Randy Bey

If you can see your way free to spend about $60 then I recommend buying some Belden Cat5 Cable and twisting your own. I spent about a weekend twisting the cat5 myself. I think that you would be at 99.9999% of what any other cable at any other price would buy you with that. Take the cat5 apart to it's twisted pair components. Braid three of those pairs into one cable. Do the same with six other pairs. You'll need nine altogether. Once you have the braided pairs (three) braid them again into one pair. Don't worry about random differences; they improve the sound. Then take the colored wires and separate them from the white wires. Bind them each into two conductors (colored and white). Use the white for "black" and the colored for "red". If you find ANYTHING better, let me know. ps this will take you about 10 hours if you do it right. Don't stretch or stress the cable. Be gentle, take your time.

"Horns do have a unique type of distortion caused by air overload in the throat. This distortion is usually lower in level than the distortions caused by direct-radiators but if one is attuned or sensitive to this distortion then you might find horns unpleasant. " Tom, what I understand is that this effect is most pronounced at higher volumes that might not represent typical listening volumes. Except BigBusa, I guess.

Hey Allan, here's all yer SPUs

oh my god!

ohmigod

a dollar two eighty.

yes, I like her minimalist stylings. Somewhat glum but otherwise quite listenable.

snowing like crazy here today. Looks like I'll have to do some serious listening instead of all that yardwork I was planning to do someday. The Garrott sounds very good, easily as good as the JVC it replaced. I'm still looking for that "right" VTA setting. Got the other bits dialed in pretty good, cart alignment wise. Found that a blank CD is a good mirror for checking cart angle. Right now the rear of the arm is up about 2 or 3 mm, not much at all. I keep trying to eye the VTA angle by looking at the stylus, and holding a grade-school protractor next to it to visualize the angle better. It just makes me cross-eyed. JG Holt from Stereophile wrote an article on setting up TTs, including VTA. He says there is a false point and a "real" good point for VTA where it simply jumps in and sounds right. I guess I need to adopt a scientific process whereby I find the elusive G spot of VTA.

Eric, I have said this before but I'll say it again. You now have perhaps one of the best speakers ever made. EVERY change you make upstream will be reproduced by the khorns. Be prepared to re-think your DVD player and the unstated TT setup as source. Get a friend to bring over a nice CD player; you will be surprized. Tune up that TT (or whatever it takes, usually not much) to make it sound better than a CD player.

back on topic, Rega Planet, hands down. Haven't heard the Ah! or any of it's bretheren but I have heard the Planet. I would discount whatever they said in Stereophile just because they are a bunch of smarmymouthed doubletalkers that you often need to read between the lines to grasp. I object 100% in the concept of replacing a few parts, such as op amps, and reaping huge benefits. Or of tacking on a tube output stage to do something or another to the sound - presumably make it savory for the audio-holic. Good performance comes from good design and yes, good parts. Mediocre design and good parts does not equate to success. The reason I think these units are well received is that with CD players the bar is set pretty high, and differences are subtle and take weeks if not months to suss out. Once you are out of the budget-player market, the knee curve in performance is pretty high and hard to differentiate. I've been through a dozen players in the last few years and believe me, I know, from hard experience, how difficult it is to hear differences in them all. So, back to cases, the Rega seems the better choice in my humble opinion. Of course if you hear mounds of differences and get a b*ner just listening to an Ah! tjoeb then you should buy one and the hell with what I think or say.

Got my Garrott P77 after a couple month wait(!) and have spent the last day or so installing and adjusting. VTA. The instructions with the cart say to raise the tonearm pivot 4-5mm which is a lot (1/4 of an inch give or take 1/20 of an inch). So I spent hours listening to a track, raising the arm a single RCH, listening, raising, etc. until the rear of the arm was WAY over 1/4 inch higher. Then the next few hours doing the same in reverse. Other than while at the extreme of height, it all sounds pretty good, and I actually like it when it's virtually at the same height that I started up with. I HATE figuring things out this way. I AGONIZE over "what is right" v. "what sounds good". I wasn't there when this music was made. I don't know when I'm doing justice to the recording or not. How do others do this?

yeah, whiskey, straight up. OK, maybe some ice if it's house brand. I went out and bought a Canon A60 (2 MP) and associated paraphenalia for a Xmas present for my wife -- and me. We need more pics of those young ladies eariler in the thread. I like 'em if they can drink hard.

hey, anyone have any words of wisdom for buying a digital camera (~$200)? Other than optical zoom, AA batteries, and a bigger memory chip?

Don't take it personal; he's a busy guy. I imagine even busier than the last time I met him a year or two ago.

How could you go wrong?

Eric, there's a good chance that you have good ears. It would be a hoot to hear what you think of ALKs as compared to the AA or A networks. The schematics are readily available on Al's web site and the building is trivial, compared to an amplifier. Buy the quality parts, or Al will come down on you like a ton of bricks. The A can be made from the parts in your AA as mentioned earlier. You can even keep the iron core inductor for the woofer (or just take it out). Listen to them. Be fair. Take your time. Report.

Not mine, but looks a lot like it:

I personally don't understand the desire or need to pop $1000 for an "entry" table. A Thorens like I have produces the kind of analog magic that is utterly intoxicating. It becomes like some kind of inebriation. To think I paid under $400 for the whole shebang.... Turn on the amps, let them warm up. Not too long, just long enough to choose a good record. Leave the lights off, except maybe some incandescents. I have Xmas lights strung up all year; they make nice mood lighting. Classy. Put the record on the table, spin it up. In the three or four revolutions it takes to get up to speed, wipe the stylus. Drag a carbon fibre brush around the record a couple times, then cue up the needle. Let 'er drop. Anticipation. You have time to go to your seat, sit down, then it starts. You float away, track after track. Finally, too soon, it ends. Get up, flip it, repeat. Do this again and again. Pretty soon the night gets long. You can go to bed. Do it all over again tomorrow. Records just didn't sound that good on what I was playing before. I would wonder why, but I think I know. The rest of my stereo has matured over the years, from the headbanger type to the type that breathes finesse.

John, as compelling as your argument is I am oddly unconvinced. I will let my own 40+ years of experience with hifi be my guiding light. Go ahead and make your own mistakes; I'll make my own.

Rob, I suggest you cut to the chase and buy a pair of ALKs ASAP. Then be careful not to measure them. Just rely on the fact that they cost a lot of money to be your guide to quality.

and what I understand is that PWK instituted very high QC on the parts he sourced. I am reminded of Grado cartridges, where they make a big batch of carts, and then measure them. By chance, some are better than others, and a few are better than all the rest. They sort them out and price them accordingly. PWK knew this type of thing happened and took advantage of it. Ah, but I forget that MD prefers the sounds of low distortion cone speakers. That nasty horn mouth distortion plays on his mind.

Actually I think Rob's scr*wed. Now that he knows about it, he'll lie awake at night obsessing. Pretty soon he'll be buying new crossovers, new speakers, whatever fits the cognitive dissonance that his measurements have created. Probably ALKs, if I am allowed to guess. God help him if he learns to measure anything else in his system. Some day he will be found, with his measuring tools, squatting in front of a Rube Goldberg patchwork of equipment, staring at perfect little sine waves with a huge grin on his face.

hmm, I bought my khorns new and unfinished, 1979, so very close to yours. Didn't remove the woofer when staining or finishing. I don't think that many fumes will travel through the W fold to the woofer. I only stained the front part (plus the plywood's sides) as these are the only parts visible with the grills on. What exactly are you thinking of doing? Live with the horns for a few months (years) before putting them under the knife. There are only three tweaks that I made that I kept: stuffing the bass bin 1/2 full of insulation, changing the AA to an A (via a couple snips and a quick solder job), and caulking the tweeter/squawker horns. All were reversible, which I highly recommend for any tweaking. There was a dude here that covered his squawker horns with cement.... ultimate damping I guess. What if he didn't like it? Got a cold chisel? Oh, I put some felt strips between the top and bottom parts and cranked the screws down. Any mechanical vibrations would be reduced that way. And I guess I did put some weather stripping on the vertical board in the rear to mate to the wall better; and foam tape on the horizontal base of the top cabinet to seggreate the two. I don't think they did much but I left them there as innocent enough. Have fun,

Hey, a 145 is a pretty good TT. You would rather have a plastic one?

used ALKs show up here on a regular basis. Just check back every few days.