Ray Garrison

Greg, thank you for that insight. You're right, if you think about the acousi-mass (?spell?) systems as the really high tech audio cousin of Air Hogs or those little LEGO robots or the stuff for sale at thinkgeek.com - the whole thing makes sense in a way it never did before. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm serious. Thanks for the insight.

Not so much due to updgrading equipment, but upgrading family. Addition of small son has resulted in shifting my listening hours and conditions from daytime rock out rock and roll to late night volume reduced so as not to disturb rest of family listening. While I still enjoy listening to ELP even at reduced levels, I have found myself enjoying types of music I didn't spend much time listening to before. Example - I listened to Famous Blue Raincoat last night, and really, really enjoyed it. I have a feeling that I would not have found it nearly as enjoyable if I'd popped it in the CD player and pumped it out of the CF-4s at 110dB. Late at night, quietly played (well, relatively quietly... house wasn't shaking) Jennifer Warnes voice just hangs in the air, wrapping around you... cool.

bump Just a note... I've had some more time to listen to music with this amp, and I can honestly say that this is the *best* amp I have ever heard combined with Klipsch speakers. It's been way under the radar from my perspective, but if you are looking for a good integrated for a two channel system, this just obliterates everything else I've ever had the chance to try out. My CF-4 have never sounded so good. Loud bodacious rocking out high SPL slamming sound, or late at night quiet Famous Blue Raincoat listening to Jennifer and Leonard, whatever, they sound better than they've ever sounded before.

I had a TD 125 mk II with an SME 3009 original series arm quite a few years back, and I found the Denon 103 to be a very good match Link

Keep in mind there are (IMHO) two different kinds of ridiculously expensive speaker cable - cable that's relatively low cost to manufacture and carries a high price because people will pay it (not gonna name names but the cables carry Nothing But Signal) and cable that is hugely difficult to make and costs a small fortune in labor to manufacture, so with any reasonable markup winds up very, very expensive (Nordost Valhalla.) Now regarding the second type, you can argue that it's insane to spend $$$$ on speaker cables, and that stuff like the Valhalla doesn't sound any different / better than decent spec'd Belden from Blue Jean, and I might even agree with you. But that doesn't mean it's a ripoff. If you look at the process they go through to make the stuff, it's no wonder it costs what it does. I'm not gonna be buying any even if I win a PowerBall lottery (of course, you can't win if you don't play, so that's a problem...) but at least I think they're justified in charging what they do for it based on how much it costs them to make it. Whether it's stupid to pay for it is another question.

He was quoting from the 1965 article.

Price range? <$500? $500 -> $1,000? $1,000 up? Also try posting in the subwoofer forum, everybody there is familiar with the CF series.

I just got an immaculate PM-94 off EBay. I've been using it for about a week now, and I can say without doubt this is, by far, the best amp I've ever paired with any of my Klipsch speakers. Those of you that've suffered through my posts over the past 8 or 9 years know I've tried a wide variety of amps (Rotel, Krell, Golden Tube Audio, Jolida, Acurus, B&K, Adcom, NAD, Nikko, too many others to mention) and of all of them, a little Rotel RA-830BX2 sounded better with my La Scalas and CF-4 than anything else I tried, though it was kind of humbled by the CF-4. Well, the Marantz just absolutely blew the Rotel out of the water. Combine the bass depth and tonality of a (smallish) Krell (KAV series) with the midrange of the Golden Tube SE-40 and the imaging capability of the Acurus (without the steely high end) and you get the PM-94. 50+ pounds, 100 watts/8 ohms 200 watts/4 ohms biased so first 25% output runs in full Class A, entire chassis copper, MOS-FET outputs, separate bass / treble / left / right tone controls with a CD-direct mode to totally bypass them, two phono inputs (haven't tested those yet, reputation is very good). Reputation is it runs *very* hot, but with mine out in the open with adequate ventilation that's not really the case. Very warm, fur sure, but not so hot you can't put your hand on the grill work over the heatsinks. There have been 3 of these on EBay in the past couple of months, in varying conditions, so if you're looking for an integrated amp and are willing to buy used, I can't recommend keeping an eye out for one of these highly enough. Websites are here and here and here and here's a picture: Edit: I have no idea why the stupid picture won't show up - appears when I edit post sometimes, sometimes not, doesn't seem to show up with I, uh, post the post. Here's the url if you want to see what it looks like: http://www.quarter-a.netfirms.com/pm-94-interior.jpg

Back in the mid-eighties, there was a human language add-on for Lotus 1-2-3 called HAL ( http://www.aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/international/lotus/pics/percon8706 ). The idea was you could place the cursor at the bottom of a column of numbers and type "total this column" and it would insert the appropriate @sum function. (Trust me, it made sense at the time.) The programmers, of course, couldn't resist including an inside joke, and if you put the cursor in the home cell and typed "Open the pod bay doors HAL" it would insert the text "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" on the worksheet. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Hummm... a tube powered laptop. Let's think about that. According to CNN ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/06/25/305473/index.htm ) there are roughly 800 million transisters per laptop computer (current generation). Let's replace those with tubes. Let's use a fairly small tube - how about a twin triode 12AX7 type. Two "switches" per tube, so we only need 400 million tubes. Running at 12 volts it draws 150mA at idle. To power our 400 million tubes we need, uh... 60 million amps. At 12 volts (roughly). That's, uh... 720 million watts. At idle, of course. The capacity of the main station of my local utility company (United Illuminating) - before deregulation, don't know what it is now - was 1,100 megawatts, so we could have powered up the laptop and had 35% capacity reserve to, like, run the state of Connecticut. I don't know how much heat we'd be dissipating, but I would guess you would need to leave the windows open. Each tube is 1 2/3 inches tall and 7/8 inch in diameter, for a volume of roughtly (pi r squared h) of approximately 1 cubic inch (convenient). 400 million cubic inches is, uh, 230,000 cubic feet. So, if the ceiling in my kitchen is 8 feet high, the floor would need to be about 170 X 170 feet for my laptop to fit. (Cool! A 30,000 sq ft house! Always wanted one of those!). Unfortunately, I think the yearly capacity of the currently on line manufacturing plants is on the order of 2 million tubes per year, or some such thing, so laptops would be on lengthy backorders.

One of the advantages to using FireFox is the tremdous number of add-ons and extensions available. For anyone who does web development, tools like FireBug are a Godsend, and I'm not aware of anything similar available for IE. FireFox also does things a bit differently - it displays tables as they are being rendered, rather than waiting until the whole table is downloaded and formatted, which can be a *BIG* timesaver when working with very large tables. (Some of the tables we use at PeriShip while monitoring our shipments' status can easily have over 10,000 rows with a lot of data per row.) It is better at Javascript, in both execution speed and forgiveness for minor programming errors. It is also a lot more customizeable, both in the number of things you can tweek and how you tweek them. Anyone who does a lot of web surfing should download FireFox and try it out - it lives in peaceful cooperation with IE and other Micro$oft apps, doesn't cost anything, and if you don't think you need it just uninstall it.

Yet another example of why I'll never understand why people insist on abusing themselves by using Macs instead of a regular PC... Next thing ya know, people are going to start talking about using tubes in amplifiers again...

How are your electronics skills? Right now on EBay there are quite a few used tube integrated amps under $600, but you should expect to have to fix solder joints, maybe replace aging capaciters, maybe replace screw terminals with binding posts, that sort of thing. If you want something that you can just plug in and play, I saw several older Sansui amps (717 and the like) that generally get pretty good reviews. You just missed out on a Marantz PM-94 - there have been three on EBay in the last few weeks, one went for <$400, the next one went for >$800, and I bought mine ( insert happy face ) for $750. Just checked, right now there's about 160 integrated amps listed less than $600, all different ages and varieties.

uh, that may have been true in 1968, but nowadays successful (aka wealthy) individuals are (IMHO) just as likely to be listening to Floyd or ELP or Genesis or the Eagles or Journey or this or that or these or those... "...Out on the road today, I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice Inside my head said, Don't look back, you can never look back..."

<bump> in last ditch effort to attract some feedback...

Whether you think cables do or do not make a difference, this post and the article it references at engadgethd.com kind of illustrate one of the problems with the internet. The referenced post contains no background on who did this test, when, where, under what conditions, etc. It has the appearence of urban myth. If you google monster cable coat hanger you will find many pages, all basically pointing to each other. Pages that do proport to contain actual details of the test run something like My friend's brother got 7 of us together in his garage to listen to some CDs and compare speaker cable. Unbeknownst to us, he tricked us by swapping in coat hangers with speaker connectors welded on. (!!!) None of us could tell the difference. I'm not saying that decent speaker cable sounds different than a coat hanger, though I strongly suspect there would be some differences. I am saying this little story should be totally discounted.

I've bought (or tried to buy) quite a few different "recertified" or "refurbished" pieces from refurbdepot.com, from Woot.com and from the Amazon warehouse. What I've found is the packageing *sucks*. The units may be in excellent shape, but the shipper drops it in a shipping carton that has no relation to the product, with maybe some peanuts or bubble wrap on it, and ships it out. I've received flat screen TeeVees with the stands so bent out of shape that the support arm on the TeeVee simply will not fit in the base. Or cracks / scratches on the screen of an LCD TeeVee that were obviously caused by shipping. My advice - if there's something you want, and it's available in recertified or refurbished condition for a fraction of the new price, then by all means go for it - just be sure to inspect the item upon receipt before you sign the FedEx / UPS / DHL delivery confirmation. And if the curiour is giving you a hard time about opening the package and inspecting the contents, ignore them. Do *NOT*, under any circumstances, sign for something without checking it out first. If you do, your options become severely limited if the product is damaged. Again, just to be clear - the products have always been in like new condition, but banged up in shipping because the shippers of this refurbished / reconditioned stuff don't have access to the original packaging. They're not underhanded or trying to rip you off - they just haven't got a clue what they're doing when it comes to packing and shipping.

Not having too much success in two channel forum, so thought I'd cross post here. Any thoughts appreciated. Anybody have any opinions / experience with this? There's one on EBay I'm thinking about pursuing. Based on reviews I can google, it seems like a good integrated for my system - CF-4, mostly CD listening, sometimes spin a few things on the Thorens. Would be replacing a very long in the tooth Rotel RA820BX2 that sounds really good, but has always left me wishing it had more oomph. Thoughts, anyone? Link

Anybody have any opinions / experience with this? There's one on EBay I'm thinking about pursuing. Based on reviews I can google, it seems like a good integrated for my system - CF-4, mostly CD listening, sometimes spin a few things on the Thorens. Would be replacing a very long in the tooth Rotel RA820BX2 that sounds really good, but has always left me wishing it had more oomph. Thoughts, anyone? Link

Junk mail, junk email, telemarking calls, offers for preapproved credit cards... it's all just a part of modern life. I get several hundred emails a day (nature of the business I'm in here at PeriShip ) of which maybe 20% are spam. Sort by sender, select and delete. Life goes on...

And when you pull up next to the Honda in your American 60's muscle car, what do you do? "So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid..."

Actually, I'm a little surprized by the lack of passion expressed about cars in this thread. You guys are usually a pretty passionate lot. To me, buying a honda or toyota (with a few exceptions) to drive around would be like buying a Bose system to listen to music on. I know my Audi is going to cost me more in the long run than a Corolla or an Accord or whatever, but that's not the point. It's a heck of a lot more fun to barrel around in, particularly on back mountain roads in the snow. Well, this is Connecticut, let's say back hill roads in the snow. Anyway, I've been driving a Jetta for the past couple of years, leased it new in 2006. It was a nice enough car, never gave me one hiccup, comforable, good mileage, but jeez was it *BOORING*. Couldn't wait for the lease to be up. I've only had the Audi for a few weeks, but I *LOVE* it... <switch font to little tiny point size> even if it does have a Bose sound system </switch font to little tiny point size>

I just bought a 2003 Audi A6 3.0 Quatro from CarMax. I could *not* be happier. The car is immaculate, is mechanically sound, and I *love* it. Bought the 48,000 mile extended warranty also, I'll let you know how that works out. Previously had a (new) Mustang GT, (new) Merkur XR4Ti, (new) Subaru Legacy Turbo, (new) Subaru Outback, (1 new, 1 used) Subaru SVX (2 of 'em), and (new) 2006 VW Jetta. The Audi, which I could not have afforded new (long story), is by far the best car I've ever owned.

I have a pair of CF-4 and have used them in quite a few different rooms in 3 different houses over the past several years. From what I can see of your room, it's asymetrical with openings of different sizes going back behind both speakers, and open space to the sides. The triangle defined by the baseline between the two speakers and the tip being where you sit is rather "long and narrow" compared to what most people wind up with. The CF in the name stands for "controlled focus" - in other words, this series of speakers was designed with one major goal being "confined directivity". The horizontal and vertical sound dispersion is very precisely configured, with less midrange and lower treble directed off axis and typical speakers. This means they interact with the room less severely in the more critical midrange frequencies. Given the amount of space around your CF-2, I would say don't just stop with experimenting with "toe in" - try "toe out" as well (not too severe an angle, just a few degrees at a time.) Also, as Islander wrote, I'd pull them forward a bit so there's less interference with the entertainment center between them. If your expeience mirrors mine, you'll find you can alter the "soundstage" pretty significantly. I can get mine to range from a very wide perspective, with musicians and instruments very precisely positioned from left to right, but very little depth - sort of sounds like everyone is standing in front of a big sheet, lined up the same distance away from me. Or, I can go the opposite way by altering toe in - I can get a soundstage that sounds like it goes from a little bit in front of my speakers to way, way behind them, much further back than the wall behind the speakers, but with much less prcise placement within that space. By adjusting the space between them and the toe in angle so they're further apart and aimed so the axis of the tweeter horns cross a few feet behind my couch, I can get a really big, fat, wide, deep nebulous cloud of sound, very organic and, uh, chewey (rolls eyes, says Thanks Gizmo) but with very little "imaging" - I can't tell whether Yorke is standing in front of, beside or in back of O'Brien, and whether Selway is up on a platform behind them or dubbed in from another take I have no clue, but it sound great. The best thing you can do is experiment. But do it slowly, over time. Line them up toed in a bit, and *LEAVE IT THAT WAY* long enough for you to get an idea of how it really sounds - few days at least. Then toe them in more. If it sounds significantly worse, don't waste any time trying to convince yourself that you just need to get used to the change - try something else. Toe in more. Toe out. Pull forward. Push back. When you find something that also sounds good, maybe better maybe not, leave it like that for a few days, then go back to where you were before. If possible, one thing that will help keep you from driving yourself nuts is using little pieces of tape on the floor so you can mark exactly where the feet are, so you can go back to the same setup after you move them. Do you have the pointy black things screwed into the feet pads? Oh, another thing that did *wonders* for my CF-4 was putting a few cinder blocks wrapped in felt under them so they weren't sitting right on the floor.

Do an internet search on "Peter Belt" sometime when you have a few minutes to kill and don't mind getting either (a) so hysterical with laughter your sides start to hurt, or ( so disgusted with what some people try to sell that your face gets all red and puffy...