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I blew it!

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I did it, oh man, I bought the pre-amp that I have been looking for.   Not specifically this one, but close.   I have wanted this brand of equipment for years and years and now I have found an affordable (reasonably and relatively inexpensive) McIntosh Preamplifier.   I am currently running a Yamaha C-70 Preamp, which is AWESOME and will see duty in my office system.   It has been acting up, so I may take the opportunity to get it over to my good friends’ house and clean it up a bit and replace some of the inner electronics.   So I was on EBay and did a search for McIntosh C and chose newly listed, I see this beauty, and it’s within my price range.   It is not perfect, it seems to have a crack on the glass and a little bit of the paper inner label material seems to be peeling away.   I will see what it will cost to get it re-done once it becomes noticeable, or if I have other work done to it.   I am going to check with my friend and see if he recommends that this unit be sent ou
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Denon DL-110 Phono Cartridge performance evaluation

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                 I am not going to bore you with details of its frequency response, specs or other information.   I am here to tell you how I “feel” the cartridge performed.   I played various types of music on various qualities of LPs over a three-week period.   Break-in                      The first thing I did after mounting and aligning it was to put on a great quality record and put a bunch of hours on it before doing any critical listening.   I broke in the turntable over a week period and was able to put approximately 20 hours on the cartridge before I started listening.   I have a repeat function on my turntable so I enabled it to auto-repeat and let it go while I worked on various projects around the house.   How much force to use                      I started the listening project on the 15 th of the month and ended on the 31 st .   I tried three different VTF (Vertical Tracking force), the amount of force pressing down on the stylus (needle) playing
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McIntosh Preamp derailed?

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Over the past few months I have been considering upgrading my Pre-amp.  I am currently running a Yamaha C-70 Preamp.  This is a very nice and quite capable preamp.  It has dual phono inputs, which to me is essential; it allows me to choose what source to record from so I can listen to other material while I record something from another source.  It is way cool; it also has an equalizer, which I seldom use to shape the sound.  It has lots of gain as well, which I seldom use as I have my amps set to 11.  The preamp needs to be warmed up to perform properly since it sits in a cold basement.  I have been considering changing this unit out for some time and I have been looking at McIntosh C-33 preamp as the model I will most like to acquire.  They are expensive, and could cost me around a thousand dollars.  I will be saving for a long time to get one! Meet the challenger, a $150 - 4 watt per channel, flea-watt tube amp.  I acquired it a year or so ago and I was using it in my office
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OOPS!

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OOPS !   In my last post, I discussed how I was going to build a turntable.  Ummmm, well it turns out that I am a member of an audiophile club and I got wind of a sale of some speakers which I have wanted to try for a while.  I heard these particular speakers, or something similar by PSB at a friends house listening to some recordings.  I was impressed with the detail and the sound.  The speakers that I picked up this week are PSB 6T speakers.  I guess that the turntable will have to wait a bit longer, onto the back burner.   The PSB 6T speakers look huge, which they are not, they are pretty big though.  Those are actually 3 - 6.5" drivers, two woofers, one mid and upper mid, and a tweeter, they stand maybe 40 inches or so high, and only about 10 inches wide, the large part is they are 20" deep!  There is a little superficial cabinet damage, so I acquired them at a sweet price from a very nice fellow.  I believe he told me he was playing them on a 35WPC tube amp.  I
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The turntable itch

I have been recently infected with the itch to change up my turntables.  I have two vintage turntables that I use as daily drivers.  Neither of them are high-end; remember I am the budget audiophile!  I have a belt-driven Technics SL-B3 turntable, this table has an interchangeable head shell system, it was built around 1980. I brought this one back from the junk pile, I traded a 17" monitor for it.  This thing was very dirty, the belt had melted to the platter.  I restored it, cleaned it, lubricated it, got a headshell a new belt and brought it back from near-death.  I also have a direct-drive JVC L-F210.  This table is a direct-drive straight-arm table from around 1982, it also has the interchangeable head shell system.  Each of my turntables have it's strengths and weaknesses.  Both have interchangeabe headshells, albeit both are different styles of headshell.  The JVC sounds brighter than the Technics, which has a nice and rich sound.  I have each one of them for a reaso
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Component break in VS. Ear break in

I have been reading for years that audio components need or at least have a break in period.  Some people have said that tubed equipment especially needs to have time to break in, I can see that.  I can understand speaker break in too, due to the physicality of what it does, a magnet moving a coil which makes the cone move and produces the sound.  Kind of like a new car that needs that 500 miles to break in. I encountered a theory the other day that I had not thought of.  It was suggested that the break in period of an audio component is actually the break in time of your ears as you get used to the sound that your new gear produces; the time between installing your new component and the time it takes your brain to forget what your old, awesome electronic component sounded like and learning to appreciate how the new component sounds. My personal opinion is a mix of both.  A component needs to burn in or break in for a short while, maybe 100 hours of play before it heats and cools e
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Who needs more than one needle?

I do!   Right now I have two turntables; neither are glorious, but both work very well for me.  I am a budget audiophile, not someone with tons of money laying around to buy gear.  I have 12 headshells with cartridges mounted and currently in service.  None of these cartridges that I currently have cost anything close to $100.  I have maybe 10 cartridges that are not mounted that I will swap in and out when I feel like listening to something different, or the need arises.  Why different needles?  Well, each model and brand of needle sounds just a little bit different.  Some are bright, which means they have lots of treble, lots of high-frequency music; some are a little less bright and have more bass response, which is the boom in music.  A few are sweetly in the center and go with the flow, some cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.  Others are special needles for special types of records.  I have a 78 Cartridge, specially made for the wide grooves of a 78 record.  I also have a m
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