A Cool Opportunity to Help


Without going into too much details about the situation, my dad recently purchased a Denon AVR 3300 for a longtime friend for about $110. He also gave him a pair of small Advent speakers.  His friend has been dealing with some significant issues that have left he and his wife in a very difficult situation on all fronts.  He's an artist and music is one of his passions.  He had a Carver preamp and power amp and after the preamp stopped working he was without a way to listen to music.

I took the opportunity to reach out to him and learn a little bit about his setup.  He has a couple of Monster Cable interconnects (they look to be in poor condition with the outside of the connector very tarnished) and appreciates the improvement they provide over the cheap ones that come in the box.  He's using a "goodwill" DVD player for CDs and also has a turntable and tape deck.

My parents were in town for the holidays so I sent two BJC LC-1 interconnects and one AQ Chicago interconnect to hopefully set him up a bit better.  I am also going to mail him my old SACD player that I've pulled out of my system because it's inferior to my other sources.  Thankfully, I still have the original box so it should be fairly easy to get it shipped.

It feels good to help the guy out and I genuinely think that he'll appreciate any enjoy any sonic improvements that he may get.

I hate selling gear and also don't need to store a bunch of extras, so I was excited to have an opportunity to pay it forward so to speak.

mceljo

@jond - I’ve had my really last name slaughtered many times, but mcjello is a classic!  Made me laugh. 

Nice story.    I always try to do the same.   I try to be a good ambassador of any hobby I'm into.   I was talking to my office manager and found out she had a turntable but her receiver died.   

I gave her a vintage Technics receiver with a phono input and a pair of Klipsch KG 1.5.   It felt good knowing they are now getting used every day and she's enjoying her record collection. 

Not many substitutes for an inspiring story. Nice. Good karma for you coming up.

My dad got the cables delivered, but it appears that the address on the CD player was one digit off, so it didn’t get delivered on Friday.  It was a real address, so not sure what caused UPS to not just drop and run.  We have corrected it in the system, so have to wait to see how long it takes now. 

Update:  Here’s excerpts from an email that I received tonight:
 
I know it seems like forever since the wonderful package arrived, but it is installed and playing right now.  To tell you how much superior it is to our $32 special DVD player we were using, my wife came down from our bedroom and said, “Is that the new  player?  It sounds so much better!”  She could not believe the difference, for she had been somewhat skeptical at the beginning.   I have one Blue Jeans cable connecting the CD player to the receiver input but have not yet installed the Chicago cables between the receiver and the amplifier.  I will do that soon.  Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate having such sound in my own home.  And it is so much more fun to use the CD player than the DVD player, since the latter cannot even show me what track is playing, etc.  I am listening to better music than any time in my life except when we were sitting in Row 4 at the symphony and I was sketching the orchestra or solo performers while they were playing.  And that was years ago when we had a more normal life.  So this is the greatest in decades and the best recorded music ever.