Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

We've been experimenting with cartridges on our turntable, to see if we can get an improvement in our analog sound.  Given we have a Jelco 750E tonearm, it can handle a large number of cartridges. Once you get in the rarefied air of the so-called super-carts (usually in the more-than-a-kilobuck variety), it may require a better arm to get acceptable performance (high fuss/high reward). Amongst a few candidates we have considered, we found a real standout, that is showing to be such a real value that we want to share right away:  The Denon DL-103R.  MSRP is $379, but the street price is closer to $250.  Link: Denon USA's DL-103R It was originally developed in 1963 for use in radio, TV and recording studios - so it was made to be rather robust and easy to align (you can do so by eyeballing it).  It has been in continuous production in one form or another for the last 50 years, and has been very popular, possibly the best selling moving coil cartridge of a...

We hope everyone has an excellent, musical, weekend!

The Thiel CS3.7's Driver ... pay no attention to the green turntable light that couldn't help but photobomb ... We were looking forward to the demo all week.  We showed up at around noon on Columbus Day - which allowed the salesman, Bob Cesarini, to spend about a week breaking in the speakers.  Given our experience with Thiel, and the fact that they take a long time to break in, this was a good thing. The speakers had about 75 hours or so, so while not fully run in, they would be much better than a "right out of the box" sound. Most of the ugly portion of the break in would be behind it. Bob told us that the factory claims 300+ hours are needed for them to reach their full potential, but at the point of the demo, we should be able to hear what earned them their reputation.  We'll see ... After Bob gave us the basic introduction to the speaker and his optimistic thoughts on the new owners and the direction of Thiel, he left us to our own devices. (Stereophi...

The Thiel CS3.7 Meeting Thiel Again after 10 years In this age of social media, where a lot of people reconnect with old friends using Facebook, Twitter, and other sites -  I have been surprised how life's twists and turns over the decades have a lot of people in circumstances different than you'd expect.  A couple will have done quite well - one of my old High School friends, for instance, keeps posting the places all over the world she and her family have been traveling.  It's a lot of fun to live that Jet-set lifestyle vicariously.  Some haven't done as well, scraping by.  Most remained in the middle class.  Many have a very different outlook on life than they did when they were younger, some haven't.  Nothing like a few miles on the odometer to shake things up.  It is sometimes kind of fun to see how things ended up. I do have a point - this is related to Thiel Audio.  I first became aware of Thiel when I heard them at a local...

We're using this cable right now, and wow do we hear more music. It took me nearly a decade to come to terms with the simple concept that seemingly innocuous things, such as placing pennies under speaker spikes, or swapping out one cable for another one, can have such dramatic effects.  Some you can explain by understanding a likely mechanism, and some ... you just don't know why, you just hear what.  As an electrical engineer, my mind has to deal with quite a bit of cognitive dissonance once in awhile over this.  And I just have to tell myself at that point that "as long as it sounds better, I shouldn't get too worried" when something that shouldn't make a difference, makes a difference. In fact, there is an ongoing debate, really heated sometimes, about various tweaks.  Like American politicians discussing US policy - there is an awful lot of shouting, yelling, hurt feelings, and anger with no resolution.  Thankfully your stereo doesn't end up shu...

Silent Disco .  I dare you to click the link How far can headphones actually replace a home stereo? The CNN article implies all cases.  We beg to differ. There was an article posted recently  in the mainstream media that was interviewing people in their early 20's who were going on at length about how high quality headphones were all they needed.  The journalist did the lazy thing after that and extrapolated that home stereos were therefore dead. Why would the younger generation own a stereo? They have their headphones. Those articles always are amusing - the shallowness of the analysis done in the article is indicative of an overall decline in detailed insightful reporting on many subjects.  But we'll be sticking to this subject rather than ranting about overall news reporting. Why the 20 year old thinks headphones are "The Way" and has no need for anything else. If this all a 20 year old needs to reach sonic nirvana? What happens when you had a...