aerius

I haven't heard a healthy pair of Quad 63's yet, the one pair I've heard was waiting for some restoration work. Poor thing buzzed and farted whenever the volume was turned up a bit and the bass from one of them sounded a bit wonky. I've been meaning to go back and listen to them but I haven't found the opportunity yet. On the other hand I have a fair bit of experience with my local dealer's Quad 57's, he has them setup with tube amps and a killer vinyl and digital rig for use as his reference system for evaluating new products he plans to carry. It's something special, once you hear it you realize that damn near every other speaker is hopelessly coloured. Yeah it's limited in the bass and it won't go to "11", but stay within its limits and it makes you shake your head and wonder what the hell speaker designers have been doing for the last 50 years. It won't play Slayer at rock your socks off volume, but turn it down a bit and it still sounds pretty darn good, you just don't get to feel the music hit you. I didn't have much of a problem with the alleged tiny sweetspot, from what I was reading I got the impression that everything would come apart if I moved my head a couple inches. Maybe it was the good room setup that helped, but I noticed that the sweetspot was almost big enough for 2 people, it doesn't suddenly fall apart when I move my head a few inches, I could move my head a good foot or so and still have great sound, it wasn't much worse than many of the other speakers I've heard. And yeah, it'll definitely put performers in the room if the recording's good enough. You do have to be in the sweetspot to get the full effect though, some speakers can do it even if you're way out of the sweetspot but with the Quads your head has to be centered between the speakers. I love the Quad 57's and plan to get a pair some day. Could take a few years but it'll happen.

They make pretty good stuff, I've only heard their FB1i and PB1i speakers, which unfortunately are a bit too inefficient for the amps I prefer. I heard'em with a Bryston amp and they do sound pretty good, but I'd like to have more bass kick. Which the big PMCs should deliver.

Bitter cold? How could it be "bitter cold" when there's cactus and palm trees outside?

Man, you could have so much dirty fun with the display on that thing. Especially if you can find a way to program it to display scrolling messages.

I wouldn't touch a Pontiac or any other car that's from one of GM's discontinued divisions. They currently have a government guaranteed warranty program for them but I wouldn't count on that program being around in the future with the kind of deficits the goverment is running up these days. Wouldn't touch any Chrysler for the same reason, their merger or whatever the fuck you want to call it with Fiat is going to have them so fucked up that it's not even funny. No idea what to buy though in your market segment, I'm a mid-size family sedan person.

Chapter 7 is liquidation bankruptcy, everything in the company including the kitchen sink is sold off to pay its creditors, after which the company is gone forever. So yeah, it wouldn't apply. With regards to buying their shares, I wouldn't do it until the audits are complete and the revised financial info is released. Their current financial info might be good, or it might've been fucked more times than a $5 whore. I'm better off gambling my money on a roulette wheel in Vegas, at least I know what the odds are there.

Well, this is Koss' income statement from their 2009 annual report. Koss says their financial info is untrustworthy since at least the end of fiscal 2006 so that's about 4 years of fraud, or about $8 million a year on average getting skimmed off. That's a good 15%-20% of their revenues every year. Someone was seriously asleep at the desk while the embezzlement was going on.

My impressions are about the same, except for the sluggish sounding part. I don't really find them sluggish or slow, but that's just me.

Wait a sec here, you're getting a custom built EC amp and you're going to cheap out on the 300B tubes? Seriously, for an amp of that level you shouldn't be settling for anything short of the upper tier stuff. Grab the Emission Labs 300B, costly, but still not Western Electric prices.

I think Esoteric is up to 8N these days.

Grado QC is pretty worrying in the cosmetics area but when it comes to sound they do a pretty good job. At one point I had 5 pairs of vintage RS-1s and as far as I could tell they all sounded the same, I couldn't say the same thing about their looks though except for the damn kink & pinch at the cable Y which was identical on each one. I've actually noted a larger variation in the sound of Senn 650s than I have in any Grado, or for that matter any other headphone except the AKG K340.

Distortion spectrum on the other hand, is a fair bit different. It's actually quite similar to the RS-1 in that respect

Hey guys, guys. Let's take a 12AX7 cause we like, need a tube or something, and use it as a cathode follower for absolutely no reason at all. Then let's get a shitty obsolete op-amp chip and run the signal through them before feeding it to the output stage, which is probably as shitty as the rest of the amp.

I wasn't guilty, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I managed to put a few dents in the protective metal grills of my dad's speakers.

Going by their 10-Q and how much cash they have on hand, if they can't raise funds through either an equity or bond offering, or secure some sort of bridge loan, they're going to go Chapter 11. They literally will not have the cash on hand to pay their employees and meet their operating expenses.

Living Voice Vox Olympian If this sounds like the OBX-R with more better everything, I'm gonna have to start robbing banks.

From a greenhouse in my city

About 10 years ago or so, I came to the realization that even if I had a million bucks I still wouldn't be able to buy all the music I wanted, assuming I had a place to put all the discs. Not to mention that it would take something like 50 years to listen to it all.

Anyone who has a bunch of shelves stacked with records. CDs I'm pretty indifferent, but the guys with a wall of records, I envy you people, and I want your vinyl.

I think so, but I'm not 100% sure to be honest. In the shop's picture it looks like the stators are painted while in one of my own photos it looks more like a painted grill cover or something of that sort.

There is to me two kinds of neutral; true good neutral which is more or less a straight pass-through, which to me is exemplified by the Grado HP-2 in the headphone world and the Living Voice OBX-R in speakers. Then there's the kind of "neutral" which flattens and sucks the life out of all music and gives it all the same bland boring character, the K701 is a big offender here. Unfortunately I'm hearing way too much of the latter and not much of the former in the audio world. Making everything sound flat and same-ish is not neutral, in fact I'd argue it's just as big of a colouration as say, the RS-1 which puts its own character on everything. I'd actually say that the HD800 isn't any more neutral than the HD650 or 600, all of them will put a distinct sound signature on the music.

I've had some mystery meats which I couldn't identify, I'm not sure I ever really want to know what they actually were. It might've been "long pork" for all I know.

Yes the Operas come with leather front & back, and you can get them in piano gloss black. And the Quads are totally black Are you happy now?

Apparently, I can't read my own handwriting anymore. The Paradigm speaker I auditioned was the Signature S6 version 3, which I'd abbreviated as "Sig3 S6" and somehow mis-read as SE3 S6. I think. I'm still not entirely sure of what I wrote, but fortunately I took pictures, and the speaker is definitely the Signature S6.

That's one of the things I disliked about them when I had them on an extended loan. The soundstage is always big, if I go to a recording which was made in a small garage the soundfield should shrink down accordingly. It doesn't. Yeah the soundstage gets a bit smaller, but it doesn't go all the way down to room sized. Get a copy of "Whites Off Earth Now!!" and "The Trinity Session" by the Cowboy Junkies. Same microphone, same recording engineer, same direct to DAT deck recording. But the first was in a garage while the latter was in a decent sized church, two very different acoustic environments and a heck of big difference in the size of the soundfield. On a good setup there's a big change in the soundstage size & characteristics between the two recordings, on the HD800, not so much. There's a change, but not as much as there should be. "Whites" garage and Church of The Holy Trinity