The Most’est of the Post’est

Thursday, April 17th 2025… You’d be wrong…

You know, you’d think that after I grabbed my Pioneer HPM 100 Speakers, I’d be listening to them nonstop. You’d be wrong. I ordered some speaker stands that would support those behemoths. They are just sitting there looking at me with their unloaded speaker stands. I think that what I am going to do is put my Carver CT-3 preamp together with one of my Carver TFM-25 amps and pair those with my M-50’s and the Pioneer Elite 400 DVD changer. This will allow me to test several things – first, does my TFM 25 really have a bad channel or is it the receiver? What is the best way to hook up the M-51 to the preamp? What is the best way to utilize my equalizer and my tape deck?

-Rat

Monday, April 14th 2025…

AXPONA was an experience to behold. As far as the conference was concerned, there was a lot going on -a large hall that housed local guys doing sales of vintage audio and consignment, vintage repair services, ultrasonic vinyl cleaning machines, cable sales, record sales, and various vendors. There was a hall that was purely headphones and headphone/turntable preamps and also a hall devoted to car audio. In addition, there were lots of listening/reviewing rooms on the first 4 floors with dealers, components, and their accompanying speakers, and in addition there was 12 floors of listening rooms for audio.

There were 2 pair of speakers really stood out above all the rest. One was the Avantgarde Mezzo speakers, and the others were the MBL Speakers. These 2 needed nothing in my estimation. I sat in the “sweet” spot area of almost all the speakers when I was listening. Some had interesting experiences with imaging, separation, range and clarity. Some speakers were better than others. Some sonic ranges were better than others – some, you’d definitely need an equalizer. Some you’d need to augment with a sub.

Everything else were varying degrees of ho-hum. That said… there were 2 other standouts from the pack – a pair of bookshelf speakers that sounded better than most floor speakers – Elac (the company name) that made a pair of bookshelf speakers that I understood to be less than 1k$ and they had a better range than most of what I heard – both bookshelf ad floor standing. I will have to find out what the others were, but they were floor standers and while they didn’t impress me by sight, suffice it to say that their sound really impressed me. Thankfully, I actually know the sales guy (well, my buddy Joe does).

-Rat

Friday, April 11th 2025… add another one…

Today AXPONA starts and I will be attending tomorrow with my buddy Joe. We have been friends since sophomore year in high school. Which is saying “an effing’ long time”. I am looking forward to seeing/hearing some of the more highly exotic and esoteric speakers this weekend. Maybe I’ll see my other friend “Joe the dentist” there. He apparently purchased some crazy expensive speakers, but I haven’t been over to his abode to check them out yet. I am sure I will see a lot of “snake oil” salesman at this show. It really doesn’t matter what you spend on audio, you like what you like. I remember in college, we had 2 guys (Tom and I) whose rooms backed up to each other and another guy on the floor who spent some big dollar amounts on audio equipment. The guy whose audio cost a lot (I can’t remember his name) never sounded well – his amp was so big that he kept damaging his speakers and they would rattle and hum (sounded like shit). And we used to have stereo wars. Tom and I both had good setups with better than average speakers. However, Tom’s speakers were highly efficient, and he could mop up the floor with me. Needless to say, I never won stereo wars – my speakers while having a better range and separation (imaging) were not even close to the efficiency of his speakers. I would have had to have a 1000-watt (RMS) amp to even begin to compete and probably would have blown out my speakers. He had rock and roll speakers, and I had classical music speakers. His were about beating you over the head and mine were about inserting the knife. His had horn tweeters and mine had a beryllium ribbon tweeter. His had no midrange – the horn did double duty, mine had a boron coated midrange, we both had woofers – his was a paper cone with a passive radiator on the back, mine was a polymer woofer. The difference was really efficiency – his was 90dB efficient and mine was 86dB efficient. Which as a physics major and understanding electronics, I should have figured it out. For every 10 dB in volume rise, I would have to double the power. Meaning if we start at 1 watt – mine would produce sonics that would measure 86dB. In order for me to get to the next dB, I would have to turn it up to 10watts. 87dB? – 20 watts would net me 88dB?

-Rat

Monday, March 31st 2025… March is going out like a lion…

It’s a high of 48 degrees today (last day of March) with yesterday’s high of 75 degrees. Saturday afternoon, we went and saw a Fleetwood Mac tribute band at the Lyric in Blue Island. It was also a nice venue for the mobility challenged.

One thing this weekend (on a different note), that I didn’t expect was for it to be such a pain in the ass to do my taxes with software that I wanted downloaded – everything now is so cloud centric that I had to hunt for a download solution from H&R Block. I have zero confidence in cloud-based software that also protects my personal financials. I wonder how others feel about this. And no, I’m not allowing comments. It was a rhetorical question.

One other thing that I didn’t anticipate (on a separate, and different note) was that when I bought and hooked up the digital ASU/XLR cables that connect the NAD M51 to the NAD M50, my audio sounds way worse. The musical resolution is crappy, full of static, and heavy on one channel. Hopefully, my receiver isn’t dying on me because the first symptom would have been the one channel on the preamp dying. Which may mean (now that i think about it) that the amp is actually good, and the receiver is garbage.

-Rat

Tuesday, March 11th 2025…Updating the update…

So, as it turns out – both my front and rear brakes needed to be done to the tune of $$$ – ouch! Also, as it turns out the fronts had 2mm left which is next to nothing since they start at approximately 15mm. Better to have them replaced before you need to turn the rotors. Turning the rotors is the process of machining them down (refacing to prevent uneven wear) so that there are no grooves or bumps (needed to be smooth). You can typically only have them turned once or maybe twice if not too bad, and then they need to be replaced. The backs were kind of bad but they are drum brakes, so they are a bit more forgiving. They also needed to be replaced (pads) but it was before I did damage to them (whew!). Better to be safe than sorry.

Still listening to the adventures of Skippy and Joe on Audible and still reading book one of the Legends of Dune series. On Saturday, we got different battery powered sconces (from Costco), so I returned the Amazon purchases (the ones with the morphydite bulbs).

Anne’s family came over on Sunday and Mo and I went for a walk to Catalina grove over by the bike path and back (approx. 3.5mi). I think this weekend I might take the covers off the patio furniture and put the pallets away – and bust out the fire table. I still need to pack up the amp and tweeters send them out for repair. I added my Jetpack subscription to my main website, and it seems to be coming along (and yeah, this was kind of a brain dump).

-Rat

Friday, March 7th 2025…what’s up?…

What the hell am I doing these days?

I’m sitting at the dealer getting my breaks fixed. Hopefully it won’t be too financially painful 🙂

On the audible front, I’m listening to a Craig Alanson book called “Task Force Hammer”- read by R.C. Bray. It’s book 17 in the Expeditionary Force” series. It’s a fun read/listen (entertaining) about a wacky AI and a semi-dysfunctional human set out to save the galaxy. Its sci-fi/action/comedy series that’s wash-rinse-repeat. But every time the author ended or thought he ended the series – his fans wouldn’t let him rest unless he wrote another book (at least that’s what I think). Also, I would get sad knowing the series was ended. But now he just keeps on going :).

On the book front, I am reading “The Butlerian Jihad” which is “Book One of the Legends of Dune”. I am on the second read of this book. The first time I read it was sometime back in approximately 2008. The Dune series are really cool and forward thinking. I have no idea where he came up with this stuff. Herbert and Anderson were/are really great writers.

On the home front, we ordered battery powered sconces for the front room, which is different. No wiring, what a concept. I’ll install them this weekend. The only problem that I can see is that the bulb is an LED and a one-of-a-kind type (thanks China) and cannot be replaced on Amazon.

I am limping along in Duo Lingo in Russian. I want to go back and start brushing up in Swedish. I really haven’t done anything in Music which is a bummer.

Most of my spare time has been spent in burning CD’s and when it’s not that, I’m fixing one of my audio things (lately I’m listening to Tate McRae), or treadmilling it, or going the gym, or cleaning, or doing laundry, or fixing a meal or life in general.

-Rat

Monday, March 3rd 2025…ugh…

So, I’m happily burning CDs on Friday, and I go downstairs to find a box and start packing up my tweeters to send for refurbishment, and I put on some music… I hear that one of my channels is out on the amp (TFM-25). Well, I see it occasionally trying, so I turn off that amp, and listen to one of the others. Figuring that I will look into it tomorrow (Saturday). Oh, and buy the way, I can’t get the powered Klipsch sub to work with the Klipsch speakers upstairs on the Pioneer SC-07 receiver. I don’t think it’s anything except that I can’t use a preamp sub RCA out connection with the speakers functioning off the regular amp. I guess it’s just me not understanding the limits of the receiver. I may have to ditch the Pioneer for an old-school 60W Yamaha receiver with way less options. I don’t really need all the “bells and whistles” with all that power anyway. However, now I have to send the TFM-25 in for service early. I was going to do it anyway, but now I have to do it sooner rather than later. I think I’m going to get the “Cadillac” refresh on this first one so I can see what all the mods are up to. It’s the one amp that I use the most – it powers the Ohms downstairs.

-Rat