tromprof

I own a Canadian built tube amp that I have used on both Fortes and La Scala speakers. The maker is a small company called Ideal Innovations (http://www.idealinnovations.biz/) located in Ingersoll, Ontario. The model I have is a basic 20 watt integrated, the Elite 80. It is dead quiet and seems very well built. The shop owner, Syd Beaumont, was very quick to return any emails I sent his way. I have gone the SET route with the La Scalas and I now have it running a pair of AR-11 speakers that my parents bought back in the mid 70s and they have never sounded better. Maybe he gives discounts for fellow Canadians? []

The Technics is a great turntable. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss a used cart, you can get a very nice one on Audiogon without over spending. I got a very nice Clearaudio Aurum Beta for my Technics off of A-gon for half of what it sells new, and it was barely used. With a nice tube phono preamp the sound is amazing!

I bought a preamp through jolida.net and was very happy with the transaction. The shipping was quick, the price very good, and the preamp well built. From what I could gather from reading online it seems that the .net people are the original Jolida that made the brands good reputation, and the .com folks have the name in the U.S. but are using a different Chinese manufacturer. I would not hesitate to buy from the Jolida.net people, but I am wary of the.com folks until they prove themselves.

I sold my ugly black Fortes for $400, so $500 for a pretty pair of F2s seems good to me. [6]

It doesn't cost a lot to get good sound out of a computer. My main system is hooked up to an 8 year old Dell sluggard and sounds great! All of my music files (now over 13,000 files) are on a networked hard drive so any computer in the house has access. I used Media Monkey for a couple of years but recently switched to J. River Media Center and find the sound better. It allows you to easily use ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output ) which allows you to bypass Windows interference, a big upgrade if using a good sound card or in my case and external DAC.

My geeky laptop wallpaper.

Repairing the cabinets is not expensive, but obviously it takes time and skill. Go to the library or troll the web and get some info on furniture refinishing and veneering, that should get you started. What will cost you is updating the crossovers. They need new capacitors, and again if you are handy you can do it yourself and save, if not Bob Crites can sell you new ones (http://www.critesspeakers.com). Sound wise the other thing to think about is your amp. The big Klipsch don't sound good with some amps (or maybe they just reveal how bad some amps sound). What are you using to drive these?

The $700 range will also get you La Scalas. A pair of La Scala with a good sub is hard to beat, and as I am sure you know, there are a host of upgrades/tweaks for them as well. It would be fun to build your own though.

Having owned Fortes for over 20 years and having heard Heresy and Chorus on many occasions I think the Fortes sound a lot like Heresy (at least Forte 1s), but much better bass. The Chorus takes all the pluses of the Fortes and just gives more of that goodness. I own both K-horns and La Scala, but would still love to get my hands on a pair of Chorus.

My experience with BEC is the same, which is a shame since his shop is a 5 min. walk from my house.

Thanks for the info. If I don't get any enthusiastic recommendations for someone closer I will contact him.

One channel on my minty Yamaha CR-2020 seems to have stopped working and so I need to take it for repair. The shop I have used in the past did a very poor job on a Yamaha amp I took to them a couple of years back so... does anyone have a good recommendation for a person in the Cincinnati and Dayton area? Thanks

Seems like a lot of sellers are asking $1,000 or more for them, but I would be willing to bet not many are selling for that much. I paid $700 locally for mine, and they are much nicer than the average. For buyers the La Scala is a bargain, it is the Belles that demand the premium price.

It is interesting you would make that observation. I owned a pair of Fortes for over 20 years, always hooked to SS. The day I sold them I hooked them up to a tube amp to demo them for the prospective buyer and was shocked how good the sounded with that combo. Why I had never tried that before escapes me, perhaps because in their later years they had been relegated to basement duty, but it was particularly the bass that struck me as most changed. I would have described the Fortes as having a tendency toward somewhat flabby bass (this is compared to my reference, K-horns!), but with the tubes it was remarkably clear and tight. It made me sad to see them go.

When I first got my K-horns I was using Adcom gear, and the bass was great, though everything else no so much. I then went to vintage Yamaha and the bass was still great and everything else improved as well. Finally I got my hands on my keeper amp, a 300B based SET. Perhaps there is a little less bass, perhaps there is just a better balance, but in my experience whatever minimal decline in bass there is, and I think that nobody listening to my setup would call the bass weak, the trade off is well worth it. The sound of the K-horns with a good SET is to die for.

Just taking a quick read through it, it doesn't seem as though the buffering of the CD/DVD-ROM output is the advantage... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Stream_Input/Output . True. But then you get back into ripping vs. CD playback

All I can say for ASIO is that it was one of the biggest upgrades I have done recently. Before I was using ASIO, I would agree that there was little difference between my computer and Sony unit, both going through the same DAC, but after installing ASIO (and spending some head banging time getting it to work) the sound is far superior.

Suffice it to say, if my player can buffer and play an incoming AV stream via the internet from netflix, I'm going to guess it has the requisite memory and processing power to buffer and apply EC to an audio CD. 10 seconds of audio represents about 2 megabytes, which should be adequate for the purpose. Consequently, heavy buffering is rather commonplace on some applications, namely the mobile space. While it could, does it? Seems like most people and companies really don't care much about accurate sound reproduction. The cool thing about my computer setup is the ASIO driver I use for digital output. ASIO allows me to change the amount of buffer, from 64 samples all the way to 2048 samples. So even if I am playing a CD or DVD in the computer and not playing a file from the hard drive, it is way ahead of any DVD/CD player that I know of. I guess my point is the computer has the processing/memory brawn that no stand alone CD/DVD player will ever have.

That would mean that the CD/DVD player would need a decent size memory. Memory is getting cheaper, but the greater the memory for buffering, the greater the cost to the manufacturer. It would probably also mean having a more robust processor to figure it all out as well, again raising the price. Most people buying a player aren't going to care one bit (I know, bad pun[8-)] ) about any of this, so there is no reason for manufactures to go to the extra effort and expense when their competitors will just be able to sell their players cheaper. The nice thing about a computer is the memory and processor are built in and way overkill for this application, and relatively cheap due to the marketplace.

The problem I have with this statement is that in the next breath you go on to say how you can make a bit perfect rip of a CD with the CD drive of a computer. I myself made some lossless rips this morning (with error correction), a process that took a couple minutes per CD, on a drive that cost ~$20. If this el cheapo drive can read a bit perfect copy at ~20x (could potentially be faster if I had something more powerful than your average $300 netbook), why do we need a high end player to read a bit perfect copy at 1x??? I'm half guessing here (hopefully not completely guessing), but the computer can error correct when it's reading the disc until it gets it right. When the Transport is reading it's playing in closer to real time, and the more error correction the more the sound is likely to be affected. So for a transport it's more critical to get it right the first time. Bingo. The computer can read and re-read the data until it is read correctly, while a CD player gets one shot at it. There are no skips, even with a bad disc, when it has been ripped with a good program like Exact Audio Copy, because the program takes the time to get it right. On some beat up discs, EAC sometimes takes an hour or more slowly going over sections of a disc, and then verifies those results. CD players can't do that.

What makes one CD player sound different from another is the DAC built into them. What make one a better transport is the quality of the laser and electronics to read the disc as error free as possible. What makes ripping a CD to a computer using a program like Exact Audio Copy (free BTW) potentially superior is that the computer is able to extract the data from the disc error free, or as close as possible depending on the condition of the disc, and save the data as either a wave file (an exact copy of the data) or FLAC (lossless but compressed), or whatever format you want. A program such as EAC also will verify the accuracy of a rip by comparing it to an external data base. Thus bit perfect playback. Got to love a program like that, good and free!

Sounds like I'm older than you, Pink Floyd and the Who ruled when I was in my teens, but I figured it out, so you can too. It is not hard and not really that time consuming to rip your CDs to a hard drive. It really is worth it, I have over 13,00 music files now on my hard drive!

I would not spend money at this point on a high end CD player, but would instead invest in a good DAC. A good DAC can turn any CD player or computer, or for that matter any device capable of sending out a decent digital signal into great sound. I have several different DACs and my current favorite is a little Chinese made tube DAC by a company called Maverick. Absolutely fabulous sound with all the digital sources I have thrown at it so far, though I did take out the el-cheepo Chinese tube it came with and sneak in little Western Electric glass. [H]

Thanks for this idea, I think I will give it a try.

Worth the price even after the $200.00 shipping? I would skip the direct from China route unless you are very sure of the seller; it may look like the real thing but you never know. There is an Ebay seller in Canada who imports these units, checks them, and even better warranties them. I bought my Yaqin phono pre from him and was very satisfied. Check him out before China direct (http://stores.ebay.com/Canadian-HiFi-Online?_trksid=p4340.l2563).