drbarney1
Responses from drbarney1
| Better R2R DAC Recommendation? I will probably stay with my vintage MSB Platinum which has upgrades. One used should be a good choice. | |
| Tweaks, money pit or real value? Speaker cable marketers claim energy from the signal gets into the dipole molecules of the insulator and returns back into the cable to distort the signal. Try this test. Tie the left channel cable close to the right channel cable. Connect only on... | |
| Class-A Amplification and 15 Amp Outlet At lease a SET tube amp draws constant current which is modulated through the output transformer. The current draw does not change - increase - when louder passages in the music play. Therefore, you need not have the high current carrying capacity... | |
| Power Conditioning on the Cheap While I value power conditioners for surge protection and lightning protection including such lightning protection for FM and TV antennas (to which I add lightning arresters where the cable enters the house) I am skeptical of their ability to do a... | |
| How much “suspension of disbelief do you need?” Caution, if you invest in extremely expensive components such as cables costing over $20,000, you invest your ego in believing you are too clever to have been taken even though you will only imaging it sounding better because you can't admit any d... | |
| Are there any audiophile Air BnB's? Let any tenant supply his/her own system and make it clear to the tenant and neighbors that any complaint, which need not require a neighbor to confront the tenant and put up with false promises to turn it down only to be followed by experimenting... | |
| Audio Research Refernce 75se The threat of excessive repair costs is why I build my own audio whenever reasonably possible to match or exceed far more expensive factory made amplifiers and preamps using the same parts and design. Often you can use better parts than the manufa... | |
| Beautiful Music That Reduce You To Tears Mahler symphonies 2 and 8, Mozart's Laudate Dominum. | |
| How long do you or should you keep your gear. I build most of my own gear because not only can I not afford gear costing 4, 5, or especially 6 figures, but for all the money you can't always pick and choose what you want. I see a $10,000 tube amp advertised on this site which has electrolytic... | |
| Advice for Amp to Drive Klipsch Forte IVs If you can get someone to guide you if you have never done it before, don't rule out building a 45 SET tube amp. Bottlehead.com has some kits and they support you. A 45 is more than enough for sensitive horn speakers such as Klipsch. | |
| Owning the speakers you dreamed of 20 years ago Close to that long ago I used 3 way cone speakers driven by bi-amped 45 SETs.The crossovers were complicated by notch filters controlling resonant drops in impedance. It was not the simple matter of using more active filters between the 6SN7 drive... | |
| Upgrade my CD player or futile effort? While a better DAC R2R ladder will help you, if you can rip all your CDs "bit perfect" into a computer and store them on a USB flash drive with a backup copy and play the flash drive through a streamer such as a Bluesound, it will not be as diffic... | |
| Helping a friend build a new system If possible have him audition some systems of the kind he wants in rooms of similar acoustics to choose the parts of the system that sound best to him. Gone are the days when anyone could save up and afford "the best" expensive such as McIntosh or... | |
| Who is ditching their shiny disc spinners? I have the same music server and I ripped all 175 of my CD collection and with help from Bluesound transferred it to my laptop with the corrections to digital data the Vault 2i did. I rearranged my library into folders, one for each composer and i... | |
| Why have capacitors improved so much over the years? For high voltages, 300 and higher including 1000 or more, I feel safer using polypropylene to electrolytic because of shelf life issues the former do not have and you can get polypropylene good for 1300 Volts for about the same price you would hav... |