That time of year again
on 12/13/2010 at 01:26 PM
I thought I had good gear. That’s some way-serious stuff. The CD player sounds like quite the machine.
But long gone are the days when I can appreciate good music through a good system. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to enjoy my system as both my ears now ring .... loudly. It takes all the enjoyment out of it.So I will soon have to put the stuff up on Craigslist. Amp, pre-amp, dbx (remember those?), 10” not-a-slouch reel, linear tracking turntable, speakers, etc. All from the early 80’s.
Have fun with the beastie!
Your ears ring, and I’m going deaf. Long term congestion has finally taken it’s toll I think. So really, it’s all for my wife. Well played or well reproduced music is an emotional experience for her.
We auditioned a pair of Dunlavy speakers once. These are gigantic speakers, taller than you are, first order crossover, that focus the sound into a sweet spot about the size of a basketball. True magic, but don’t move your head. Hooked up to a Burmeister transport and a Krell amplifier about the size of a coffee table, she sat their crying at the beauty of what she heard. That’s how good it can be.
Unfortunately, sitting two feet to her side, all I heard was some very nice music. We swapped positions and the experience was the same. So we decided this rig - about $80,000 worth of kit at the time I recall - was extremely selfish. The coffin sized speakers were really just the world’s largest pair of headphones. World’s best, without question. But still headphones. We wanted sound that would fill the whole house, so it was back to shopping.
Top grade audio equipment lasts nearly forever. Vilmar’s rig is 30 years old and probably still going strong. 10 years down the road and my gear hasn’t had the slightest hiccup, except for the Denon CD/DVD player. That was a troublesome unit for Denon, a flagship product they entered the DVD market with, built too well for them to turn a profit on even when they later jacked the price up $500, but the laser pickup was off the shelf stuff and tended to fail after a few thousand hours use. I’ve had that fixed once already. It’s just not worth it at this point to get it repaired, since even a good Blu-Ray player would cost less than that job, and those things can play any kind of disc ever made. Which makes them fine for home theater who-cares playback. But to get the most from your music you need gear dedicated to that task.
If the RIAA ever gets off it’s ass and loosens it’s rules to save the industry, then streaming audio is going to be the wave of the future. It already is, but I’m talking quality, not just quantity. The stream you can get today, for you iPod or whatever, is terribly degraded. A really top notch audio stream would be like DVD-Audio: twice the data width of CD and at 4 times the sample rate. That gets you so close to analog that even the testing equipment can’t tell the difference. And that analog would not be “bent” analog the way that vinyl has to be. The other side of that coin is that the recording industry would have to step up and start creating much better recordings, and the performers would have to make better music that was worth it. “Today’s sound” is crap. It’s thinned out and machine generated to sound “exciting” on your iPod or in your car’s Boom-Boom street thumper “stereo”. This is pretty much just like the mid 60’s, when music was “tuned” to the “transistor” radios of the time and the AM broadcast spectrum. Horrible, even though the technology already exists, and the necessary bandwidth is almost here, to give people sound that is orders of magnitude better. But convenience drives the market, so it’s pointless for 92% of the sales. You simply can not get good sound from those little earbuds.
