The Listener's Page

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 ...

                 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      ...

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...

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 an...