The Listener's Page

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...

In past years I have heard about Record Store Day the day or week after.  This year I decided that I would not miss out on record store day again!  So I got up at the crack of dawn, well, um OK 8am, then I headed right out, after several cups of coffee and having some breakfast about an hour later, LOL!  I got my daughter all packed up and headed out to Dearborn Music, in Dearborn, MI to see what they had to offer for RSD. My daughter also brought some money in hopes of scoring some cool music herself.  We easily found a parking place and I was glad to see that the lot was pretty packed but parking was available.  As we entered we saw the checkout line, it stretched across the store!  They had enough people at the registers that we noticed that there was swift movement at checkout.  So we started walking around, dodging people left and right and looking for someone who worked there as I knew exactly what I was hoping to score.  I found someone wi...

I was just sitting here listening to my media library through my stereo.  I was thinking that the major benefit would appear to most people to be the sound overall.  I believe the benefit is portability along with the absence of skips and pops when listening.  I love analog, don't get me wrong, but if I am going to crank the system way up and listen loudly, I usually will either do CD or media from a computer source.  Has anyone out there experienced these fun and exciting things that can happen during loud record playback?  The record skips from how loud you are playing and/or the vibration from the speakers made the turntable feed the vibration back through the system causing a rumbling noise when playing.  This makes very unpleasant noises come from your speakers.... The extremely loud pop or click from that speck or dust, or the occasional static discharge, or the repeated very loud clicks of a small scratch on your record while listening very loud ...

Hey everyone!  My name is Jeff and welcome to my Blog and my first Blog Post. I enjoy listening to analog recordings. I like the LP format,  I also enjoy reel to reel or open reel tapes.  However,  I also listen to digital formats too!  I am not here to debate the pros and cons of digital versus analog.  I just simply prefer analog for the experience.  The analog experience is a bit more involved than the digital one.  For one thing, when was the last time you cleaned a CD?  Looked for scratches?  Cleaned the CD Player lens?  Seems strange to be asking those questions? Well, when playing an analog format there is a ritualistic series of events that are taken to get the very best sound possible from that analog source.  Let's take a LP record.  First, it is housed in a sleeve within the outer sleeve.  The record must be removed very carefully to prevent adding scratches o...