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George O.

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Posts posted by George O.

  1. Thanks for responding...at least.

    ...Hey, listen...

    I'm a bit skeptical of these music services ever since someone loaded Spotify onto my wife's laptop (a real mess of an app, I must say). That's why I listed the other opinions from another source. I trust no one with these type of programs. YMMV. Just checking things out.

    But...you're initial reaction to my external reference wasn't what I'd expect, and you posted at least two pieces of information that weren't accurate, right? And you didn't acknowledge it.

    I apologize if you thought I was being critical...trust me, I wasn't. I typically go out of my way to avoid energizing egos.

    When I get a chance, I may load the app on a laptop and try it. But I'm going to do due diligence first based in the bad experience with the other apps that stream music. I'm a little gun shy.

    Chris

    Being skeptical is the sensible route. Just blindly following one individual's opinion, no matter how well intentioned, is a ticket to disappointment. I'm especially skeptical of anyone whose first reaction is to get defensive when politely questioned. The internet is a great source for differing opinions but one needs to know how to weigh them.

    Steve Wozniak expressed a lot of doubt about the Cloud just the other day:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/08/06/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-distrusts-the-cloud-is-he-right/

    Essentially, it comes down to whether you want to own your personal collection or pay a monthly fee to access and select from a huge collection put together by others. Do any kids of today value music like the previous several generations? I haven't run into one.

  2. That is the worse rug I have ever seen.

    You must have lived in higher class apartments than I have, then.

    I'm thinking those little bits of red tape near the speakers and in the center ARE little bits of red tape, maybe to outline precise speaker placement when speakers are swapped out repeatedly. And they've just been left on the floor after being dislodged.

    Generally speaking, though, we can't see the rooms in their entirety or know what kind of influence they have on the sound of reproduced music. They may be fine sounding for all we know. I think a room should be comfortable to listen to music in, a relaxing room, and would not want or expect it to be an audiophile-tuned room. If you can have both, though, that's great.

  3. You don't need to go any further than ONE vintage turntable: the Pioneer PL-518.

    Listen to what Burgess Meredith had to say in this TV commercial:

    Think of the budget that Pioneer had, that they could buy TV time for a record player! That ad cost them more to air than probably the total current sales of all turntables! Turntables used to sell by the millions, not just by the dozens that a mom and pop company handles nowadays.

    This is a sleeper, a steal, ridiculously good for the tiny bit of money it'll cost you. Sometimes you can get one for less than $100.

    They are prone to having bad feet after all these decades, but you can find them with excellent feet intact if you are patient.

  4. The big concept to remember with the advent of the chip amp is not so much that it's a novel amplifier technology, but that it relies more so on a very specific means of dealing with the source signal.

    Have you ever taken a comprehensive look at what's upstream of those RCA inputs? Count all the gain stages. When an analog amp is bench tested, by any right, it's source is simply a lab-grade function generator....not our pre-amp and certainly not our source. That's a lot of parts that don't get factored into those measurements.

    We might have a real kick-@ss amp that will pass a bench test with flying colors...posting gorgeous individual specs, but how does the source signal ,ahead of it, look in the real world? Is the output of the pre-amp a good facsimile of the source? Most importantly, what about the aggregate combination? With this method, ensuring global signal integrity starts to equal parts and money, fast.

    When transporting in the analog domain, it's all about the pre-amp stages along the way, no matter what.

    But a chip amp, accepting a digital signal, dispatches with all of that fan fare. It can eliminate an entire input / output stage and the gear associated with it.

    This approach leaves the end user (me) with more resources to handle the other two devils of playback...the speakers and the room.

    It's a wonder anyone's system sounds reasonably good, when you look at it like this.

    There are two kinds of people. One kind is an equipment guy. The other kind is a music lover. Sometimes they overlap.

    An equipment guy will audition selected cuts for you to get a wow response. For him the recording is the means to the end of displaying his stereo.

    The music lover is like the honey badger:

    http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/e858312f83/the-crazy-nastyass-honey-badger

    He really doesn't give a shirt what you play the recording through, as long as he can hear the notes.

  5. It's been demonstrated over the years that, in a DBT, listeners can rarely distinguish between much of anything, let alone what is powering the rest of the equipment.

    Not true. I have observed under numerous occasions that as long as an audiophile is provided with once piece of critical data they can distinguish easily.

    $$$$$$ Big Smile

    Dave

    Good one that I will remember to use in the future.

    There are two kinds of people. One kind brags about how much he paid for something. The other brags about how little he paid.

  6. i am back, well over a year since i posted the heritage vs new question. i got some heresy's 1980 isth. i love them. my fisher loves them and they love the fisher. thank everyone for joining in on the original thread. They have a damaged cone on one woofer, so eventually it will need to be replaced...am now in heritage heaven.

    You made a good choice, Frank, with the Heresies instead of the new junk made in China or wherever.

    And now for the rest of the story. When Paul W. Klipsch had finished designing and building the Heresy speaker, it lacked a name at that point. He was thinking of something that would fit in thematically with the marching band sound that he so dearly loved. He thought about calling the speakers Sousas, after John Philip Sousa, of course. He thought about calling them the Alfords, after Kenneth Alford. He even considered calling them the Fuciks, after the great Czech composer Julius Fucik, but it didn't take an engineer to foresee the problems he'd get into with that one. LOL!

    Anyway, PWK was always fond of his sweets. While running through possible names, he was close to finishing a chocolate bar . . . Do you know where this is headed? Yep, he got some melted chocolate from his Hershey bar on his fingers, and then from there mysteriously (or not, he abhorred napkins) transferred to his yet untitled speaker. Just then a friend of his came into his shop, saw the speaker, asked "What's that?" PWK said, "That's Hershey," thinking that he was referring to the stain on the speaker finish. Anyway, PWK didn't enunciate clearly enough since he still had some chocolate in his mouth. It came out a little garbled, like Her-sey. The friend repeated it, but modified the first vowel sound a little, pronouncing it more like Hair-sey. PWK had a eureka moment and settled with Heresy on the spot.

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