Ray Garrison

At least check out the Sony Alpha line before you buy anything. Great new cameras with Minolta influence, wide availablity of lenses on EBay from Maxxum series, innovative live view implementation on some models. I use an a100, love it!

On the topic of great things now gone to the big arena in the sky... Many years ago (uh, 30-ish?) at this place in Hartford called the Agora Ballroom, long since gone, my girlfriend and I saw the Guess Who and Def Leppard together. Place was a big, empty concrete shell, temporary seating set up for each show, floor sloped from back to front to the stage, so much beer running down that the first few rows were in, like 8" of pooling beer, sound just echoed and reverbrated off the concrete walls, people screaming... ah, the good ole days...

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg looks around for a moment, then says "Well, as there are three of us and we are inside a bar, this must be a joke, but I can't determine whether it's funny or not." Gödel looks at him and says "Of course not, we're inside the joke. To determine if it's funny we'd have to be outside." To which Chomsky replies "Idiot, of course it's funny, you're just not telling it right." There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those scrambling for a dictionary.

I have the good fortune to live a short drive from Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville (?spell?) Connecticut. They have the $$$ to pay big name performers to come play, and the theater where they perform is very small and intimate. My wife and I last saw Don Henley there, and the concert was wonderful. Anybody in the area who likes going to shows should keep an eye on their concert schedule.

My best advice would be to find a local audio shop that carries a good sized range of brands and will provide loaners overnight for you to try out, with the understanding that you're committed to buying from them (as opposed to using them to try stuff out then buying it over the internet) if they have one you like. I've used many different amps (Rotel, B&K, Adcom, Acurus, Krell, Jolida, Golden Tube, Nikko, Teac...) with several different Klipsch speakers (KHorns, La Scalas, KG-4, CF-4) and they all sound different. My current fave is the Marantz PM-94 Best amp I've ever had the pleasure of owning.

Sam Tellig reviewed the La scala for Stereophile in November 2006 ( I think ) and found that adding a pair of super tweeters (don't remember brand, am at work now) improved their sound (to him). He thought very highly of them, and the La Scala is currently listed as a "Class A - limited low frequency extension" speaker by Stereophile.

I have to disagree slightly with Tom about the GFA-555. I had a pair of 1977 La Scalas, and initially I was using a GFP-555 / GFA-555 pair to drive them. Besides having way more power than I usually needed (though I once put a pair of GFA-555 bridged into mono fed directly by a CD player into a pair of Klipschorns, but that's another story...), I found the 555 (tried two, one of the original series with the big black handles on the front, and the 2nd generation with the horizontal striations and no handles) to be too bright in my room (slate floors, large open room with sliding glass doors on one side.) Tried a bunch of stuff, wound up with a little Rotel integrated that I only recently replaced (Marantz PM-94, tee-rific.) One thing you will find is that the La Scala sound more different with various amps than just about any other speaker. They are *VERY* reveiling of the differences between electronics, probably because they're being used at very low power levels where the output signal is not masking whatever nasty noise the amp is producing. Try as many different amps as you can before you settle for one. I'd start with what you've got, as that's a known commodity - changing before you've heard that on the La Scalas means you have no baseline to procede from.

Wow. Am I the *ONLY* person on this forum using a Sony Alpha system camera? The a200 is a wonderful entry level system, the A3xx have a really unique and cool live view LCD implementation, the a700 is a real giant killer... Where is the Sony brigade?

Allman brothers, but I have no idea what the name of the song is... Make It Up To You?

Al's Website has three different styles of crossovers available. I had the original ALK's in my 1974 La Scalas, and thought they were excellent .

Human, mostly, with occational bouts of Cardassian thrown in when I don't get enough sleep...

The Association, Along Comes Mary They say that Cain caught Abel rolling loaded dice Ace of spades behind his ear and him not thinking twice

Like Dean, my first posts didn't survive the first upgrade to the forum back in early 2000. This is the oldest one that still seems to be available (and the thread is still going...) thread

I don't think it's a hoax... that implies intentional deceit and collusion on a fairly massive scale. Our government has trouble coordinating something as simple as a school lunch program, I can't see "them" successfully implementing some kind of fraudulent scientific research involving thousands of people on a global scale to accomplish, what, exactly? Having said that, I am not convinced that man made global warming is happening the way it is being portrayed by Al Gore and others promoting the idea that greenhouse gas emissions and other artifacts of our society are the primary cause of a perceived increase in average temperatures. Yes, I know the artic ice pack is melting, the permafrost is melting, the western portions of our country are suffering ever increasing problems with tinder-dry conditions and widespread fires, the ozone hole over antartica is expanding, greenland is losing it ice covering, glaciers are melting and my refridgerator's ice maker is taking longer and longer to fill the bin, but (a) is that a new trend or a continuation of an ongoing cycle dating back hundreds of thousands of years, ( if it is a real trend and something new, the systems involved are so complex and so huge that assuming that a few years of analysis by us, with our currently level of understanding and technical competence, can state with certaintly that we know what is causing it and it is us seems to me to be ludicrous to the point of absurdity. After I get my son in bed I'm going to start another thread on something that really concerns me regarding renewable energy sources that I haven't seen anybody thinking about. Hold that thought...

My all time favorite bumper sticker: "Nuke a Gay Whale for Jesus!"

Judging from the condition of the seats, I'd say (from painful personal experience) that this vessel has never seen salt water. If your brother in law intends to actually *use* the boat to, like, fish or water ski or just cruise around on warm summer days, make sure he understands that if he takes the thing out in the ocean it'll last about 3 months before everything falls apart. The last 8 track I heard was in an old AMC Gremlin on the way back from Rensselaer to Fairfield with Tarkus on infinate repeat, I was hitching a ride in the "back seat". I still regret not shooting myself.

Be sure to check out the new-ish Sony Alpha line before you buy anything. The Alpha mount can use any of the Minolta Maxxum lenses, which are widely available on EBay and used camera stores and are generally excellent, and the Sony has a very unique approach to "live view" LCD panels on a couple of the models. I have an a100 (no longer made, been superceded) and I would not trade it for any of the similarly priced Canons, Nikons, Pentax or Olympus models. Also be sure to use www.dpreview.com for research - best reviews and tests on the planet, IMHO. Though they do tend to be a bit Canikon-leaning... [:$]

Courtesy of George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on television... "You can pr1ck your finger, but you can't finger your..."

Hearts of Stone" by The Fontane Sisters

I have no idea where you guys find the room to keep the boxes. I barely have enought room in various closets and the attic to fit the EQUIPMENT I'm not using at the moment, let alone the boxes... the only boxes I wind up keeping are the ones the wife uses for packing up Christmas decorations.

Which would be what, exactly?

One thing I've learned over the past 40 years or so of audio insanity is that there is, someplace in the world, a room and a system that will make any given pair of speakers sound magical and wonderful and beautiful, no matter how good/bad those same speakers might sound just about anyplace else. The absolute best sounding system I have *ever* heard was a pair of Thiel CS 3.x (don't remember exact revision) at Take 5 Audio in New Haven in 1986. They were in the perfect room, with perfect room treatments, with the perfect amplification (Think it was Levinson but might have been Audio Research). To this day I have not heard the equal. Aside from all the usual BS buzzwords, they just sounded so "real", so much like someone singing was there in... well, no, so much like I was someplace else, in a room where someone was singing or a band was playing... just incredible. I bought a pair. Got them home, set everything up, and they sounded *horrible*. They would drill holes in your teeth if you got too close. What a horrific disappointment. Luckily, Take 5 took them back for full credit toward a used pair of the original series B&W 801f... which is a topic for another day... I have no doubt that somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout; That even Bose can play a tune, if the amplifier's stout.

CF-4 with Marantz PM-94 amp... Closeup of the amp (best I've ever had the chance to use!)

Have you checked out the Palladiums at Ovation thread in 2 channel?

Does anybody else remember the old Saturday Night Live commercial satire about multi-bladed razors when the first Gillete twin-tracks came out (this is probably back in the late 70's). Their spoof took the twin blade concept and extended it to three blades (the first blade grabs the whisker, the second blade yanks it out, and the third blade hacks it off) with the tagline "Becase, you'll believe anything..." How life imitates art... [:^)]