My Quest For More And Better Music

Oh yeah. Music servers are a dream come true and yes I keep all my software too.

I don't care about the debate about which format sounds better. Been there done that. All of the formats have reached a point where when done right, they all sound really good. I'm no longer splitting hairs about trying to get a miniscule amount of improvement from a certain format. I'm in paradise now, listening to all of the great music that I've ever dreamed of hearing....on demand.

I love that idea.
Most of my cds are now ripped to a server (mac mini) but I go back and forth as to which I listen to. Just lovin the music after all these years searching for gear. Won't call it a waste as gear swapping has its own rewards but listening is more satisfying.

Dude, I would have loved to read your post, but your lack of paragraph breaks makes that virtually impossible. Here is how you should have written it:

My first system was a Sansui reciever and a Technics manual turntable. That was an excellent system....for a while, until it got annoying to keep flipping over the LP every 15 minutes. Or even worse, searching through the lousy songs on the lp to find the one track on the whole album worth listening to.

Then good sounding stereo cassette players came out. I bought myself a SuperScope cd player and immediately started to make tapes of my lp's so that I could have custom recordings of only the songs that I liked. Then I noticed the hiss on the tape, that wasn't a good thing. I pushed the Dolby noise reduction button and all of my good treble disappeared. It seemed like someone threw a heavy blanket over my speakers.

So, back to the turntable and the laborious ritual of playing records...but, the music sounded good again without that dadgum tape hiss or sparkle-killing Dolby noise reduction on the cassette player.

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Time out here! You *do* realize that Dolby is an encode/decode process, right? If you simply pushed in the Dolby button on a non-Dolby tape, you most certainly would kill all the high frequency content. However, if the tape had been Dolby-encoded, you should find that the hiss was greatly reduced with little or no effect upon the high-freq. information.

Dolby B/C/S/Hx-Pro was a God-send for cassette decks. The best decks: B&O, Tandberg, H/K, Nakamichi, and Aiwa all used Dolby signal processing. And the best of these decks were damn near as good as an open reel running at 7.5 IPS...
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I sold the cassette player. I was lamenting my disappointment with cassettes to the salesman at Cal Stereo, he told me that if I wanted to use tape that I needed to get a reel-to-reel. I bought a Dokorder 10 inch machine and I was in heaven. I made tapes of my lp's and the tapes sounded better than lp! I could make a two hour long tape with no interruptions!

This worked fine for a while until I found it impossible to find a particular song on a two hour tape. I spent more time fast forwarding the machine than I did listening to it. So, back to the turntable again.

Fast forward ten years and cd players came out. That was cool. To be able to select which track you wanted to play was a good thing...but, you could still only play one disc at a time, so I didn't buy one. I was looking for a device that could play two or three hours of music without having to change discs...and select any song that I wanted at any time. Fast forward a couple of years and the carousel cd player came out. Omigosh!! You could load five cd's and program any 40 songs of your choosing in any sequence that you wanted!! I thought I had died and gone to heaven, even the Jetsons never had it so good.

I mothballed the lp's and turntable and was in hog heaven. I was happy for several years until a guy a bought a used pair of speakers from introduced me to Audiogon eleven years ago. After joining Audiogon, I learned that carousel cd player was an audiophile no-no, a single disc player was the only way to go if you expected anyone to take you seriously. Also I discovered that if you really were serious about audio you owned a turntable and spun vinyl.

So, I dumped my carousel cd player, bought myself an Oracle Delphi turntable rebuilt by Brooks Berdan himself and trotted out my lp's again. Yes, the music sounded fantastic...for a while until I got tired of cleaning records and going through record playing ritual all over again.

I bought myself an Audio Research cd player, whoa! Man did it sound good! I upgraded everything, amps, preamps, speakers, cables....EVERYTHING! I even upgraded to the Audio Research reference cd7, its flagship player at the time. Man, everything sounded fantastic again! The single disc thing was still a pain in the butt, but hey that's the price you pay for good sound.

The local jazz station in LA was my only source of discovering new and old jazz recordings, so I bought myself a Sansui TU-X1 badass tuner. I had a serious antenna installed on my roof and the reception was incredible. Great jazz 24 hrs a day, I'm in audio heaven again. As good as the tuner and the music was, of course you could not choose what song you wanted to hear and you were subject to the tastes of the dj.

Fast forward a few more years. One day while browsing the Audiogon digital forum, some guy mentions a contraption called a SqueezeBox. This SqueezeBox thing kept popping up in the forum with all of these great reviews a and accolades. So I bought one. CHA-CHINGGGG!! Oh my goodness, you could stream music from the web, you could copy your own cd's to a server and catalog ALL of your cd's and create custom playlists, random playlists and just about anything else you could think of! Plus, you could throw money at it and have it modded just like any other piece of audio equipment. Now you had a piece of equipment that could literally play infinitely with every cd you ever owned...and sound good to boot.

See what I mean???

-RW-

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Rlwainwright, I was being lazy. You called me on it, and rightly so. I apologize to you and the other members of the 'Gon. I'd seen other members do it without being called out, and figured that it was okay. No more, I will do the right thing going forward.

Now about that cassette player. The SuperScope player that I bought was an entry level model. I did try all of the chromium dioxide or whatever metal specialty tapes they were making at the time, and it just didn't do it for me, so I went the reel to reel route.

...be cool,

mitch
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