mr sneff
10-11-2013, 15:33
Hi
I'm new to the forum, I have introduced myself on the welcome page and posted a few jokes over in abstract chat, but this is my first 'proper' post, so go easy!
To begin with it was just about music, we had a Dansette record player and a load of secondhand records that my parents had. By the time I was a teenager I’d started buying my own records, singles to begin with, The Beatles, Stones, The Who, and then albums, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Dansette had by now permanently migrated to my bedroom and my parents bought a new Hacker record player for the living room. All this, of course, was mono, though eventually we got an extension speaker for the Hacker which made it stereo.
Eventually I wanted a better bedroom system and my parents bought me a belt drive Garrard turntable (I can't remember which model) for my birthday. I just sat and admired it for some months, I couldn’t afford an amp or speakers! Eventually I had a bit of money and bought a secondhand Sansui AU101 for about £20 (amazing to see them going on ebay for £100 now) and a pair of Hitachi speakers off a mate for about a tenner. I was happy with this system for quite a few years. Listening to music was the main thing, I knew nothing about speaker placement, the only possible position in my room was diagonally from corner to corner, I’d never read a hi fi magazine or been in a hi fi shop. I sometimes think that reading hi fi magazines was my undoing and the way it sounded started to become as important as what was being listened to.
By the time I was working I had a bit more disposable income, got the upgrade bug and bought a Dual turntable (again I can’t remember which one) and an Sansui AU217 amp. I was planning to upgrade the speakers to a pair of Wharfedales (dentons?) but the first pair I bought (from a Comet-style store) had a faulty tweeter and the replacement pair had a faulty woofer so in the end I stuck with the £10 Hitachi speakers, I preferred the sound anyway. I’ve always found speakers the hardest part of a system to change, better the devil you know.
I now knew a few people who were into hi fi and used to read their magazines, consequently the quest for better speakers continued. This time I did audition a number of speakers at a proper hi fi shop and got myself a pair of the original Tannoy Mercury’s, which I was happy with for many years, from the mid 80s until the mid 90s. But I did upgrade the turntable and bought an Acoustic Research TT with a Linn basik arm.
Still I wasn’t really interested in the niceties and subtleties of hi fi, it was the music that mattered. CD changed all that. I bought my first CD player in 1989, a Sony CDP 791 (I think), I also bought a Pioneer A400, which was flavour of the month in the hi fi press at the time. I liked the convenience of CD and absence of clicks and pops but was horrified to discover that the mid range actually sounded better on my cassette deck!
A rapid period a upgrading followed; the Sony was replaced with an Arcam Alpha CD player; that was an enjoyable system with the Pioneer and the Tannoys. I tweaked the system quite a bit, a ‘proper’ interconnect to replace the freebie, some directional speaker cable, sorbothane feet under the CD player, green rings around the CDs and a CD mat. All of these made a difference and I guess it was kind of gratifying to think that I could hear the differences that the ‘experts’ in the magazines talked about.
So why stop there? I had a good system and a room set aside as a listening room, but it certainly could be better - the magazines said it could. The oldest component in the system was the Tannoy Mercury’s, obviously a new pair of speakers was the answer! This time I did talk to a few dealers and listen to quite a few speakers. I’d never considered Linn speakers before, but a local dealer suggested I auditioned a pair of Linn Helix speakers. In the demonstration room they sounded great so I part exchanged the Tannoys and bought a pair. They sounded shit at home! Give the dealer his due, he bent over backwards to help me, unfortunately the Tannoys had already been snapped up by some lucky punter but he to the Linn speakers back and exchanged the for a pair of Arcam speakers. They were an improvement, but after about an hour I had a headache and I just wasn’t enjoying listening to music any more. I thought that upgrading the amp might help and after auditioning some bought a Linn Intek, which I still feel was a good amp but it didn’t solve the problem. Just goes to show how changing one component can throw a balanced system out of kilter and you end up changing everything to restore the balance.
Next up was a pair of Harbeth LS3/5as. Lovely speaker, but not right for the large scale classical and opera I was listening to at the time.Then I had a pair of LInn Keilidhs which, once I’d got the positioning right hit the spot.
Obviously now the weakest part of the system (as I saw it) was the CD player so I upgraded to a Linn Karik and for a time I was satisfied with the sound of the system. But surely a pre/power amp would be better? I auditioned a few likely suspects, tried out a Linn Majik I/LK100 at home and couldn’t understand why it didn’t really sound any better. So I spoke to another dealer who asked if I’d ever thought about valves? He brought a number of different amps to my house for me to try. The Audio Note wasn’t right for my system, though I was surprised how such a low-powered amp could drive the Keilidhs. A Copland integrated was very refined but a little too polite for my tastes. I would have settled on a Tube Technology Unisis, but it didn’t quite gel with the room - I wish I’d know how to sort out the room then because I could have been happy with that amp the soundstage and imaging were amazing. In the end I settled on a Musical Fidelity A1000, not as 3D as the Tube Technology but a big soundstage and plenty of deep bass.
Sorted? No. I discovered that it was possible to get equipment upgraded by changing components for more ‘audiophile’ ones. So I sent the A1000 off to be upgraded. It certainly sounded different when it came back but had lost the warmth and spaciousness that I loved. The A1000 went and I replaced it with a Linn Kairn and a biamped the Keilidhs with a pair of LK100s. All was well for a while until I thought about going active. Again, the demo in the dealer’s room sounded great, much more transparent than the passive Keilidhs, but at home it sounded shit. As with the Unisis if I’d got the room sorted it probably would have been fine. Whilst source first may be true on the principle that what’s lost at source can’t be retrieved further down the chain, in my experience the speakers and their interaction with the room has played a bigger part in how the system sounds. I didn’t get much good advice from my dealer, who incorrectly identified the front and rear walls as being the problem when it turned out to be the side walls that had the most influence. And it was easily sorted once I’d put some CD storage down the sides of the room the sound improved.
Another blind alley was using a particular CDs to audition components. One CD that was a test disc of mine had a very sharp treble. Instead of searching for a system that made it sound good I should just have accepted that it was a bad recording and perhaps just bought a different recording of the piece - it would have been cheaper!
A lot of my upgradeitis came from reading hi fi magazines. It seems to me that hi fi journalists make their living by over-emphasising the differences between pieces of equipment, “amplifier X mark 2 is a ‘massive’ improvement over mark 1”, and magazines depend on advertising for revenue. If they said that there was only a negligible difference between mark 1 and mark 2 and it’s not worth upgrading then the company may take their advertising elsewhere, and apparently being a ‘cloth-eared audiophile’ isn’t good for the reviews image. A piece of equipment costing £2000 doesn’t, in my experience sound 10x as good as one costing £200. Then what is better? A fair few pieces of equipment that have received rave reviews have sounded distinctly underwhelming to me. Certainly it’s easier to say that A sounds different to B and it can be easy to convince yourself that it’s better, especially if you’ve just shelled out a lot of money for it. I remember buying a Van Den Hul ‘The First’ interconnect to replace my standard Linn interconnect between and initially being disappointed with it. After a week or so I decided it was better. A friend was visiting, and I was keen to show off my latest upgrade. We listened to a few pieces and then swapped back to the Linn cable; neither of us could hear a damned difference!
My favourite hi fi cartoon is of a chap standing in a hi fi shop saying to the salesperson, “I want something that sounds better than the real thing” !! Sometimes it’s easy to get seduced by something that makes you go “wow”. But something that’s “wow “ after 5 minutes can induce a headache after an hour and not be a long term satisfying listen. Even if that’s not the case the wow eventually just becomes the norm.
Anyway, fortunately life intervened, it became necessary to move and I had to downsize. The big Linn system had to go and was replaced by a Classik. Funnily enough I didn’t miss the big system, and anyway music had to take a back seat for a while. Just recently I’ve had a hankering for a decent system again and have been buying a few bits of kit on eBay. I’d always fancied a Quad amp and have been building a system around a Quad 34/303, using a laptop and Audioengine D1 as source, or an old Pioneer PD-S705. It’s only a small room and I managed to pick up a pair of John Blue jb3s at a good price. It means I can now listen to whatever I want without headphones and without upsetting my wife! The only thing I’m tempted by is trying out a T class amp, apparently the jb3s were developed using a KIngrex T20, and I’ve read very good reports of the Temple Audio Bantam Gold on this forum. So if anyone has any experience of jb3s with a T class amp I’d be interested to hear from them.
I'm new to the forum, I have introduced myself on the welcome page and posted a few jokes over in abstract chat, but this is my first 'proper' post, so go easy!
To begin with it was just about music, we had a Dansette record player and a load of secondhand records that my parents had. By the time I was a teenager I’d started buying my own records, singles to begin with, The Beatles, Stones, The Who, and then albums, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Dansette had by now permanently migrated to my bedroom and my parents bought a new Hacker record player for the living room. All this, of course, was mono, though eventually we got an extension speaker for the Hacker which made it stereo.
Eventually I wanted a better bedroom system and my parents bought me a belt drive Garrard turntable (I can't remember which model) for my birthday. I just sat and admired it for some months, I couldn’t afford an amp or speakers! Eventually I had a bit of money and bought a secondhand Sansui AU101 for about £20 (amazing to see them going on ebay for £100 now) and a pair of Hitachi speakers off a mate for about a tenner. I was happy with this system for quite a few years. Listening to music was the main thing, I knew nothing about speaker placement, the only possible position in my room was diagonally from corner to corner, I’d never read a hi fi magazine or been in a hi fi shop. I sometimes think that reading hi fi magazines was my undoing and the way it sounded started to become as important as what was being listened to.
By the time I was working I had a bit more disposable income, got the upgrade bug and bought a Dual turntable (again I can’t remember which one) and an Sansui AU217 amp. I was planning to upgrade the speakers to a pair of Wharfedales (dentons?) but the first pair I bought (from a Comet-style store) had a faulty tweeter and the replacement pair had a faulty woofer so in the end I stuck with the £10 Hitachi speakers, I preferred the sound anyway. I’ve always found speakers the hardest part of a system to change, better the devil you know.
I now knew a few people who were into hi fi and used to read their magazines, consequently the quest for better speakers continued. This time I did audition a number of speakers at a proper hi fi shop and got myself a pair of the original Tannoy Mercury’s, which I was happy with for many years, from the mid 80s until the mid 90s. But I did upgrade the turntable and bought an Acoustic Research TT with a Linn basik arm.
Still I wasn’t really interested in the niceties and subtleties of hi fi, it was the music that mattered. CD changed all that. I bought my first CD player in 1989, a Sony CDP 791 (I think), I also bought a Pioneer A400, which was flavour of the month in the hi fi press at the time. I liked the convenience of CD and absence of clicks and pops but was horrified to discover that the mid range actually sounded better on my cassette deck!
A rapid period a upgrading followed; the Sony was replaced with an Arcam Alpha CD player; that was an enjoyable system with the Pioneer and the Tannoys. I tweaked the system quite a bit, a ‘proper’ interconnect to replace the freebie, some directional speaker cable, sorbothane feet under the CD player, green rings around the CDs and a CD mat. All of these made a difference and I guess it was kind of gratifying to think that I could hear the differences that the ‘experts’ in the magazines talked about.
So why stop there? I had a good system and a room set aside as a listening room, but it certainly could be better - the magazines said it could. The oldest component in the system was the Tannoy Mercury’s, obviously a new pair of speakers was the answer! This time I did talk to a few dealers and listen to quite a few speakers. I’d never considered Linn speakers before, but a local dealer suggested I auditioned a pair of Linn Helix speakers. In the demonstration room they sounded great so I part exchanged the Tannoys and bought a pair. They sounded shit at home! Give the dealer his due, he bent over backwards to help me, unfortunately the Tannoys had already been snapped up by some lucky punter but he to the Linn speakers back and exchanged the for a pair of Arcam speakers. They were an improvement, but after about an hour I had a headache and I just wasn’t enjoying listening to music any more. I thought that upgrading the amp might help and after auditioning some bought a Linn Intek, which I still feel was a good amp but it didn’t solve the problem. Just goes to show how changing one component can throw a balanced system out of kilter and you end up changing everything to restore the balance.
Next up was a pair of Harbeth LS3/5as. Lovely speaker, but not right for the large scale classical and opera I was listening to at the time.Then I had a pair of LInn Keilidhs which, once I’d got the positioning right hit the spot.
Obviously now the weakest part of the system (as I saw it) was the CD player so I upgraded to a Linn Karik and for a time I was satisfied with the sound of the system. But surely a pre/power amp would be better? I auditioned a few likely suspects, tried out a Linn Majik I/LK100 at home and couldn’t understand why it didn’t really sound any better. So I spoke to another dealer who asked if I’d ever thought about valves? He brought a number of different amps to my house for me to try. The Audio Note wasn’t right for my system, though I was surprised how such a low-powered amp could drive the Keilidhs. A Copland integrated was very refined but a little too polite for my tastes. I would have settled on a Tube Technology Unisis, but it didn’t quite gel with the room - I wish I’d know how to sort out the room then because I could have been happy with that amp the soundstage and imaging were amazing. In the end I settled on a Musical Fidelity A1000, not as 3D as the Tube Technology but a big soundstage and plenty of deep bass.
Sorted? No. I discovered that it was possible to get equipment upgraded by changing components for more ‘audiophile’ ones. So I sent the A1000 off to be upgraded. It certainly sounded different when it came back but had lost the warmth and spaciousness that I loved. The A1000 went and I replaced it with a Linn Kairn and a biamped the Keilidhs with a pair of LK100s. All was well for a while until I thought about going active. Again, the demo in the dealer’s room sounded great, much more transparent than the passive Keilidhs, but at home it sounded shit. As with the Unisis if I’d got the room sorted it probably would have been fine. Whilst source first may be true on the principle that what’s lost at source can’t be retrieved further down the chain, in my experience the speakers and their interaction with the room has played a bigger part in how the system sounds. I didn’t get much good advice from my dealer, who incorrectly identified the front and rear walls as being the problem when it turned out to be the side walls that had the most influence. And it was easily sorted once I’d put some CD storage down the sides of the room the sound improved.
Another blind alley was using a particular CDs to audition components. One CD that was a test disc of mine had a very sharp treble. Instead of searching for a system that made it sound good I should just have accepted that it was a bad recording and perhaps just bought a different recording of the piece - it would have been cheaper!
A lot of my upgradeitis came from reading hi fi magazines. It seems to me that hi fi journalists make their living by over-emphasising the differences between pieces of equipment, “amplifier X mark 2 is a ‘massive’ improvement over mark 1”, and magazines depend on advertising for revenue. If they said that there was only a negligible difference between mark 1 and mark 2 and it’s not worth upgrading then the company may take their advertising elsewhere, and apparently being a ‘cloth-eared audiophile’ isn’t good for the reviews image. A piece of equipment costing £2000 doesn’t, in my experience sound 10x as good as one costing £200. Then what is better? A fair few pieces of equipment that have received rave reviews have sounded distinctly underwhelming to me. Certainly it’s easier to say that A sounds different to B and it can be easy to convince yourself that it’s better, especially if you’ve just shelled out a lot of money for it. I remember buying a Van Den Hul ‘The First’ interconnect to replace my standard Linn interconnect between and initially being disappointed with it. After a week or so I decided it was better. A friend was visiting, and I was keen to show off my latest upgrade. We listened to a few pieces and then swapped back to the Linn cable; neither of us could hear a damned difference!
My favourite hi fi cartoon is of a chap standing in a hi fi shop saying to the salesperson, “I want something that sounds better than the real thing” !! Sometimes it’s easy to get seduced by something that makes you go “wow”. But something that’s “wow “ after 5 minutes can induce a headache after an hour and not be a long term satisfying listen. Even if that’s not the case the wow eventually just becomes the norm.
Anyway, fortunately life intervened, it became necessary to move and I had to downsize. The big Linn system had to go and was replaced by a Classik. Funnily enough I didn’t miss the big system, and anyway music had to take a back seat for a while. Just recently I’ve had a hankering for a decent system again and have been buying a few bits of kit on eBay. I’d always fancied a Quad amp and have been building a system around a Quad 34/303, using a laptop and Audioengine D1 as source, or an old Pioneer PD-S705. It’s only a small room and I managed to pick up a pair of John Blue jb3s at a good price. It means I can now listen to whatever I want without headphones and without upsetting my wife! The only thing I’m tempted by is trying out a T class amp, apparently the jb3s were developed using a KIngrex T20, and I’ve read very good reports of the Temple Audio Bantam Gold on this forum. So if anyone has any experience of jb3s with a T class amp I’d be interested to hear from them.