dazed_and_confused

I’ve spent most of the last 35 years with at least one foot in the audiophile camp. People on the outside all think I’m crazy so I’ve long since given up on trying to explain the ‘logic’ of what I do to people who rarely seem to want to understand. I always think of system building in terms of macro and micro. Putting together a well matched set of speakers, power amp, pre-amp and source components is the macro stage and should (if carefully done) take you 95% of the way to where you want to be. Then there’s the micro phase which is moving speakers around, fiddling with spikes/cones and other isolation components, adding power conditioning, tweaking cables, dinkering with TT setup etc etc. You can do as much or as little of the micro stuff as you want. Some people do nothing, and are content with being 95% of the way to where they want to be. (often oblivious to the possibility that there’s another 5% of performance lurking in their system). Others obsess constantly, trying to wring out that last few percent - often expending a lot of time/energy and money. It doesn’t matter which camp you fall in and you shouldn’t have to explain or justify your actions to outsiders (assuming you’re not selling your children to pay for things). Personally, I spent a lot of time messing with the 5% and I KNOW I could hear changes in my system when I moved things, added cones, changed cables or whatever. They weren’t always positive changes and it was that fact which largely convinced me that I wasn’t dealing with some imaginary psycho-acoustic phenomenon where tweaking my system was resulting in changes which took place only in my head. Of course the more resolving your equipment, the more audible the effects of tweaking become. I always catch a lot of flack when I say this, but sometimes it doesn’t surprise me that people can’t hear the difference between a $5 interconnect and something more exotic, when they’re using the cable in a poorly matched system or with midfi electronics. There, I said it.

I had a set of Plats with a buzzing ribbon and agonized over sending them off to be repaired....there were one or two less than satisfied customers who were starting to come out of the woodwork and voice their discontent with the service/treatment received, so in the end I made the painful decision to dump my speakers for pennies and walk away. I miss them, but I sense I would probably never have got them back up and running via the guy in FL. Sorry to hear about your situation, hope you can get it resolved.

I always enjoy Tracy Chapman's debut recording on vinyl - sounds very good. Friday Night in San Francisco is another good one.

I'm curious to learn what you are trying to accomplish with driving all three pairs together. Will this be a surround config for HT or some type of array?

I wouldn't push anyone towards owning vinyl, there are plenty of good sounding formats around which might not match what vinyl can do, but come awfully close and are far more convenient. Some of the best sounding music I listen to comes from digital based formats that are not even supposed to sound good. That aside, I just sold my TT a couple weeks ago and regretted it immediately. I listed it on Audiocircle just to put my toe in the water and see if there was any interest. It sold in a couple days. Someone got a great deal on a $7500 vinyl rig and now I'm left wondering how I'm gonna replace it, and with what. Damn dirty hobby feeds my OCCD and other mental issues I have. One minute I think I'm free then I get drawn right back in...

I've gotten quite sensible about speaker ownership after realizing that A - they take up too much room, and B - they're the hardest thing to sell (when you live in the boonies and shipping is the only option). So my modest collection is down to: Main Listening Room Talon Khorus on Target R1's. Michael Green Floorstanders HSU Sub Bedroom 1 Apogee Caliper Sigs Bedroom 2 QLN Signature Splitfield II Closet Carver Amazing Plat Hybrids Various items of dross - computer speakers, outdoor speakers etc However, it's that time of year again where outdoor activity takes second place to hanging around on forums and getting corrupted by all you fiends....so who knows how the list will look come March 2015

Were the house on fire I don't think I'd try and wrestle the Amazings out the door and to safety. I'd probably grab the Talons, one under each arm, and leg it. I know, it's only a concept If someone said to me 'you can only own one pair of speakers, for the rest of your life, pick one, heard or unheard' - then that decision would be made in an instant - Apogee Grand (The grand daddy of all speakers) - Never heard 'em but I think I know how they sound...

I hate this question 'cos I can't pick one. My head's spinning just thinking about it. It's like 'what's your favorite song'.....there's so many of them and so many good ones from which to choose. Heard - Linn Isobarik with full active Naim 6-pack, LP12, Itok, Troika....setup in a large hotel conference room - an orchestra right in front of me, completely realistic and at realistic spl's. Owned - Quad ESL 57 originals. There's no other speaker I've heard which sounds as transparent as these. Sure, they don't play loud or do bass, but for a window into the venue I've never heard anything even close. CLS were the next closest for transparency but the Quads were still way better. Heard - ML Prodigy - for walk around 3-d imaging. Driven by top end Lamm amps. The bass integration was shockingly bad. But the realism and dimensionality were quite special. I'll stop there

Yay, it's Friday You prolly already know about this, so consider it a reminder rather than a tip - The next time you sit down to listen to tunes, spin a couple tracks, stop, take out a screwdriver, allen key or whatever you need, then tighten down all the bolts holding your drivers and or baffle boards in place. Then listen again and tell me you don't hear anything different.... I've been using a pair of stand-mounts that I picked up used a few weeks ago. I thought they were ok, but they weren't really holding my attention like the big Carvers do. I was about to switch back in the Carvers when I remembered that I hadn't checked the driver bolts. Went round with a 5mm key and then a torqx on the tweeters....what a difference! Absolute night and day. Cheapest and best tweak I know. Try and do it every 6 months or so. Have a great weekend!

wowzee...congrats on 2000....

Awesome looking system(s) and HT room. And congrats on the vinyl....it makes me all giddy whenever I come across someone I haven't met before that has a turntable (or two!) What kind of music are you in to? Welcome along..

I went through a similar project a while back with a haul from Craigslist. I bought a bunch of the plastic sleeves and got the vinyl into the new sleeves and out of the covers. Then baked the covers in the sun until they were fully dried out. Then I just placed them loose against the wall and give them a good douse with Lysol spray and let them sit for a week. You'll need to mark the plastic sleeves with the title so you're not fussing too much when you come to insert the sleeves/vinyl back into the covers. It's a pain in the sphincter but we must learn to suffer for our cause....

Yes.....vinyl....but give yourself a fair chance. Instead of trusting entirely to the used bin at the SA, pick up a couple of new LP's whose sound you're familiar with from other formats. Then get yourself a decent deck....if you're going to do it, commit to it fully. A decent deck, arm and cartridge will minimize the ticks and pops you hear and should sound better than any other format you have if you have the skills to set it up properly. Which is the next hurdle, obviously I don't know what history you have with vinyl, but there's a certain amount of skill needed to setup and level a deck, install the cartridge, set the VTA/VTF etc...again, make sure you give yourself a proper chance to enjoy the format as it should be enjoyed....get someone to help you set it up if need be. I took a 15 year sabbatical from vinyl and got back into it about 18 mths ago. I jumped in with both feet and bought a good TT, and I'm glad I did I just upgraded my preamp and the new one has a nicer MC, so things are just getting better as I upgrade in small steps. Once you're up and running you can have a blast hitting places like you mentioned, along with yard sales and Craigslist. I scored a 700LP collection on Craigslist for less than $150....it's been a pig cleaning those mofos but well worth the effort!! Good luck..

Very chic and stylish, and you won't have to shell out too much... In every room where I've had dipoles I've always found that leaving the front wall untreated and having the speakers well out into the room, sounds better than having any sort of random treatments on the wall. I went to the time and expense of making a bunch of treatment panels from acoustic foam, attaching 2x2 foam panels to 1/4" plyboard, and I always preferred the sound without the panels on the front wall. You can see one of the panels in the picture below. I used them to deflect/absorb sound away from a custom crossover I made for my old Maggie 3.6's....... You can see it more clearly here....with Bandit the cat (RIP)......note the windows behind the speakers and the distance from the wall... The image below, borrowed from here http://www.linkwitzlab.com/rooms.htm is telling - you can see how the energy coming from the front and rear is equal with a dipole or open baffle design and how the sideways energy is significantly less. (Pertinent to Carver Amazing owners too, where the cone woofers are open baff and act as dipoles mostly)

ohhh.....here's a nice technical explanation along with math. http://www.linkwitzlab.com/rooms.htm

Hmmmm... Dipoles radiate in a figure of 8 pattern, so they don't interact as much with the side-walls as a monopole arrangement. So the two critical waves are the direct wave and the rear reflected or reverberant wave. (A slight over-simplification). So at the listening seat what you hear is the direct wave and the rear reflected wave combined. If there's sufficient time delay between the two, your ear/brain is able to separate the arrival of the two waves and mostly ignores the rear reflected wave which is arriving later. If there's insufficient time delay in the arrival of the waves then the affect is that certain frequencies overlap and you get a smearing and/or cancellation effect. This is why you need to get a dipole out into the room, to give sufficient time difference for the arrival of the two waves. This is more important where you have a hard reflective surface behind the speaker, which does little to break up that rear wave. If you can't get the speakers out into the room then you can 'treat' the back wall either with absorption or diffraction/reflection or a combination. Clutter behind the speakers will act as diffraction and maybe absorption, depending on the material, so it can be helpful where the speaker cannot be pulled out into the room. Unfortunately, clutter is unpredictable and you don't really know what it's doing. It could be absorbing/diffracting more of the rear wave from the right speaker than the left, so it can seriously throw off the soundstage and positioning of instruments/performers within the stage. So personally I would remove clutter and try to do a more controlled correction. Some dipole speaker manufacturers make rear wave diffractors specially for these situations. SoundLab have a product called a 'SALLIE' which sits behind the speaker and looks a bit like a louvered door only with bigger louvers....it directs the sound up/down and away from a direct reflection off the front wall (front wall is the wall behind the speaker in this case). There are many DIY recipes for diffraction/absorption devices for treating that front wall. In olden days people used those egg carton trays, the 12x12 variety without the lid! You can plaster these over the wall and see what happens. Just think long and hard about what to tell the wife when she says 'what the fuck is that'. What was the question again? Gotta run, there's a lot more detail to be had here, mine is just a quick pass...

I'm too dense to understand the chart posted by Rich so I found my own The source is here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival#UK_Official_Record_Store_Chart The 'resurgence' is less impressive in the UK, it seems. But the above looks like a veritable boom in sales, if the numbers can be trusted...

I had a bunch of CD's, most of which had spent time in the car, all of them had surface marks and skipped. I also had a few DVD's which had been mistreated over the years, and skipped. I bought a CD/DVD repair kit from Amazon. I've since seen similar kits in Target and Best Buy, Memorex makes the ones in Target, I think. They look like a portable CD player. They come with different (abrasive) disks, one pair for cleaning and a more abrasive pair for removing scratches. There's a cleaning fluid and a scratch fluid. The whole kit was around $25 or less. It works, but not 100%. Some discs with deeper scratches require multiple 'cleanings'. The danger is that you can go too far and render the disc unplayable. But in most cases it was unplayable anyway, so there's little to lose.... I'd guess at maybe a 70% success rate, based on my having some pretty banged-up CD's / DVD's. Your mileage may vary. Good luck!

I don't think using a 'blues based riff' would be grounds for plagiarism, but stealing someone else's composition certainly is. I'm sure it will be settled out of court, as with most of the other claims...

Funny you should post this, I was reading an article only yesterday on how they're being sued for 'stealing' the intro to Stairway - http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/19/led-zeppelin-accused-stealing-stairway-to-heaven-opening If you listen to the Spirit song, which predates Stairway, it sure does sound quite similar All this just leaves me dazed and confused dazed and confused

All Rush fans will already know that drummer Neil Peart is the band's primary lyricist and has produced many remarkable 'words' to accompany the music of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Those on the periphery may not know that Peart is also an accomplished author of books, five in total, and poster of many fascinating prose on his personal website at http://neilpeart.com/ This is a heads-up for his book 'Ghost Rider', which is a really great read. Peart lost his daughter tragically some years ago and a few short months later, his wife too. He dealt with his loss by hopping aboard his BMW touring motorcycle and taking off on an epic journey, starting from his home in Quebec, down the American West and through to Mexico and eventually, some 55,000 miles later, back to Quebec. It is a beautifully written and very moving account of a man dealing with loss and coming to terms with the prospect of a new life devoid of the two things he loved most in the world. He talks about his relationship with the other band members and how they helped him deal with his loss and how eventually, some 5 or so years later, he returned to the studio. It really is a good read and highly recommended for anyone with a love of 'the great outdoors' and a love of life and of course, motorcycles. ######Book Review Over!!######