Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

If you can't hit it with a hammer and easily replace it, leave it at home ... There is an old story about two guys sitting at a bar.  One wearing a Rolex, and one wearing a cheap Timex.  The guy with the Timex, after a couple of beers, asked the Rolex guy "I bet my watch can do something yours can't" "That cheap Timex?  It cost what, $25?" The Timex guy took off the watch and placed it on the bar with a nod, pulled out a hammer and smashed the watch. "I can go and get another one easily." Touché.  And so it goes for portable audio ... ===== While there has been a resurgence in consumer electronics around portable audio - that has reached and created genuine high end products for it, the acid test for such devices is while you are traveling. I have some simple principles that I use when selecting what to take: Fiio X5 ... the heart of my road warrior kit It has to be light, have long battery life, portable, inexpensive enough...

This is a quick note to talk about how truly spectacular I am finding the Cardas EM5813 "earspeakers" are when I am on the road. One of the things that struck me is that I keep reaching for them, despite that they are breaking a few "audiophile rules" in that they are not tonally as accurate as the Etymotic IEM's I had also packed for the trip.  There is something that is big, spacious, warm and lifelike with the way they handle the music they are given by my trusty PMP. It is clear that the headphones capture the life and emotion of the performance, dynamics and transients are just about perfect.  Tonality?  It's on the warm/dark side of the spectrum, but unapologetically so - the subtractive loss is not large, and the benefits are so amazing, that these have become my "go to" headphone when I am not actually on a airplane (the Etymotic, while less captivating, win due to their superior sound isolation). For acoustic instrument based music th...

Crimson at night! We sent back the Crimson Audio gear ... The guys at Austin Hifi were generous to let us borrow the Crimson Amps and Preamps with a set of their crazy Good cabling . We made the trek to send back the giant Pelican cases happy that we heard it and with a tear in our eye.  While we're gathering our thoughts for a review, we'll say that this is a truly magnificent, transparent, fast and realistic sounding set of gear and we were happy to have tried it out.  We sent it back with a sad farewell, but hope we'd be able to make it a permanent part of the mancave at some point.  Stay tuned for a review ... We had a network filled weekend ... Cat7 ... shields and shields ... kill that RFI dead! We spent a good chunk of the weekend upgrading the wired side of our home network (going from a mixture of Cat5, 5e and 6, and 10/100 switches) to Gigabit and Cat7 where possible.  We noticed that even when not using streaming services, it seemed like...

I would be a liar if I claimed that we didn't love the Beatles catalog.  We have a large collection of pressings on vinyl, the stereo and mono CD sets released a few years ago, and they are in regular rotation.  Their music is timeless, and the enjoyment spans the generations in our house. The Beatles were late to the digital game, and only recently allowed their taped to be converted to digital .  After lengthy legal negotiations with all the estates and remaining band members, they ripped the tapes to 24/192, but for some reason, only 24/44.1 downsampled has seen the light of day.  Now we own and love the stereo box set.  Given the difficulty of locating an affordable copy of a quality pressing of their stereo albums, this was a godsend to many.  But ... purists complained (they always do!) that since it was rumored to have been mastered from those 24bit/44.1kHz digital files - the Vinyl fell short of expectations.  We had hoped the release wou...

This was supposed to kill our sound and save our amp.  It made our sound (and sleep) better! "You know ... if you use a surge protector you will ruin the sound" I had bought into this idea, plugging in the amp right to the wall, since instantaneous power delivery was supposed to be compromised wheever anything was between the wall and power cord, and therefore the sonics compromised.  The only give-back I had, was utilizing a Chang Lightspeed powerstrip to handle sources and our preamp (low current stuff). For things well outside of the sonic pathway we still have a long extension cord to another plug with a standard (inexpensive) filtered powerstrip that the motors, and dirty digital stuff (Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Sonos, the cool Philips Hue products, and our Lava Lamp). But ... every single time there was a thunderstorm rolling through, we got nervous - with visions of a smoking carcass of that amp (making us unplug the amp) - and that we aren't exactl...

The Koru's understated yet solid front face Cue music playing of the Elton John Variety "Will you go get it?" "No, you go get it!" "It's all the way over there, I don't care enough to get it." Thus ends the Mancave's statement about album art and liner notes.  For those keeping track, it was "Funeral for a Friend" and how silly is that to fuss over? No, we don't read liner notes, or gaze lovingly at the album art.  If this makes us overly honest, or philistines, I couldn't tell you.  I am skeptical that lot of people pour over it at all, and find people listing this as one of their favorite things about vinyl, are either overselling it, are crazy and actually do it.  But in reality, we spin disks and stream files for no other reason but the music - and for us the closer it sounds to what was actually laid down, the more we enjoy it - good liner notes, or not. This attiude not only keeps us vinyl fans, i...

I grew up in the Midwest in the US.  What that means for our readers is pretty simple - I'm incapable of an unbiased review of classic rock since it was in the air we breathed and water we swam in during our formative years.  But also I love the genre possibly more than any other. I play a mean air guitar, as well as the air drums.  And I probably cannot listen to a stream of classic rock (just called "rock" when and where I am from) without being familiar with more than half the songs from way back.  I think, during the summer, too, when I was growing up, at any one time you could go see any number of bands that seemed perpetually on tour, wending their way across the plains and up and down the Mississippi & Missouri Rivers. When I go and visit my home city of St. Louis, a quick spin the dial will usually give you 5-6 choices of various forms of classic rock, where the library ends about the time Clinton assumed office.  For someone coming to his home ...

"What the world needs is a good 5W amp" - Paul Klipsch (c 1950) The Klipschorn - the horn speaker that put Klipsch on the map.  It's secret?  You put it in the corner and the room becomes part of the speaker! These days a typical system put together by an audiophile usually involves 60-600W per channel, and speakers that have a 4-6 Ohm minimum load with a sensitivity of 87dB from 1w at 1m.  Such sensitivity is considered "average" - but rewind about 50 years, and it is anything but average, since in the age of tubes, 60W per channel, considered by many to be a minimal output in the world of solid state is a reasonably large tube amplifier.  A modern "average" speaker would be a "pig" by those standards. Tannoy Westminster SE's -- 99dB efficient, but you can see from this picture, they are not small at ALL.  Size = Efficiency But the main push to lower efficiency speakers and bigger power was due to the blinking SIZE of ...

"Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well." - Mahatma Ghandi "Rare is the union of beauty and purity" - Juvenal "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." - Mae West The ultimate in purity - it is 100% mechanical, and never goes through a single one of those degrading mechanical to electrical conversions .... Analog reproduction is a beautiful thing.  You put a small needle attached to a tiny transducer into a groove that's been scratched in a vinyl disk, and then the small signal comes off of it and gets equalized and amplified and then the resultant sound is converted into sound through some more loudspeaker transducers.  Any little thing can wreck the signal on the way, make it unconvincing in it's realism and dispell the illusion of the performance you are trying weave. So rightly so, people who care about that sort of thing can get fussy.  And many...

"The Throwaway Society?" Not if you are an Audiophile This whole stream of thought came after reading an insightful article by Alan Sircom of HiFi+ magazine. The Throwaway Society   is a section of the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.  Widely read, the whole book was by and large correct - the rate of change was so fast that everyone is in a continuous upgrade cycle, tossing out the old and obsolete, and living in a sort of culture shock since mentally people cannot adapt quickly enough to the change we ourselves instigate.  So much isn't designed to be repaired or last to keep the costs low, that not only can you afford to throw it away in a few years, you must throw it away.  And what you replace it with, is usually better and more capable by a significant margin. I know I feel it.  I am pretty sure everyone feels it.  But ... in audiophilia, with a few exceptions, has escaped largely immune from this churn. As people are throwing away ...

Rondo +  Arché  Headshell We recently pressed into service in the middle of our Koru phonostage listening tests, an Ortofon Rondo Bronze and the Acoustic Science  Arché  Headshell.  This poses a couple of problems - the most significant is that we changed far too many variables to keep the "listening impressions" review intact, and the improvement is so large, we're not undoing them.   Scientific method be d***ed ... we are going to re-do the listening impressions and redo the review ... First up, and the crack in the foundation of our carefully constructed "one variable at a time" discipline, was when we took out the Denon and pout in the Ortofon Rondo Bronze in a standard headshell.  It was a solid improvement in every important way- especially a sense of refinement we hadn't had with the Denon.  Having experience with this cartridge before, we decided to continue with the tests, and we were on our merry way reviewing albums for the r...

Record Store Day ("RSD") started as a small promotion done to boost sales at local record stores that were getting slammed by big box stores in 2007.  The the ensuing 7 years, and a growing vinyl revival, it evolved into a bit of a retail/audio/cultural phenomenon.  RSD have added a few smaller "RSD's" throughout the year ("Back Friday" in November for instance) but the biggie is in April.  Record labels have responded to the growing number of sales, by making rare releases, B-sides, live recordings and covers of well known artists, picture disks, remix albums, special singles, and early releases of remastered albums available and only available at the stores themselves.  But also, record stores that sell used vinyl will sometimes haul out some special collections and their best stuff for that day, so it isn't a bad time for used record shopping either.  Nothing says Record Store Day like Poutine - parked outside of "Record Archive...