April 2025 – Tao and Zen

Wednesday, April 30th 2025…audio update…

So, last night, I busted out some sweet new speaker grills and replaced the battered and bruised ones on my HPM-100’s. The new ones are Olive in color, and although they don’t look designer – they look awesome. I think I may get 2 more pairs. I was thinking of sending my old ones in to get reclothed in the standard black fabric and order a new pair of orange, like JBL used on their 100’s back in the day. I moved my Sony disk changer and the Nak over to the stack – which is getting quite high, I might add. I have to wait for some new cables before I can hook everything up. I think I will probably also move the Vault down there. It’s nice to have upstairs, but I think I am going to grab a Node or some other streamer. I’m debating if I am going to stick with BlueSound. I used to have a crapload of mini-disks and now I can’t find them. I’ll have to put some pix up tomorrow.

I got some cables delivered this morning – my wife says, “you got more cables?” I said, “cables to an audio guy are like saws to a carpenter…”

-Rat

Monday, April 28th 2025… never a dull moment…

<<Updates…>> You know, you’d think that after I grabbed my Pioneer HPM 100 Speakers, I’d be listening to them nonstop. You’d be wrong. I haven’t made any time for it << I made time for it, this weekend>>. They have been sitting there for 3 weeks. Which for me is very bizarre. I ordered some speaker stands that would support these behemoths. They were just sitting there on the floor looking at me with their unloaded speaker stands (so, I actually put them on, on Friday afternoon). Tonight, when I get home, I think that I am going to pair a Carver CT-3 preamp together with one of the Carver TFM-25 amps and attach the NAD M-50 stack, the Sony 400 disk DVP-CX995V disk changer, a Nakamichi RX-505 tape deck, and an ADC SS-315 EQ. << So, I set the components up on a small roller cabinet >> This will allow me to test several things – first, does my TFM 25 really have a bad channel or is it the receiver that has a bad preamp out? <<As it turns out – the receiver is starting to go bad, and the amp is still kicking ass!>> What is the best way to hook up the NAD streamer stack to the preamp? <<Didn’t connect the streamer stack because I would need to run ethernet and I was feeling lazy>> Also, what are the best ways to utilize my equalizer, DVD/CD changer and my tape deck? Do I throw a mini-disk recorder into the mix – I love my mini-disks! <<Also, I didn’t connect the Sony or the Nak yet. However, I did connect the mini disk recorder and the EQ>>

I will say a couple of things – the Pioneer speakers sound sweet – especially if you are sitting in the sweet spot. Off axis, I was unimpressed. Unless you are way off axis – like upstairs. They are as clear as a bell. I was listening to Wynton Marsalis Standard Time Vol 1, Vol 2, Journey – Escape, George Michael – Faith, and Deep Forest – Boheme. Nice separation, range, clarity, and punch. The base is not sloppy, the upper midrange frequencies were clear, the highs were ringing without causing fatigue. The equalizer helps with some of the recording deficiencies. Mini disks rock! Ill connect the CD/DVD changer and see what I think tonight.

-Rat

Thursday, April 17th 2025… You’d be wrong…

You know, you’d think that after I grabbed my Pioneer HPM 100 Speakers, I’d be listening to them nonstop. You’d be wrong. I haven’t made any time for it. They have been sitting there for 3 weeks. Which for me is very bizarre. I ordered some speaker stands that would support these behemoths. They were just sitting there on the floor looking at me with their unloaded speaker stands (so, I actually put them on, on Friday afternoon). Tonight, when I get home, I think that I am going to pair a Carver CT-3 preamp together with one of the Carver TFM-25 amps and attach the NAD M-50 stack, the Sony 400 disk DVP-CX995V disk changer, a Nakamichi RX-505 tape deck, and an ADC SS-315 EQ. This will allow me to test several things – first, does my TFM 25 really have a bad channel or is it the receiver that has a bad preamp out? What is the best way to hook up the NAD streamer stack to the preamp? Also, what are the best ways to utilize my equalizer, DVD/CD changer and my tape deck? Do I throw a mini-disk recorder into the mix – I love my mini-disks!

-Rat

Monday, April 14th 2025…

AXPONA was an experience to behold. As far as the conference was concerned, there was a lot going on -a large hall that housed local guys doing sales of vintage audio and consignment, vintage repair services, ultrasonic vinyl cleaning machines, cable sales, record sales, and various vendors. There was a hall that was purely headphones and headphone/turntable preamps and also a hall devoted to car audio. In addition, there were lots of listening/reviewing rooms on the first 4 floors with dealers, components, and their accompanying speakers, and in addition there was 12 floors of listening rooms for audio.

There were 2 pair of speakers really stood out above all the rest. One was the Avantgarde Mezzo speakers, and the others were the MBL Speakers. These 2 needed nothing in my estimation. I sat in the “sweet” spot area of almost all the speakers when I was listening. Some had interesting experiences with imaging, separation, range and clarity. Some speakers were better than others. Some sonic ranges were better than others – some, you’d definitely need an equalizer. Some you’d need to augment with a sub.

Everything else were varying degrees of ho-hum. That said… there were 2 other standouts from the pack – a pair of bookshelf speakers that sounded better than most floor speakers – Elac (the company name) that made a pair of bookshelf speakers that I understood to be less than 1k$ and they had a better range than most of what I heard – both bookshelf ad floor standing. I will have to find out what the others were, but they were floor standers and while they didn’t impress me by sight, suffice it to say that their sound really impressed me. Thankfully, I actually know the sales guy (well, my buddy Joe does).

-Rat

Friday, April 11th 2025… add another one…

Today AXPONA starts and I will be attending tomorrow with my buddy Joe. We have been friends since sophomore year in high school. Which is saying “an effing’ long time”. I am looking forward to seeing/hearing some of the more highly exotic and esoteric speakers this weekend. Maybe I’ll see my other friend “Joe the dentist” there. He apparently purchased some crazy expensive speakers, but I haven’t been over to his abode to check them out yet. I am sure I will see a lot of “snake oil” salesman at this show. It really doesn’t matter what you spend on audio, you like what you like. I remember in college, we had 2 guys (Tom and I) whose rooms backed up to each other and another guy on the floor who spent some big dollar amounts on audio equipment. The guy whose audio cost a lot (I can’t remember his name) never sounded well – his amp was so big that he kept damaging his speakers and they would rattle and hum (sounded like shit). And we used to have stereo wars. Tom and I both had good setups with better than average speakers. However, Tom’s speakers were highly efficient, and he could mop up the floor with me. Needless to say, I never won stereo wars – my speakers while having a better range and separation (imaging) were not even close to the efficiency of his speakers. I would have had to have a 1000-watt (RMS) amp to even begin to compete and probably would have blown out my speakers. He had rock and roll speakers, and I had classical music speakers. His were about beating you over the head and mine were about inserting the knife. His had horn tweeters and mine had a beryllium ribbon tweeter. His had no midrange – the horn did double duty, mine had a boron coated midrange, we both had woofers – his was a paper cone with a passive radiator on the back, mine was a polymer woofer. The difference was really efficiency – his was 90dB efficient and mine was 86dB efficient. Which as a physics major and understanding electronics, I should have figured it out. For every 10 dB in volume rise, I would have to double the power. Meaning if we start at 1 watt – mine would produce sonics that would measure 86dB. In order for me to get to the next dB, I would have to turn it up to 10watts. 87dB? – 20 watts would net me 88dB?

-Rat

Monday, March 31st 2025… March is going out like a lion…

It’s a high of 48 degrees today (last day of March) with yesterday’s high of 75 degrees. Saturday afternoon, we went and saw a Fleetwood Mac tribute band at the Lyric in Blue Island. It was also a nice venue for the mobility challenged.

One thing this weekend (on a different note), that I didn’t expect was for it to be such a pain in the ass to do my taxes with software that I wanted downloaded – everything now is so cloud centric that I had to hunt for a download solution from H&R Block. I have zero confidence in cloud-based software that also protects my personal financials. I wonder how others feel about this. And no, I’m not allowing comments. It was a rhetorical question.

One other thing that I didn’t anticipate (on a separate, and different note) was that when I bought and hooked up the digital ASU/XLR cables that connect the NAD M51 to the NAD M50, my audio sounds way worse. The musical resolution is crappy, full of static, and heavy on one channel. Hopefully, my receiver isn’t dying on me because the first symptom would have been the one channel on the preamp dying. Which may mean (now that i think about it) that the amp is actually good, and the receiver is garbage.

-Rat