Wilson Laidlaw

I sorted the issue with the ATC-SCM19's and the Krell 300iL. It was a number of factors: 1) The Chord silver cables at 1.5mm were on the small side, so I bought a set of River Cable Starflex 11 SWG with the Nakamichi locking plugs 2) There was a cracked stem on one of the cable banana plugs and a failed tension spring on the cable to the other speaker 3) The BASH amplifier in the ATC C1 sub woofer was from a faulty batch and ATC replaced it 4) It turned out that the ATC's had only done around 80 to 100 hours and most of that at low volume. They were nowhere near run in. 5) The Krell had not been used for 2 years and the caps needed some reforming With all these factors corrected, I am now happy with the ATC's and no longer feel I have to replace them. Wilson

What would folks think about the p17-B's on a Krell KAV 300iL integrated amp. I wanted to upgrade the bigger of my two systems in the UK to make it sound more like my big French system, which has Klipsch RF83's. I bought the apparently highly regarded Acoustic Transducer Company SCM-19's, the biggest of their passive stand mounts. Unlike Klipsch's they are very low efficiency (optimistically rated at 85dB/watt) and although they sounded good, the power requirements killed my elderly Quad 606 power amp. A Japanese friend was retiring and giving up the apartment he used during his visits to London. I bought a very lightly used Krell KAV300iL he had there. The problem is that the Krell is very cool sounding and the ATC's extremely cool/precise and the combo will have icicles hanging off your ears in 30 minutes. I am just not sure if the P17-B's will be warm enough to compensate for the Krell. The alternatives are a pair of ex-demo Sonus Faber Minima's or a used pair of Spendor SP100's. Wilson

After I lost my Boothroyd Stuart Meridian G57 power amp in a lightning strike on my house in France, I could not get the replacements to sound right (Musical Fidelity 550W RMS Tower Monoblocs). The G57 has very punchy bass but quite a gentle top end. The new Musical Fidelities sounded much too thin and bright. I am still using a Meridian G02 pre-amp and RF83 speakers plus a JBL E550 sub. My house is 1970's avant garde, built by a pupil of Le Corbusier as his own retirement home and is all glass, stone and steel with curved walls, resulting in "interesting" acoustics. In the end, I have put an LA Audio, studio grade, balanced XLR, 31 band analogue equaliser between the pre amp and monoblocs. I then hired a sound meter and bought a CD of tones. I spent a day going round the main room in the house measuring tones and adjusting the bands. I can switch the equalisation in and out on the LA unit to check progress. I am now delighted with the sound. When you now switch the equalisation out, the sound is very flat, shrill and dull. The only downside is that the equaliser produces a tiny amount of hiss, which younger folks can hear, if they are close to the speakers but at my age, it is not perceptible. Wilson

Last year soon after upgrading from Quad 66/606 to Boothroyd-Stuart Merdian amplification (G02 pre amp and G57 power amp), my house got struck by lightning. This fried the G57. although luckily I had the G02 disconnected to do a firmware upgrade of the control system, so it survived. After a nightmare with couriers where one replacement G57 was stolen en route from the UK to France and a second one was damaged, I gave up and bought locally in Marseille. I bought a pair of Advance Acoustic MAA705 Monoblocs, which had just won a major award in Germany. They do not suit the RF-83's at all. I have a large room (about 130 sq. meters) mostly made from stone and glass, with a ceramic tiled floor, therefore quite a cool acoustic. The Advance Acoustics with the RF-83's are bright enough to make your ears bleed. I cannot now get a new G57, as they are out of production. Has anyone got any suggestions of alternative power amps/monoblocs available in Europe. My budget is around 2500 or $3500. The G02 pre-amp has either RCA or XLR balanced output. Wilson

I have bitten the bullet today and bought a Boothroyd Stuart Meridian G57 (at least 200 WPC into 8 O) power amplifier as an ex-demo unit, just a few months old. I will now put my elderly Quad 606 on eBay, where there seems still to be a considerable demand for them. I could take it back to the UK to replace my even older Quad 405 but even though that is not as powerful as the 606, it has a sweeter sound. Different folks did the last upgrade on each, which must be the reason, as they are very similar designs. Wilson

Best of luck with knee surgery and trust you will have a quicker recovery than me. I had a total knee replacement last October done in South Africa. It is just starting to work well now. Given the price, I expected it to be like a Rolls Royce engine but it sounds more like a Yugo. Wilson

For those of you who left very kind comments on my French house, I thought if you liked the house, the view might just blow you away. There is a 60 foot drop some three feet in front of the tiled terrace you can see (very useful for getting rid of visitors who overstay their welcome) and then it drops more gradually away some 1,000 feet to the valley of the Bresque below. The mountain you can see in the far distance on the left is Mont Victoire above Aix-en-Provence. http://tinyurl.com/5b2uh7 Wilson PS The RF-83's just get better and better. However it is showing up that my Quad 606 power amp is close to being due another rebuild. It must be 8 years since Les Wolestenholme of Avondale Audio did the last upgrade to his Mk3 spec but I did not opt at that time for the larger power supply with a toroidal transformer and Shottky diodes. I have asked my current favourite Quad man (I have three Quad set-ups in various rooms in my two houses), Peter Hickman of Fidele Audio if it is worth spending more money on the 606 or whether I would be better going for a more powerful Boothroyd Stuart Meridian 559 and just getting a standard service on that (replace electrolytic capacitors etc). My Quad 66 pre-amp has already had the full Fidele treatment and it can very easily be changed to give a standard line output of 1.5 to 2.5v rather than the 0.5v that Quad uses between pre and power amp. I had the new Burr Brown OPA 627 final op-amp set to give 2.5v and currently have an attenuator in to reduce that to 0.5v for the 606 power amp. Anybody got any other suggestions for a 200 to 300 WPC power amp - my budget does not stretch to a Krell or a Musical Fidelity kw750. W

Leo, Many thanks for the suggestion. I think as I don't have a signal generator or breaking in CD, I will just live with the more lengthy but maybe safer process of running in on normal audio. I have seen quite a few posts on other audio websites which recommend against such a strenuous breaking in procedure and council more patience, especially with loudspeakers. Wilson

Coytee, When I am in England, I live about 4 miles north of Lewes (the county town of East Sussex) about 50 miles south of London. However at the moment, I am at our other house in the South of France, where I spend about 6 months of the year. www.tourisme-tourtour.com/indexa.php3 I retired from working in the City of London about 4 years ago, when I also realised a long term dream of owning a house in France. I had been looking for about 8 to 10 years, not found a house I liked and finally found my perfect house on the last day of a two week house hunting trip. Wilson

Kev, I have posted pictures of the inside and the outside here: http://tinyurl.com/6fqpvy and http://tinyurl.com/5lo6oo Wilson

Well I am sorry to disagree with someone who is obviously very knowledgeable on Klipsch speakers but even after about 75 hours, my RF-83's have changed for the better considerably. To begin with the bass and treble were very good but the middle was just a touch on the thin side. Now some 70 hours later, the bass has improved from good to excellent and the middle has filled out very nicely. What I was struggling with initially, was speaker placement to get an even sound stage, without a hole in the middle. As I am sure you all know, these are heavy lumps to move around single handed, as all my family are currently back in England. The room they are in is very irregularly shaped, being an ultra modern French style house from the early 1970's, built by one of Le Corbusier's pupils out of large blocks of limestone, aluminum and glass. It has sunken areas and projections into the ceiling from sunken areas from the floor above. Many of the walls are curved and I don't think there is a right angle wall join in the house. the sound stage is still not perfect but it has improved hugely. I am guessing this is because timing has improved on the speakers. I also noticed this on my other cera-metallic cone speakers, the Infinity Kappa 200's. It may be with cera-metallic cones, a stiffer roll surround is used, which takes more breaking in. In order to get my speaker placement perfect I feel I really need a test disc. I had lent my RR/HiFi news CD to a friend, who appears to have lost it. I have therefore ordered one of the XLO HDCD test discs and hope that will do the job. Wilson

Well just a day and a half late the RF-83's finally arrived this afternoon. They are both in position, connected and running. I am sure that it's not a serious hernia. I am very impressed for new speakers and the sound is remarkably open. The bass is about as good as I have heard. However I feel that there is more to come in the middle and upper middle ranges and that they will open up even further over the next few days. If, as I suspect, they have been sitting in a warehouse in Genoa for some period, maybe up to a year, the cone surrounds are bound to have stiffened up a bit over that period. A few days playing at reasonable volumes should make them supple again. Wilson

Many thanks for the suggestions guys. I have just upgraded from Safari 3 to the Webkit version (effectively Safari 3 1/2) and it has cured some formatting problems on other sites but not on this one. So a trial of the two suggested method - two quote marks "" and secondly the HTML method Well does it work? No RF-83's yet. The Italian and French couriers are a bit like the Irish builders who were restoring a big old farmhouse outside Dublin for a Canadian friend of mine. When he and his family were still not in the house after a year, when they had been quoted a maximum of 6 months, in frustration he asked his architect "do you Irish have a phrase that means Mañana, Mañana?" The answer was "to be sure we do sur, but nothing that conveys the same desperate sense of urgency!" Wilson

Brac, Where I have my house, I am surrounded by oak trees. I was woken up two nights ago by the sounds of wild boars (sangliers) routing around in my grounds, I assume looking for truffles. The next morning, there were 6 inch to a foot deep holes all over the place. I often have to chase mushroom hunters out of my little wood, explaining that I too like morels, cepes etc and these are MY mushrooms.

Bruce, I have to confess I was lazy and downloaded that photo of an M8 from the Leica Website. Mine is actually the black and silver one. It has had teething troubles (mine is camera #310) but various firmware updates have gradually sorted it out to become a wonderful camera. I have been using Leicas since I could first hold a camera. I still have my father's IIF, which works as well as the day it was bought in 1953 and still looks like new. In fact it was a friend on the Leica Camera user website who suggested I go for the Klipsch speakers, when I was moaning that after 12 months, I still had not bee able to find a pair of Quad 989 Electrostatics at the correct condition/price. It would seem from various discussions on the Leica forum, that people who like Leicas, also like top end HiFI equipment and many like me, are keen on "lifting the hoods" and upgrading the internals inside those grey boxes. Now just eagerly anticipating the knock on the door from the courier and then I will have to fetch my neighbour to help me shift those 100 pound lumps into the correct positions. Wilson PS Can someone tell me how to put paragraph breaks in a reply - Is it because I am using a Mac, that the paragraph breaks in the draft don't appear in the post?