Coming soon is a new Decware TUBE EQ designed to restore the missing "HIT" in many systems.

Even in systems that "HIT" just fine it becomes an indispensable tool for making Rock music sound right at lower volumes.

A real triumph for music lovers who listen to rock on audiophile systems designed for good recordings, using systems that lack the four 15 inch drivers that would otherwise make it happen.


Sorry, I don't know what else to call it... while the hitter box you're all thinking of may in fact make your music sound better, that's not what this is. This is a box specifically designed to make your music "hit". You all know what I mean.  

Invention from necessity... need a way to force music on the radio to sound good during the day while we're listening at work.  The radio specifically is internet streams of rock music that sound like shit 82% of the time (despite great DAC's) unless you have a subwoofer turned up too loud and then it still doesn't do anything to fix the anorexic music coming from your speakers, just makes it less noticeable that it's got real issues.

Basically what we're talking about is bringing back the "contour" or "loudness" button so that we don't have to crank the music to get some body to it when listening to music that has been somehow destroyed in the packaging and delivery process... or designed to be played back 20dB louder than you'll ever hear it in your living room or with bass heavy speakers.

You have to ask yourself, why when something sounds questionable to down right bad, does it always lack weight and consequently sound lean and dry? Clearly this is the common denominator when music becomes tedious to listen to. Fix the frequency balance and the inner dynamic balance and it no longer matters if the recording sucks, or the music sucks, or both, because it's listenable. So if it's really that simple, a properly executed and voiced tube equalizer could be transformative.

Example... flat lean dry internet stream into an SE34I.5 with the meters.  Using the music streams in the above examples, you turn the amp up looking for body.  It doesn't really come.  Soon the music is loud.  The meters are starting to dance, still no hit to the music.  It's just loud and thin which is even worse than soft and thin.  Introduce tube EQ.  Reduce volume to half where you had it when the meters started dancing.  Press play - music hits.  Meters aren't moving, amp can get louder.  Apparently, bass and "hit" have a lot less to do with power than everyone thinks.  I've been saying this for 20 years, but having a bypass switch on the "hitter box" makes it easy to prove it to yourself quickly.

Now, lets compare the results to using a subwoofer.  Basically, no comparison because the subwoofer has no effect on the main speakers.  The music is still thin.  With a hitter box, the juicy tone and body of midrange vocals goes through the roof, and things become more animated.  This can't happen with a subwoofer.  This effect has to be created across the entire frequency band from 20Hz to 20kHz with a phase angle that connects across all of those frequencies.  All you can hope for at best from a subwoofer, is muddy boominess that overtakes the thin sound of the main speakers... waste of time.

It's a fascinating process to voice such a design.  It starts with a passive 2nd order network to give 12dB at 40Hz, be back to 0dB at 1KHz and then +3dB at 10kHz.  Of course this is a cut, so it must be followed by a tube stage to give a linear increase to the entire EQ to make it appear as a boost rather than a cut, which at that point it in fact is.

Once you have the passive network driving a vacuum tube rather than a scope the changing impedances violate the perfect curve in your passive network and you have to make adjustments in an attempt to arrive back there again. This is where it gets interesting, because you can't exactly duplicate your measured results of the passive network in the active stage so you begin to listen and clip in new values to hear how they effect the music. Yes, it's hot, music is playing and no fear of electrocution because you've already sacrificed to the audio gods by wiring the tube socket wrong so that nothing worked. It's like a pre-payment to avoid later delays.

Anyway, hearing how each part and the value of that part effects the music across a wide range of songs is an endlessly fascinating pastime of mine which is actually kind of resulted in this company.  You can go trough about 40 variations in real time over about an hour and stumble on some incredible "holy crap" moments in the voicing.  It is in these moments where you continually listen, return to bypass, listen, return to bypass, listen, return to bypass - hundreds of times where you gain incredible perspective on what animates music.

It's like having 40 preamps hooked up all at once and switching between them getting it narrowed down to your favorite 3.  From there it gets far more difficult which is why so many Decware products have a switch or sometimes two or more that effect voicing.

So as of tonight, the first draft is completed and rocking out in the build room where the concrete floor and fairly hard surfaces exacerbate bright forward glassy, toneless, grainy, modulated variable bitstreams into painful urges to pull the plug!  

I can already guarantee you that guys who spend all week in there listening to "the radio" while they build your amplifiers will marry this device to the source and it will never not be on.  Fine with me

This is a device that we've been talking about for years during product development discussions.  We've even attempted it in the past and almost succeeded but basically failed big time since the end result was a full blown preamp with about 6 tubes in it and very little gain.  While it had the desired effect, it was too subtle and too esoteric.  In contrast this device has a single tube, and when you flip the switch it's anything but subtle.

This device will correct the phenomenon that occurs with higher power amplifiers (over 50 watts) where the amps don't sound good until you turn them up.  Now they'll behave more like Decware amps with rich body and fullness without being cranked.

It's being built in a ZSTAGE chassis and from the outside it looks exactly like a ZSTAGE or a ZOX. Our classic black boxes for mysteriously simple audio fixes.  

I'll obviously keep you posted as things progress with the design. I'm pretty sure that in real world conditions this will probably be the single biggest change by a factor of 4X that a Decware black box has made to the way a system sounds.

Steve

You should, because it fixes a real world problem that has been around since hi-fi was invented.  The Human hearing curve which is acutely sensitive in the midrange and less so in the bass and treble frequencies.  

This is what prompted the invention of the loudness button on receivers and preamplifiers throughout the heyday of hifi.  What has changed since then?... well, hi-end audio was created and made use of mind altering tone controls forbidden fruit.  At the same time the average size of speakers began to shrink to stupidly small boxes, and then for the grand finally the predominant source went from vinyl and tape to CD.  Any one of the aforementioned items would be in and of itself enough to kill the "hit" and the rosy weight of the music we grew up with.  

The result of all this is that as an audiophile who has heard incredible sound come out of his or her speakers and wondered why almost nothing else they hear from the same system sounds as good... you know, how can there be such a discrepancy between the levels of quality?  And then to hear only things that sound that good, they have to cherry pick the recordings and even listen to music that they don't particularly follow or sometimes like.  But hey, in the spirit of being an audiophile, you can do what I did, give up on Rock and most of the music you love, and listen to audiophile approved recordings until you're ready to vomit despite their good sound.

This is in Lon's defense, why listening without a treble control in today's world is a dangerous proposition.  And as he knows, it's not the format so much as the use of it that kills us.  In other words a shitty recording sounds equally bad on analog as it does on digital.  The point I'm making is that with all these things driving the density of music down to stupid low levels, digital playback (not recording) wasn't the problem, it was simply the last straw.

The point is, we live in a digital world which is an anal format that often lacks the density of analog, a density that was so fine it made shitty recordings listenable.  Without that, the recordings have to be completely stellar to be listenable.

Fixing this can only come from the recording or more specifically the playback of the recording assuming you don't want to build a new audio system.  

I can frankly hardly wait for Thursday when everyone is back to work and they discover the box and hook it up. Despite having a brief conversation about "yea it would be cool if you... " like we do every year around this time, none has any idea I actually decided to go for it.  The real joy is going to be in listening to rich full music that will come from the room that only sounds that way on perfect recordings, and quite the opposite on classic rock.  Classic Rock is however what gets played in there from 7AM to 5PM every day so I won't be closing the door nearly as often

The box has a bypass switch, that's the main thing. It also has an EQ switch that lets you go between two curves.  Other than that there is a volume control that can become a gain control when paired with todays non-Decware amps that don't have gain controls. In a pinch, or when you get in your Zen mood, it can be used as a preamp, and rather nicely at that. In fact, for the purpose described, making todays murdered digital recordings of classic rock played back on super flat audiophile speakers, there will be no better preamp period... I'm sure of it.

Used as an extension of your source, a preamp can certainly still be used in which case the variable gain control on the box is adjusted to a level that sounds best with the preamp.

The only problem I'm really having with it is what to name it.

Steve

Suggestions for names
ZROCK
ZTONE
ZEQ
ZHIT
ZTRD or ZTRB - Zen Tone Restoration Device or Box

Question - When you bypass the EQ features, do you still get any benefit from going thru the tube or is that bypassed as well? What does it do for gain (i.e. More like a zstage or zbox or somewhere in between)?

Donnie nailed it! It has to be called KIM.

ZTONE gets my vote! 👍

Corey

Quote:


An impossible question to answer with so many undefined variables.  However, this is what is does:



Steve

This device has piqued my interest; and many other forum members I presume.

Steve mentioned in the OP that - "This device will correct the phenomenon that occurs with higher power amplifiers (over 50 watts) where the amps don't sound good until you turn them up.  Now they'll behave more like Decware amps with rich body and fullness without being cranked."

My question is how would this device "ZBOOST" (my name suggestion) pair with a 25 watt amp (TORII MK4)?

Happy & Safe New Year to the Decware Crew and the Forum Members!
-Cheers

Zwant

Tone,

Did you get the gold or silver ones?

Corey

Corey, I have the Pills S (Silver coming).

Thanks Bro!

That's really great to hear...better morale/mood means better productivity as well.  ;)  

Steve, I was wondering if the functionality of both the hitter box and a Zstage could be built into a single box?

ZQ

Yeah... I have a feeling that this box is going to make it into many of our setups... its really going to be a sleeper upgrade IMHO.

They still won't give it up.  I am inclined to go with it as is which is to say without developing a custom volume control with a loudness tap to make the effect diminish with volume.  I doubt it will be needed or perhaps wanted... just not sure.  I think the answer may be in how people use the box and on what style of recordings.  

I think we'll roll with it and if with customer feedback it can be improved than we'll improve it.

Steve

This reminds me of another approach used by Yamaha years ago. Instead of boosting the bass and treble, or some such amplification of the signal, they went with having a variable midrange cut that reduced the midband thereby causing less distortion. Pretty cool idea, but I haven't seen that sort of thing since.

This remains to be seen based on how people use the box.  The effect will not diminish with volume so indeed if you use it at high volumes with music that doesn't need it, it will be too much.

We may have a volume control built with a tap that could be used to diminish the effect with volume, but hope that's not going to be needed because we don't expect people to be using the variable output level as a volume control in most cases.  In other words, we don't expect people to use this as a preamp, rather as a part of your source component.

Is that Z-ROCK or ZEROCK?

Ahh, another guitar player I see.  :)

So, when do we get to see this thing?