aerius

You're not crazy. You're certifiably insane. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless your name is Patrick.

Dead easy. Take the subway to St. Clair West station and it's less than a 5 minute walk from there. webpage with maps

It adds transparency to the sound.

Because if I did, I'd get confused as to which forum I'm on, and that would be very discombobulating. I think I'm going on Tuesday, you know where the store is.

And always, always use lubrication.

Speaking of DHT's, full Artemis Labs setup, featuring a nice SET 300B amp. Let me know if you wanna hook up there.

Glad it worked out. They can take a while to break in too so it'll only get better from here. Note for the future, because upgrades are inevitable. Tribute makes a nanocrystalline cobalt core autoformer volume control (click on news, inductive volume control). It's ridiculously good.

I, for one, applaud the timely euthanizing of the Senn 600. Sorry, I just had to say that.

A bit over budget, but a great deal. I've heard this 'table at a local dealer and it's really really good.

My Living Voice dealer is about 30 minutes away. I thought I should mention that again. Nope, those are for his K1000 headphones. He uses a variation of the Aurora with a DHT input tube and transformer coupling on the front end. The tubes were 26, 45, 300B, and the transformer between the 26 & 45 is a stepup transformer. His other amps are much cooler though, high voltage transistor amps running at 150V-200V with output transformers. Puts out about 30W, almost as good as his all DHT amps according to him. To me they sounded pretty much the same. Even more cool is his large open baffle speakers, still being fine-tuned. Large Heil tweeter, Lowther wideband driver, and 3 12" Eighteen Sound woofers for the bass & mid-bass. Looks kinda like the old Apogee speakers, but with dynamic drivers & the Heil tweeter. Efficiency is something like 98dB/W/1M, but it can handle several hundred watts of power. The OBX-R's will compress if you push them above 100dB or so while the prototype speakers can hit 115-120dB before running into trouble. Much bigger dynamics, and can play way louder.

Interesting. I think you once mentioned that your PS-1 has some extra damping material inside for some reason, could this have something to do with its more refined sound?

I could, but I don't know how much that'll help considering that his pair is not anywhere close to stock, and it's also been retuned for a more neutral balance with a new x-over box he built. Basically, it sounds like a Quad ESL-57 with more bass, more dynamics, a bigger soundstage, and a much bigger sweet spot. The '57 has sweet spot that's about as wide as your head. Anyways, the Moona Moona Luna. Setup was Capitole to XLO Sig2 cables to Luna (Mullard E88CC & stock outputs) to modded HP-2, RS-1, and K340(mine). His amp is the base model, except he swapped out the input transformers for the amorphous core version from Lundahl. I did most of the listening with the HP-2. The amp looks kinda cheap & plain, but it sounds damn good. It's a better match for the HP-2 than the RS-1, the slightly warm balance helps to keep the HP-2 from sounding to analytical, but with the RS-1 the mid-bass hump gets a little out of hand and it loses some resolution in that area. Other than that there's really nothing I can complain about, it just does everything well, no sibilance, no mushy slow bloaty crap, no overly rich midrange, no roll-offs in the highs or lows, or any of that other crap I've heard too much of in tube amps these days. The first thing I wanted to do was check out how much resolution it had, so I threw on Sarah Slean's "Sweet Ones" to see how deeply I could hear into the multi-tracked vocal parts. It was pretty good, I could tell that each track of the multi-track had some reverb & chorus effects of its own before getting made into the multi-track, but it wasn't able to resolve the echo-chorused multi-tracked multi-track vocals near the end of the song. Still pretty impressive performance as only a very small handful of amps can manage the first part. The smoothness & coherence test was the Transmission album by The Tea Party, specifically, the title track, Psychopomp, and Pulse. Psychopomp is fun since it's a real busy track which goes from a few instruments at the start to lots of stuff playing real loud. The Luna keeps everything nice & separate, the quieter instruments don't get drowned out and lost when all the electric guitars & mad drumming kick in. Cymbals are crisp & clear without getting harsh, drums are good & dynamic, and Jeff Martin's vocals sound right too. Transmission is more of the same except with a different mix of instruments & effects, no problems here either. Inferior amps will round off the cymbals and become discombobulated & lost when things get loud & busy, instruments get lost altogether, the soundstage becomes a mess, and the amp will sound constipated. Played From Hunting Ground To City by the Cowboy Junkies to see if it would mush up a warm recording, and also to see if I could hear all the electric guitar goofs. There's a few places where the guitar goes into a bit of a feedback squeel, I don't know if they meant to do that but it sounds kinda cool and has a nice tube tone since they used tube amps and recorded the whole album with vintage analog gear. It sounds right, the guitar tone is just about right, it does indeed sound like a Fender and Margo's voice is damn sexy. Margo really knows how to work it, she's got that sultry smoky thing nailed down and it comes through perfectly. Skipping a few tracks to "He will call you baby", but this time with the RS-1 and it was more vocal goodness, lots of emotion and it was just haunting, by the end of the song I was like "damn..." That doesn't happen often these days. While I was on the RS-1, I played some G n' R to see if it could rock, I gave it a good dose of "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Paradise City" with the volume cranked up a bit, ok, more than a bit. It rocks, no problem at all, Slash's solo in "Sweet Child" was damn sweet, the tone's right, the dynamics are good, everything ticks. There was a bunch more music I played, but I ended off the session with more Cowboy Junkies, the Trinity Sessions album since I wanted to do the cymbal tone & decay check and since it's cool to hear sounds bounce off the walls of the church, that is, if the system is good enough. It is. Dreaming My Dreams is cool since there's a solo part in the middle where the cymbal gets hit every second or two, each hit sounds different since the cymbal moves and the drumstick never hits the exact same spot, and you can hear the decays & echoes. The Luna does make each hit sound unique, most amps make it sound like a loop of 4-5 hits, in the latter case low-level detail is being lost. Decays are good too, they sound real and trail off a long time as they should, and the wall bounce is there with the drums, vocals, foot taps and cymbals. All in all, one of the best amps I've heard. It doesn't have the resolution, technicolor vivid tones, and realism of a DHT tube amp, but among IDHT amps it's in the upper tier for sure. Pure stealth amp, looks plain, but killer sound. It's neutral and has the naturalness of tube sound, and from what he tells me it just ends up sounding like whichever input tupe you stick in it.

The impressions will come late tonight or sometime tomorrow after I get around to listening to it in a short while. I'm over at Roam's place and we just finished de-fucking one of my tube amps.

You guys broke the internet.

Partial liver donation would be the better way to go as your liver can grow back while kidneys are gone for good.

The old Thiel CS3.6. No idea how the new generation Thiels sound compared to the old ones though.

R10...bass...R10......bass.....either I'm dreaming or I'm stuck in an alternate reality....

The music video for "Sweet Ones" by Sarah Slean. Sarah Slean is cute, I'd like her to sit on my lap and wiggle her butt.

I'm indifferent towards Seinfeld. Sometimes it's good, other times it grates on me.

HeadWize has a forum?

To me at least, Wilsons become more unlistenable the further up you go in their lineup. The Sophia's pretty decent (but not for what it costs) and it's all downhill from there. But others like them and are more than willing to pay the big bucks for them, so whatever.

What do you think "hug and dance" audio is?

If they don't have the Avatar OBX-R2, see if they have the standard Avatar. Same family sound and still definitely worth a listen. Go figure, I can't figure that one out either. Of course the problem is once you move past 2-ways, running wires from the x-over box to the speakers starts to become a major pain in the ass and the cable costs can start running up real fast.

It's made in France, by silly French people, not that there's anything wrong with French people, and chicks with French accents are hot.

Go vinyl. Pro-ject RM10 turntable, a nice cartridge and phonostage will fit in your budget.