Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

He's Doomed. When you look at various forums, and talk to audiophiles, there is a common mythical beast, the so-called Giant Killer. The Giant Killer means many things to many people, but in essence, it is a variation of the "something for nothing" but its story is one of hope that there exists a combinations of improbable engineering successes, and marketing blunders that offers incredible performance for a pittance. Audio reviewers talk about Giant Killers in hushed tones, audio enthusiasts look for these deals (usually fruitlessly) in new and used gear to try to find that magic component that would be like a sprinkle of pixie dust to suddenly propel their system into a new category of performance. As you can guess, we're skeptical about these so-called Giant Killers (heneforth referred to as GK in this entry), and think the sweat, time and effort would be best spent making synergistic upgrades, careful experiments with cables and room treatments and ...

It used to be that every single receiver or preamp had a built in phonostage.  The way it used to work is that you would by a turntable, plug it in, and start spinning records.  For the audio enthusiast, there was always low output moving coil cartridges, and the resultant step-up-transformer you could use to present a signal to the phono input, but the built in was always used.  When the CD came to dominate, that the good 'ol built-in phono input went away.  A minor proliferation of external phono stages began as analog declined, but it left the mass market's consciousness as the silver disc rose in domination.  Given the people sticking to their vinyl through the near death of the medium were mostly performance oriented enthusiasts.  The state of the art playback for analog rose considerably (both in performance and price) during this dark time.  Now that vinyl is beginning to flirt with becoming mainstream again, brands are introducing their own ta...

There is a current puzzle in audio since the introduction of CD. While the measurements of digital are in many cases an order of magnitude better than vinyl (and audio  Skeptics  are fond of gleefully pointing this out), yet in the end, vinyl tends to sound more natural and more real most of the time (which subjectivist use to rub the Skeptics nose in it). While we don't need to rehash the millions of words lost in the ongoing argument, I think it is easily summarized by three statements below: The audio Skeptics have made a basic assumption that digital audio reproduction is essentially perfect, and have stubbornly maintained this idea The audio Subjectivists have not adequately defined high resolution well enough to inform study. Neither Skeptics nor Subjectivists have been able to acknowledge that our understanding of sound perception is incomplete and its study and revisions are ongoing.  This is either through ignorance or stubbornness. In a perusal ...

The Rondo Bronze in all the Glory One of the largest sources of distortion and excellence in any LP setup is the cartridge.  We're big fans of Ortofon, and we took a big leap first jumping from a Grado Sonata1 to a Denon DL-103R then to the underappreciated, excellent Ortofon Rondo Bronze. We listen to a lot of vinyl, around 8-10 hours a week.  But keep meticulous care of our records and clean the needle with every side of a disk.  This means that at best we'd have 1500 hours of enjoyment.  At our rate that is right around 3 years.  We're into year 2, and while everything still sounds fantastic, it is time to start the long arduous process of finding a replacement, since in the mean-time, Ortofon has discontinued the Rondo line.  They have consolidated most of their LOMC offerings into two series:  "Quintet" and "Cadenza" I can have the Rondo Bronze retipped (3rd party), or I can replace it with a Quintet or Cadenza.  Or look elsewhere, but ...

We dug out the trusty Denon DL-103R and mounted it on the Acoustic Research "Arche" Headshell ... and got an incredible musical presentation once about 15 hours had passed with some fussing and adjusting. The Denon's sound will continue improving as your tone-arm and turntable get upgraded, but does justice to what you already have.  It responds very well to careful alignment, but it's forgiving of less careful alignment.  It can go toe to toe with carts costing multiples of its US$379 MSRP (Street price slightly less).  If the basic sound is to your liking, there is also a small cottage industry that takes the DL103 and 103R and hotrods them, too.  The Denon DL-103R is not a perfect cartridge by any means, but it is one of those rare true "giant killers" where you have to spend a lot more to do better, and makes you ask "why bother" when considering such an upgrade. We were happy to recommend it earlier, we're happy to double down on...

The era of the vinyl bargain is over.  While we might long for the time when we could get an album for $1-2 each is gone and dead on a wave of technology revival that was both unlikely and astonishing.  While this wave might burn itself out, or go on to be a dominant media again is anyone's guess.  But for the foreseeable future, there won't be the killer Thrift Shop Finds of LP as even the charities realize they can get some real money for their copy of Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits in mint condition (when 10-15 years ago, they'd be lucky to sell it for $1).  But like the Iron Throne in an unnamed overly long and bloody TV show, a new bargain sits proudly, if uneasily:  the CD. Look at this?  Vinyl from $15 (used), MP3 $14, and Lowly CD? $8!  All for your selection on Amazon in this example.  Funny thing, CD.  Was supposed to be "perfect sound forever" and after it's initial teething pains proved it worth by being able to do thi...

The audio family at home, might choose to spin a record (LP standard launched in 1948, stereo about a decade later), play a CD (1982), or playback a digital file (c1996) as they settle in for the evening.  For us, we tend towards solid state amplification (c1955), but there is nothing wrong with vacuum tubes (c1920).  We have a dynamic speaker (c1930) but we know that electrostatic (c1955), ribbons (c1960-1970) or horns (c1920) could be there, too. While you could go through the house and do a similar exercise and see that most things in a house aside form the structure itself, are from the 20th and 21st century. Most of the basic technology found in a house was developed before 1970, if not before World War II. But ... given how white hot the electronics sector has been since World War II (really since before World War I actually!), it is a little surprising that a domestic setup to listen to music is mostly unchanged over that time.  A stereo system in 1957 is m...

Neil Young making the round, evangelizing for Pono, his plan and mechanism to save recordings' soul ... We have been aware of the development of Pono for the last few years, and when we saw a few announcements and the Kickstarter campaign pop up, we went in to order ours on what turned out the be a wave of support. We see they are flirting with $2M $3M $4M $5.3M raised in their funding campaign, which clearly is on the path to being one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns yet.  It also bodes well for high end audio, as well as high quality recorded music.  And the fact that one of our favorite audio companies (the majority of our electronics come from Ayre for those keeping track), Ayre Acoustics , is doing the analog guts of the player, means it will stand with the best of the best. from www.Ayre.com This post is NOT an advertisement for it, though we would encourage you to consider it, or something like it as a personal music player. We listened to ...

The Wisconsin Chair Company, decided to start a recording company, Paramount Records , to help sell phonographs they were marketing.  If this sounds familiar, this is not entirely unlike Apple launching iTunes in order to sell their iPods over a decade ago.  From 1917 until 1932, they were recording and releasing a lot of inexpensive records, but they were most famous for the so-called "Race Records" - which was early Jazz and Blues performed by African-Americans.  They may have recorded 100,000 78's by the time they stopped, and most of the artists are obscure, though Louis Armstrong, "Jelly Roll" Morton, and others got their starts with the label.  The recording quality, even for 78's, was never high, but the rarity and the excellent music make them a bit of a holy grail for people who collected 78's. A few years ago, a few collectors, including Jack White (of White Stripes fame, and currently the head of Third Man Records ) decided to put toget...

"Perfectionist Jazz" - Enjoyable but Not the best.  Sound quality 100% In my experience the journey though audiophilia really went in several stages. The first ones were yearning, and the initial plunge into a high quality stereo, followed by adjustment of components and other ancillary items to tease the most out of the stereo. But for music, there was a long dark period of musical enjoyment that I eventually busted out of.  That part was probably the most important thing I had to do ... Music bought only for sound quality is death to enjoyment ... Yes, sounds great.  "Meh" for enjoyment (Though fallen out of favor in audiophile circles these days) Early into audiophile exploration, I got a list of "demo quality music" - it was a 3 page small type single spaced list of CD's that the author used when setting up a demonstration of an audiophile stereo system.  I poured over the list, and had only heard of one or two out of the several hu...

Audiophile in hot pursuit of perfection I was having a conversation with my father this morning on the way into work. I think Kathy will attest to the fact that on any car ride of more than a few minutes I am usually on the phone to a family member or a friend - hand's free - I'd like to say it was because I am just that efficient, but it really isn't that.   True, and yes, not efficiency; this is an ongoing thing in our household. :)  Usually we talk about politics, news events, our dogs, kids and family news, but this morning he started opining on the reasons someone would spend a lot of money on a stereo.  This was after I told him, the previous day, the price of some speakers that I was very curious about (for those keeping score, it was German Physiks ). German Physiks Speakers ... the object of my eye "It's got to be that they are after a trophy to show off to their friends" he started with, but throughout his theorizing it boiled down to ...

Duevel speakers are not the first, and certainly won't be the last omnidirectional speakers ever designed.  But they just may be the prettiest.  You can read about them here. The are currently distributed by a Canadian company, Duevel having dropped their US distributor and consolidated in Canada under the umbrella of the very interesting and self described "Zendo" as company Mutine . Look!  That's how they do it! Omnidirectional speakers tend to be radially symmetrical - which isn't surprising.  And the first popular success was the Ohm Walsh F.  Bose (yes that Bose) spent a lot of the 1960's trying to figure out how to do one - and eventually settled on the Bose 901's as a poly-directional speaker - 9 drivers firing to the rear, and 1 towards the listener.  I have to say, as an owner of a pair, you will not find a bigger illusion of a soundstage (but diffuse) and a convincing illusion of being at a rock concert when playing live music loudly any...