to be low to high. 

https://youtu.be/WMg15uF2SAo

Voltage 

Is it voltage of the output, I have read 2V is typical. Is it more than that or less?

Power Supply

I have read that using a different power supply for the Rhythm Wolf can fix a problem with distorted outputs. However, I have switched the adaptor and it didn't;'t work. THe manual says 12V 2A Supply which is reasonably beefy. 

It was supplied with a 12v 600ma, but swapping that to a 12v 2a has not helped. 

More amps? Probably won't help. 

Distortion  Notes 

"Possible causes of audio distortion problems may be: Wrong input level to the amplifier. Amplifier gain is set too low or high. Not enough amplifier power."

https://blog.miscospeakers.com/preventing-speaker-distortion-increasing-listenability#:~:text=Possible%20causes%20of%20audio%20distortion,Not%20enough%20amplifier%20power

Flood Risk Assessment London 

Is UK2 a Good Hosting Company in 2024?

UK2 is a web hosting provider. They also sell domains and provide more complicated cloud computing services such as VPS etc. But is UK2 a Good Hosting Company in 2024? No they are not. 

Rewind . . . . 

If someone had asked me "Is UK2 a Good Hosting Company" around 2 years ago I would have rated them excellent. Apart from a few domains registered with Google Domains, and a couple of older sties hosted on Firebase, I had all my websites with UK2. Probs about 10 in total. 

The reason I was so please with UK2 up until a couple of years ago was that I thought they really understood what the customer wants, i.e reliability and expandability. 

 All was well. I had used UK2 for over 10 years, and it had been super reliable. THey obviously had it all figured out. . . .

UK2 . . . . THG 

So around Jan - February 2024 I noticed the UK2 website was rebranded UK2 THG. No big deal I though companies get bought out all the time. 

But around April 2024 one day all my websites went down, and when I contacted support no body answered the ticket, I waited for 36 hours before I got a reply. I'm not really sure how much I lost in leads, on a pro-rata basis it would be about £2000. 

Here is the review I left on UK2 THG Google Maps Listing 

So I will write the details of what happened (and reduce to 1 star - facepalm):

a- I had to wait 36 hours for a support ticket to be answered, I missed out on a day and a half of leads, goodness knows how many opportunities lost,

b - turns out this was because you changed from working system (CPanel) to StackCP

c - You didn't update nameservers automatically

d - You didn't even email me to say you were doing this!

e - After 24 hours of waiting I had to make a move and so very laboriously I have had to move my websites and domains to other servers.

Whatever possessed you to mess with a working system, not tell anyone about it, whilst blanking me on support for 36 hours. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Stack CP

But Stack CP is OK right?

No no no, its not OK. I spent 2 hours today trying to hook up filezilla, to FTP. I have to log in to Stack CP to unlock, and then the FTP client won't connect. I have tried dozens of different configs. No joy. 

Well perhaps I can upload the files using file manger. No. In trying to upload about 8 files to the required director it results in files disappearing instead of being overwritten, and not all of them are over written. Its a right mess. 

So from my limited experience Stack CP os absolute garbage. I wonder how much money they saved by switching.

Conclusion 

I would have been a customer for life with UK2, I had no reason to change. I don't pay a lot say £240 a year of something like that. But I would have paid it for years to come. . . happily for a reliable service. 

I wonder how many customers they lost. 

FYI I went to Hostinger they do a specific Control Panel hosting package. It costs about a quarter of the price and works just as well. 

If only I could get back the 50 hours or so it took me to migrate (nearly) everything. 

Flood Risk Reports

Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly  

Number of Cores vs Clock Speed - Which is Better

Number of Cores vs Clock Speed - Summary  

In all instances I have found it better to have more cores, as a opposed to fewer cores, regardless of clock speed. 

Number of Cores vs Clock Speed - Example 

I run a XW8400 and an XW6600. They are both capable of running 8 cores split over two physical processors.  

I have run the XW8400 in two configurations:

• 2 x Xeon 5160 (2 x 2 Core Processors @ 3.00GHZ - Total 4 Cores)
• 2 x Xeon E5345 (2 x 4 Core Processors @ 2.33GHZ - Total 8 Cores)

Despite the significantly lower clock speed, the 8 core set up is:

• Quicker 
• Less Glitchy 
• More Stable 

Number of Cores vs Clock Speed - How Do I Know This 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ gives the following marks for the CPUs

• Xeon 5160 - 963
• Xeon E5345- 1868

Both systems are running 16GB RAM and High Quality SSDs. As such bottlenecks from these components are reduced. 

I also really do trash this old PC with modern heavy modelling software & and video encoding. And have found that in all cases the machine is less prone to hang ups, and crashes when run in an 8 core configuration, as opposed to a 4 core configuration. And also completes tasks much moire quickly. 

This is based on 10 years of observations, and using the same machine with 3 different operating systems (XP / 7 / 10). 

Additional 

Why am I using such an old (18 years) PC?

This:

And guess what this 18 year old PC still works really well. Please consider fixing / or upgrading what you already have, rather then adding discarding your equipment and adding to the e-waste problem. 

Environmental Consultants London

Flood Risk Assessment London