drbarney1
Responses from drbarney1
| Preamp choices:Short list I have a single ended triode par of monoblocks which I built because I can't afford to buy what fits my tastes. For my preampier I have always used a simple SET using either a 6J5, a 76, a 6P5, and finally Arcturis 27 because I like blue glass ins... | |
| Recommendation for a replacement speaker cable Be suspicious of any cable manufacturer who sells any remedy for skin effect attenuating treble. 10 Feet of solid 8 gauge cable changes resistance on the order of hundredths of an Ohm from DC to 20 kHz. In series with a 4 Ohm speaker, skin effect ... | |
| How old are you? 74 | |
| Does Power Cord Require Burn-In To Sound Good? How power influences the sound depends upon the equipment: The power supply in an amplifier could do so thorough a job of filtering out noise along with hum that it might make power conditioning irrelevant. If you use single ended triode amplifica... | |
| BlueSound Stinks(!), anyone? I ran into some problems with a Bluesound Vault 2i. The first thing I did when it arrived was to rip all 175 of my CD's onto its 2 Terabyte hard drive in "bit perfect" multiple passes it makes over each CD. However, it was impossible to arrange th... | |
| Audiophile demographics? Neuro-scientists are still researching cognitive differences XY vs XX causes in the brain. So far, there is great overlap in any Gaussian bell curves of what they quantify. This makes a concept of gender too weak for me to ascribe this difference ... | |
| Preamp recommendation Don't be too quick to rule out building one from a kit.www.bottlehead.com has easy to build kits which outperform preamps costing thousands. | |
| Most hyped turntable, tonearm, and cartridge? There s something almost Zen about linear tracking tonearms. I am conflicted on whether they are better than a 12 inch or 9 inch tonearm. Many reviewers who listen and evaluate for a living seem skeptical. The added complication of air bearings an... | |
| Desire to try tubes If you can get someone who had done it to mentor you, consider building a tube amp from a kit such as Bottlehead. Use polypropylene instead of electrolytic capacitors in the power supply so you not only will never have to replace them in the futur... | |
| What's the best and/or favorite piece of equipment you've owned? And do you still own it? My favorite is my 833A single ended triode stereo monoblocks. I could never afford to buy manufactured ones ($350,000 for WAVAC and a "cheap $60,000 made in Poland.) I built my own with all the design features I want and could not count on getting... | |
| Amp repair cost — is this right? The cost of repair is why I build my own amplifiers. I have the good fortune of liking SET amplifiers, which are very simple to design. They are easy to repair if anything goes wrong. I notice your describing a problem with power supply capacitors... | |
| What's your favorite boutique speaker maker Please accept my vote for Magnepan. In my small house I pair 0.7s with a par of DWMs. Each DWM I wired the two 4 Ohm elements in series for 8 Ohms and connected the outputs of the Hammond 1642SE transformers as follows: 0.7 negative to zero, 0.7 p... | |
| Thinking about getting a R2R DAC I have a vintage MSB Platinum Link DAC from the turn of the century. The frequency display went out and MSB is refurbishing it back to like new. It has two upgraded R2R ladders, one in each balanced output channel because I use single ended triode... | |
| spend on the streamer or on the DAC ? I tend to go with the DAC because if you hear a composition you find so beautiful you might want to download it into your library and get it in high resolution it will sound better than what you can stream. If you run into unexpected financial rui... | |
| Am I too big of a jerk,even for audiogon? There is nothing wrong with looking down on fraud such as some pop chart musicians who have little training but claim they don't need it because "I was born with natural talent," or claiming without any significant education to know more about a s... |