The Listener's Page

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

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

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

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