Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

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 ...