Audio Equipment

I completely understand. The music has been my passion for as long as I can remember. The equipment is only a means to an end. I bought my first stereo when I was 16. I quit school and went to work at a plant making windows for $3.50 an hour. Over the next year I managed to put together a Sansui AU2200 10 wpc amp, two second hand no name speakers, and an eight track player. During the summer I'd take it outside and set it up on a picnic table in the back yard. If you want to hear the best sound you've ever heard give it a try . . . no reflections or cancellation waves, the greatest anechoic chamber ever made. I eventually was able to afford a Dual 701 direct drive turntable, which I had up until I gave it all away. Every payday I had a circuit that I would make through the delete and sale bins in the big box stores. If I liked the album cover I would buy it; you could usually get deletes for a $1.50 each -- you wouldn't believe the bands I discovered that way. I've owned thousands of albums and I just can't be bothered any more. I was going through storage boxes under the stairs and I still have a couple of distat pads and some bottles of vinyl treatment. I don't need the physical product; the vast majority is over-priced disposable music for a disposable culture.

I added a Polk sub and the difference is astounding. With an LFE going it takes a lot of the load off the KEF and allows them to act as mid-range and tweeter. I've been switching back and forth between the tube pre-amp and straight DAC. The tube pre-amp definitely has a much wider sound stage and higher definition. My thoughts on system configuration change constantly but right now I'm leaning toward two Dayton class A/B amps configured as monoblocks. I think I'll feed them from a tube pre-amp. The Dayton can be daisy chained, so I could add a third one as a sub amp and have a shit kicker system for less than $1500.

Borzak said:

Still use a Sansui 5500 to feed my reel to reel thru, dad bought the Sansui when I was young. The quality is highly dependant on the speed recorded at and how bad a shape it's in. A 15 inch per second record speed in good shape is pretty high quality. Better than streaming music by a lot, better than vinyl. 3.5 ips pretty bad.

I just use it cause I buy tapes in bulk off ebay for next to nothing and sort thru the ones I want and ocassionaly get odd stuff. Stuff recorded off the radio, personal band recordings, and copies of released tapes, and factory tapes.

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That's a beautiful piece of vintage hardware. One morning I turned on the 2200 and there was a puff of smoke -- and that's all she wrote. At one point I had an Akai reel to reel, but it had it's own amp and speakers and no way to patch it into a stereo system.

You might think I was being metaphorical about the storage under the basement stairs, but it's a real thing, and it was packed: Five keyboards, three video cards, two sound cards with a Logitec 5.1, two PSUs; a router and two DSL modems; interconnects and patch cables, speaker wire up the yin yang, various transformers and power supply cords, a couple extrernal drive enclosures (one with a 100 meg Seagate in it LOL); a pair of Bose 301 speakers I'd forgotten I had; an xbox and xbox 360; a model of a Klingon Bird of Prey; a pair of neopremes, fly vest and kreel; various camping gear, a tape box with 200 cassets in it (mostly punk and 80s metal), a couple hundred cds, books and titty mags! I don't own a casset player any more, so they'll be going to the nephew -- he's scored heavy on this adventure.

Unique concept! Never seen that before. I did most of my cassette listening in my vehicle, but I had a Technics tape player, and later on, CD carousel. One time I went camping and took 60 tapes with me. I had a Chev Tracker with the soft top, all my fly fishing and camping gear in the back. I got back about two in the morning and said fuck it, I'll unload in the morning. Got up the next morning and some asshole had cut a hole in the top and cleaned it out; they used cutters of some kind to get the player out of the dash, and the amp from under the seat. The speakers were in boxes in the back, all Alpine. When I phoned the cops they told me they couldn't be bothered, bring the vehicle in and they'd look at it, check the pawnshops. I got seats from a junk yard for $200, and a new hard top for $1500. Insurance paid out $524; would only pay for one cassette that could have been in the player. Wanted me to claim everything else under house insurance, which had a $1k deductible. The Fenwick rod and reel were about $300, waders and vest another $150, and maybe a hundred worth of flies; camping gear maybe another couple hundred . . . I was pissed.

I owned a 72 Mustang, green with black hard top, 289 and C six. Loved that car!

I watch Techmoan quite a bit, along with Joe N Tell, Z Reviews ,and Audioholics.

My dad owned the theater in small town Canada. In 1972 there was a big promotion for the movie Elvis on Tour. As part of the promotion they gave us boxes of 45s to hand out. I raided it and came away with 20 or so records, can't remember what all there was, but it was a treasure hunt at the time. I used to sit up in the projection room and help dad load reels into the two arc projectors. They used carbon rods just like a welding rod, and ran off these huge tube rectifiers. So did the amplifier that powered two Altec A5 Voice of the Theater packages behind the screen. Years later I met the guy that bought the theater from us and asked about the speakers because I knew he's had to shut the place down. He said there was a leak in the roof that went undetected and destroyed them. I didn't know what they were at the time and only realized how famous they were when I recently saw a set for auction on Ebay.

I've come to the conclusion that if you aren't sure you need a subwoofer you probably do. I've been listening to a set of KEF speakers for the last couple of months in near field; on my desk with an equilateral triangle of about four feet. Andrew Jones knew what he was doing when he went with the Uni-Q driver array design. With a bottom end of about 50hz it reaches deep enough, and using the woofer cone as a wave guide to direct tweeter dispersion is a masterpiece of on axis linearity. Sound stage and imaging are amazing, and detail is outstanding when playing a properly recorded track; listening to music I've heard hundreds of times before, I often hear things in the recording I've never heard before. In fact, my one complaint about the KEF is they can be too revealing: A shitty recording becomes unlistenable.

That is, until I added a subwoofer on the amp's Low Frequency Effects channel. After some tuning the difference is distinct and fills a portion of the audio spectrum I didn't realize was missing. At loud volumes the tap tap, tap tap of the kick drum takes on a physical property you can feel in your chest. The bass guitar track comes alive. At all volumes bass is filled out in a way a five inch speaker in a small enclosure just can't reproduce.

Here's a James Blake track to see how your speakers perform. Best to give it a listen at low volume before cranking it up: