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Speaker Porn


Hopstretch

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Great sounding gear, very unappealing room and layout.  I would stare constantly at the bit of screen covered by the Naim Statement sitting directly on the carpet.

Also, who puts a dropdown screen in a dedicated room?

Edited by Sherwood
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My son has two cats. Where has one of them gone? Has he got out onto the road? Is he lost?

They eventually, after a good deal of panic, found him fast asleep in speaker wadding, having gained access through the reflex port of a very large bass guitar loudspeaker he has.

I suggested he discourage this behaviour by firing up his 1kW bass amp and playing a few notes when the cat was in there. Meeeooow!

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I've got a bunch of photos of high end systems stashed in a folder, and instead I'm gonna post these:

peaocjx.jpg

The mainland house is now my remote outpost.  I still have two NS-1000s stashed there, for a number of reasons (I have 4, I need some speakers in the old house until I demolish it, NS-100s are heavy as all fuck, and I'm not relishing the idea of moving them.)  Sadly, my old 1970s Martanz receiver might finally be on the way out.  One of its two "Protect" LEDs won't go out when I power it on.  It also plays a monophonic signal no matter what I feed it.  I think something inside gave up the ghost.  The Yamaha receiver I helped my father pick out in 1997 so he'd have a sound system to woo his then-girlfriend (it didn't work out) was nearby, so I swapped it in.  I never really liked the sound the Yamaha, it's kind of thin an anemic.  It definitely doesn't have the balls to drive the NS-1000s as they were meant to be.  With that said, it still works.  How many other bits of consumer electronics from over 25 years ago can you point to that work as well now as they did new?

The rest of the signal chain is the HeadAmp Pico DAC I bought off some HCer or other an eternity ago and my M1 MBP.  Barely visible but of great importance is the USB-C to Mini-USB (vs Micro) cable I bought of bozos.com.  I may have mentioned this before, but cables with that particular arrangement of connectors do not grow on trees.  Both the Pico DAC and my HeadRoom Balanced Desktop use Mini-USC, so I make it a point to have a few of those cables on hand always. 

The sound of the above was ...fine.  It's not like I had time for critical listening.  I watched a couple old movies with my (sainted, octogenarian) mother while we were there.  The TV is my friend Dave's 2006 DLP model he dumped on my lap when he skipped town.  It will not being following me to the Vineyard, but it still works for now.

Speaking NS-1000s...

ENfcCL8.jpg

The other set are on the Vineyard.  I spent the last two days clearing crap out of the living room, including: 9 boxes of records, four Unisound tower speakers I bought back in 2010 from some wacky site called ThingFling.com (a few HCers might remember them), and innumerable other things including an Herman Miller office chair that I am convinced wants to kill me.  My back is not happy with me.  I cleaned off the NS-1000s (which are 30 or so years old at this point, the Technics 1200 (ditto) and Outlaw RR2150 (much newer).

If one knows anything about NS-1000s, it's that (A) the midrange driver is at least as famous as the speakers themselves, and (B) they have awful spring loaded speaker terminals.  Earlier this year I bought a set of terminals specifically for this job:

qWtgzjT.jpgbe s

Today I dug out some speaker wire from a box in the attic and had it.  The first record I put on was a 7" 45 of Yam Yam's Bahama Mama, which is a weird little downtempo ditty that defies description.  You'll just have to hear it for yourself.  NB: The version of the 7" is a bit different than YouTube rip, but that's life in the world of obscure promo downtempo vinyl.  Next I rummaged up "I Spy" by Death in Vegas, which lifts a beat from a Notorious B.I.G. track.  Lastly I found one of the four vinyl copies I own of Oliver Lieb's 1994 one-off album The Ambush.  Talk about a timeless classic.  I actually played all four sides of it and really listened to the system.

Some Captain Obvious observations: The R2150 blows the poor Yamaha out of the water.  The spot I chose for the 1200 is lousy, and resonance prone.  Twelves are big beefy MFing turntables and resistant to vibration, but I could hear some unwanted resonance in the midbass range.  The NS-1000s midrange is really something spectacular.  The RR2150's phono preamp is very good, but it's hardly audiophile grade.  With that said, listening some 90s (and one case, 70s) mastered vinyl through was just compelling.  Vinyl is engaging in a way that nothing digital will ever be.  I'm sure that 90% of is looking at the turntable spin and handling the actual records.  It might be a very psychosomatic effect, but it's still a real one.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention the record in the photo.  That's a 70s pressing of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.  I played it in the wrong order (part II first) but it still sounded amazing.  It's funny how the part everyone knows (the Exorcist bit) is a tiny segment in the beginning.

Next week I'm replacing the 1200 with a television set.  More on that later.

Edited by Knuckledragger
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The first time I heard Tubular bells was from an old VHS tape I bought in San Francisco as a kid, about the US space program called, The Space Movie. 

Many... many 😞... years later, Duggeh posted something about Tubular Bells prompting me to listen to the album for the first time. It's basically the soundtrack of the movie (documentary) and couldn't fit it more perfectly.

 

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13 minutes ago, swt61 said:

vivid-moyam1.cover2_-678x509.jpg

I've been a Vivid Audio fan for some time. Now they've upped the game for sure. 

I don’t know, those look a bit alien like. And I’m sure they would sound great in that room 🙄

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9 hours ago, Knuckledragger said:

YMKbekI.jpeg

I hope that floor is reinforced.

Wen we bought our house, new, maybe 30 years ago, I went into the front room and jumped up and down. "It's a concrete floor! We've got to buy this!"

Mind you my speakers are a fraction of the weight of Wilsons. But I get no floorboard boing.

Note this guy has ornaments on the shelf behind one of the speakers. I eradicated those in our room, after clapping my hands to listen for anything untoward, there was a chorus of pings from glass ornaments and plates.

And he has a guitar behind the other, which will resonate nicely. Yuk.

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