Sorry about the photos, Photobucket sucks. Those 300B's are in an AudioNote Kit One. The input tube is a TungSol 6sn7 roundplates, which feeds a pair of TungSol 5687's that feed the 300B's. The rectifier is a TungSol 5u4g. The DAC is an AudioNote DAC 1.1x Signature which uses a pair of 6DJ8's for the output stage. I run Amperex gold pin 7308's in it, but also have gold pin Siemens 6922's and 7308's to roll. After my transport died I switched to a cheapie Cambridge player to use as a transport because I will eventually burn all my discs onto SD cards and run it from a tablet. The speakers are AudioNote AN-E's from a kit. I built the cabinets and veneered them in lacewood. Speaker cable is AudioNote copper, interconnects are AudioNote silver and power cables are custom made silver. I dread the day when my WE300B's die. A friend lent me some JJ's or some other well known alternative and they sounded like dogshit compared to the Western Electrics.
Toob Addiction (An Audio Odyssey For Music Fanatics)
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Orley and all - yes, way too many audiophiles are more into the gear itself than the music. Constantly changing gear. If the gear is good, why the change? When I was young, like you, stereo equipment was everywhere. It seems like today, it is disappearing, younger kids seldom have a stereo or have ever even had one! If they do now, it is part of a home theater with 5.1 Dolby. I try to promote it as much as I can. Music is a very important part of my life, I will share some of it here but will be the first to also tell you that much of the high-end is very overpriced and a lie. If you venture into good consumer audio gear as some of you have, do so with caution.
The question to ask is whether it sounds like good stereo or, DOES IT SOUND LIVE? What I showed is about a third of my complete stereo, but while some of it is stock, much of it has been highly modified and more pro sound than consumer. Much of the high end goes on about expensive wires and connections and all kinds of doodads to tweak your system. All at great cost. Good sound comes from solid fundamental circuit design. Orley asked, do I have a stand alone house? Yes, but I need more of a stand-alone neighborhood! I've had a few problems. Building this myself, I have about eight grand invested but were you to go out and want to buy my level of sound in a store (these days, you'd have to go to Chicago or New York), you might be into it for about $200,000. Of course, it would look a lot prettier and fancier and newer than what I have. A lot of money in high end gear goes into the looks.
The high end can be a bottomless pit rip off. I had the advantage of growing up with an audio engineer as a best friend. You can spend a fortune and not get good sound. You can buy an old, beat up Dynaco Stereo 70 from the sixties and with a few other things have great sound for a few hundred dollars. But the truth is that no digital format I've heard yet equals the realism of a vinyl LP IF REPRODUCED RIGHT. Getting good playback of a record is a very difficult and complex problem.
But most people don't want to be electrical engineers with a test bench just to hear music. Digital offers the best solution as you insert the disc, it is all optical, it almost never breaks down and gives very good sound. Tubes for all their advantages are difficult, expensive and unreliable. But if you are willing to invest the time and effort, it is like having a night club in your house and at your whim can have your band of choice over for a personal visit and performance! Almost as crazy as collecting hundreds of pipes! :mrgreen:
troutface - when you start talking Audio Note, TungSol and Amperex, you are talking about some of the best to be had. That is great stuff. Watch yourself burning those SD cards that there is no loss of quality. Cherish those 300B's, one of the great challenges of today is finding replacements that sound as good as the old stuff. I'm not sure anyone today builds them like Western Electric did (which was Bell Labs).
But I'm glad to hear that audio is still at least alive and well with some of us in an age where it seems that everything I value in life seems to be either disappearing, increasingly illegal and/or nearly forgotten! :
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The question to ask is whether it sounds like good stereo or, DOES IT SOUND LIVE? What I showed is about a third of my complete stereo, but while some of it is stock, much of it has been highly modified and more pro sound than consumer. Much of the high end goes on about expensive wires and connections and all kinds of doodads to tweak your system. All at great cost. Good sound comes from solid fundamental circuit design. Orley asked, do I have a stand alone house? Yes, but I need more of a stand-alone neighborhood! I've had a few problems. Building this myself, I have about eight grand invested but were you to go out and want to buy my level of sound in a store (these days, you'd have to go to Chicago or New York), you might be into it for about $200,000. Of course, it would look a lot prettier and fancier and newer than what I have. A lot of money in high end gear goes into the looks.
The high end can be a bottomless pit rip off. I had the advantage of growing up with an audio engineer as a best friend. You can spend a fortune and not get good sound. You can buy an old, beat up Dynaco Stereo 70 from the sixties and with a few other things have great sound for a few hundred dollars. But the truth is that no digital format I've heard yet equals the realism of a vinyl LP IF REPRODUCED RIGHT. Getting good playback of a record is a very difficult and complex problem.
But most people don't want to be electrical engineers with a test bench just to hear music. Digital offers the best solution as you insert the disc, it is all optical, it almost never breaks down and gives very good sound. Tubes for all their advantages are difficult, expensive and unreliable. But if you are willing to invest the time and effort, it is like having a night club in your house and at your whim can have your band of choice over for a personal visit and performance! Almost as crazy as collecting hundreds of pipes! :mrgreen:
troutface - when you start talking Audio Note, TungSol and Amperex, you are talking about some of the best to be had. That is great stuff. Watch yourself burning those SD cards that there is no loss of quality. Cherish those 300B's, one of the great challenges of today is finding replacements that sound as good as the old stuff. I'm not sure anyone today builds them like Western Electric did (which was Bell Labs).
But I'm glad to hear that audio is still at least alive and well with some of us in an age where it seems that everything I value in life seems to be either disappearing, increasingly illegal and/or nearly forgotten! :
:Cool thread! My stuff is still boxed after our last move. I think I have profile photos on Audiogon though. Not that this stuff is all the exciting to look at.
Trout, nice job on those cabinets. The lacewood looks great.
Toob-that looks like the rack of a mad scientist. What is the Tascam for?
Trout, nice job on those cabinets. The lacewood looks great.
Toob-that looks like the rack of a mad scientist. What is the Tascam for?
Tascam, Tascam . . . I had to think---- oh yeah! You have good eyes. You mean the little recorder thing mounted off to the side. At the time I took the second picture, I had been experimenting with using it to A/D record some of my albums to 24-bit PCM, the highest resolution it will go, taken off of a line feed straight off the back of my preamp, then use it as a playback device. LP records have that one evil, every 20 minutes you have to get up and flip them over.
With the Tascam I can just look up a digital file (I would upload them first from my computer a playlist for the night), hit play, then not have to move either until my pipe went out or I needed to refill my drink.
It actually worked very well and most people would be pretty happy with it. Some albums came through sounding very live, very dynamic, pretty impressive, but in all cases, there was a loss, either a little or even a lot. My ear is very tuned to hear artifacts, even crossover-notch distortion, TIM, clipping and other audio failings.
Its a pretty good unit especially for the price, but I'd need an even better ADC / DAC and maybe 26-28 bit resolution before I think I would not hear any loss. But I still have all of the files I created saved and maybe one of these days I will give it another swing. I'm trying real hard to make peace with digital.
With the Tascam I can just look up a digital file (I would upload them first from my computer a playlist for the night), hit play, then not have to move either until my pipe went out or I needed to refill my drink.
It actually worked very well and most people would be pretty happy with it. Some albums came through sounding very live, very dynamic, pretty impressive, but in all cases, there was a loss, either a little or even a lot. My ear is very tuned to hear artifacts, even crossover-notch distortion, TIM, clipping and other audio failings.
Its a pretty good unit especially for the price, but I'd need an even better ADC / DAC and maybe 26-28 bit resolution before I think I would not hear any loss. But I still have all of the files I created saved and maybe one of these days I will give it another swing. I'm trying real hard to make peace with digital.
That's pretty common. I started with Adcom stuff a long time ago. On a trip to Austria to visit my brother we went to visit his friend, who is an AudioNote dealer. My jaw about dropped when he hit the play button. I actually started laughing because the difference was so absurd. On my return I ordered a Soro PSE, which is a parallel single ended integrated that uses a pair of 6L6's per channel to give you about 18 watts. The sound was muscular but missed some finesse. I then switched to the 300B based Kit One and haven't looked back. I do listen to a fair amount of acoustic music and voice, so the 300B's really shine. They are surprisingly good at rock, but most rock recordings are terrible, so who cares. Because of a life spent in woodworking and hunting, my hearing is beginning to suffer, so I have no urge to spend more on equipment.
Truer words were never spoken. A noob just assumes more dollars=better sound. It can, but just like wine or pipes (or many other things in life), the correlation is a loose one.
I have a friend who is an audiophile. He also happens to be blind and is an electrical engineer. He is my "technical advisor" when it comes to digital. He assures me that I can burn everything in true lossless quality now. He will set it up when I finally get around to it.
The High-End is a dangerous place for consumers. Lots of people get pulled in by looks. A great deal of effort and money used to be put into things which made no difference in the sound. When Levinson first came around they were among the most highly touted! But the emphasis was on a totally noiseless, quiet background--- I cannot ever remember going to a live event and being able to hear a pin drop.
If I sit in my room with no music playing, I will hear all kinds of sounds in the background: a little hum, hiss, maybe the occasional pop or even whistle! Some of this is self-generated and some comes in on the line. Best time to listen to music is late at night when all the businesses are closed and the power line is much cleaner.
But consumer equipment is held to a totally different standard than pro-sound gear. In professional circles, the stuff has to work and be durable and reliable. There is no room for frills or cosmetics--- you are competing to deliver the best sound and feature set you can for the least amount of money otherwise the client goes somewhere else. I was lucky enough growing up to have an audio guru friend who worked in pro sound and eventually in the 1980's for a time, I worked with him in pro sound. Out the door goes all the gimmicks and hype.
A lot of the consumer High-end is fraught with pixy dust and magic. All kinds of theories and claims that are either not understood by the maker himself or simply not backed up at all by physical science. Exotic cables, little blocks you sit on the amp, even green markers to coat the edge of your CD.
It isn't until you get to the real high end (and AudioNote is way up there) that you really get to real hard solid engineering free of "little black boxes". I remember in the 70's, Audio Research came out with one called the Analog Module. Some solid state package that was supposed to play like a tube. Utterly failed.
One thing my guru buddy taught me was the idea of designed obsolescence--- no consumer product is ever engineered to be as good as it can be. They leave room for improvement so that next year they can bring out the "new and improved" version. Consumerism is based on the idea that you keep trading in last year's model to buy the newest one, just a little better, and on it goes.
It isn't until you get to the Highest-End or pro sound gear that you escape that endless loop. In pro sound it is simply a matter of no BS because the people using it know how things should sound and how things work. You have a very simple circuit topography. Straight-forward designs requiring minimal feedback. If I were to show you a block diagram of my system, it flies in the face of everything the High End tells me I should do or avoid! In the Highest-End it is a matter of building it to a high enough standard that you can charge enough for the gear that you can afford to make it good enough that the owner keeps it for a very long time and isn't trading it in every year! In effect, you are paying at once for many year's revisions.
The whole point of audio is lost on the younger generation now because all they have heard is their iPad or laptop. They have never even heard an old 1970's Radio Shack stereo which was infinitely better! THE MEASURE OF SOUND QUALITY IS THIS: when you turn on the system and play your music, does it grab you by the balls and absolutely nail you back into the chair thrilling you? Draw you into the sound where you are quickly lost in an amazing world of visual images and dimension where you utterly forget that it is you sitting there in a room listening to it?
You BECOME the music, hanging on for dear life riding it like a bucking brono and there is no thought of the time of day or what you need to do later on or tomorrow. No thought of: HERE I AM LISTENING TO THIS. there is no you, just the music, and you are swept up by it as a physical, dancing, swirling, playful force all around and through you that whisks you away to another world of timelessness and imagination. And when the music is finally over, you come out of it and say: WOW. INCREDIBLE. What the hell was THAT?!
And you cannot wait to play another album and get right back into it. And another. You find yourself giggling, giddy with joy. It leaves you with goosebumps.
If your music system does not absolutely sweep you away on a timeless journey of emotion, imagery and wonderment, then you still have not found the right gear and you are not hearing (nor have ever heard) music yet. ALL YOU HAVE HEARD IS HI-FI. For the ultimate goal of any music system is to suspend disbelief and make you feel that you are right there in the live event back with the musician as he plays just for you, standing right before you.
If you have heard that live, then you know what I mean. The goal of audio is to bring that into the home. If the gear does not do it, then it is wrong. If the salesman tells you that cannot be done, then he does not know what he is talking about.
Some of it. Very little is entirely stock. Turntable modified, CD player small mods. Preamp entirely custom made from an AR SP3-A preamp chassis reusing just the power transformer and a couple of the boards.
Crossovers are standard issue pro sound rack units, there is another panel with switches used in the power-up / power-down totally made from scratch. The QSC amps for the mid-bass are heavily modified inside and I spent a lot of time on the phone with the company over that, plus not seen are two plug-in boxes that plug into the sides of those amps which modify their operation. They can be pulled out to return the amps to stock.
There is a stereo tube amp which is almost stock, two other mono-chassis tube amps which are totally redesigned, the midrange-tweeter cabinets are still stock but will eventually be totally gutted and redesigned, the midbass cabinets have different drivers in them and all-new redesigned input circuitry. Finally, the sub is self powered and needs no modification.
Maybe one of these days I'll post pictures of the other stuff.
Crossovers are standard issue pro sound rack units, there is another panel with switches used in the power-up / power-down totally made from scratch. The QSC amps for the mid-bass are heavily modified inside and I spent a lot of time on the phone with the company over that, plus not seen are two plug-in boxes that plug into the sides of those amps which modify their operation. They can be pulled out to return the amps to stock.
There is a stereo tube amp which is almost stock, two other mono-chassis tube amps which are totally redesigned, the midrange-tweeter cabinets are still stock but will eventually be totally gutted and redesigned, the midbass cabinets have different drivers in them and all-new redesigned input circuitry. Finally, the sub is self powered and needs no modification.
Maybe one of these days I'll post pictures of the other stuff.
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