Parrot

Yes, a good sense of humor, or sense of the absurd, is helpful.

I'm glad you're digging it. Starker's one of the great ones.

Is this your current take on tube amplification, Dr. Who? "pretty lightbulbs"?

A perfect memory could be tested. I read a list of twenty terms to you, and you repeat them back to me from memory. I can compare what you remember to my list, and score the accuracy. But a perfect auditory memory? It's untestable. How could anyone else know whether you remember what a performance sounded like? How can you yourself know if you remember it correctly, or if you just think you do? You're asking us to believe you, based on faith.

Obviously, Dave, none of us here have anything even approaching the superhuman ability of your golden ears and auditory memory. Makes one wonder why any of the rest of us simpletons even bother to post anything when we could just wait for your take on the matter and have THE TRVTH revealed.

What kind of audio system is he going to have in the new kitchen, if you know?

He did not attend this year.

Arf, Digital amps suck bigtime. I have to seriously question the ears of anyone who would recommend them.

It would be fun to ask Roy, "Where are the Jubilees if they're so incredible? What are you afraid of?" But I am not going to attend. Feel free to ask Roy the questions for me.

Any thread with a picture of me in it is going to be popular.

I think there should be only one big general forum, possibly even just one continuous thread for all subjects.

Maybe if there were a Home Theater section in the Forum . . . ?

I'm sure he'll be back to attend the Klipsch get-together in Indy.

Exactly what I was thinking! I just love these casual asides "Anarchist" drops in like the "Miller effect" and An optimized triode implementation involves making some additional changes beyond merely disconnecting the UL taps and sticking a resistor between pins 3 and 4 on the output tubes. Too funny!

Joe, I bet you're going to love it.

Cornwalls used to be good enough for Smilin, who is arguably THE greatest audiophile the world has ever known.

Many folks think they are the most attractive speaker ever made by anyone. In Alaska, you'd be doing all right paying $1000 each.

Someone thought the Martinelli horn on Craig's bastardized La Scala was ringing, but it turned out to be the phone.

Now we learn the real reason Dr. Who prefers CDs to LPs: They don't weigh as much. I figured that Dr. Who, being a youngster in a group of old farts, would be the logical choice to help me haul up two boxes of records. I gave him the lighter box that had only 50 LPs in it, and I took the one with 70 LPs. I enjoyed your AKFest review, Doc, especially the part about telling the guy with the fancy turntable that it sounded the most like a CD player that you had heard. That must've crushed him.

A few things that sounded bad in certain various systems: Rattling when turned up! I'm not sure if it was the speakers physically or something else in the room, but I think it was the speakers themselves. Room-sized vocalist instead of real-sized vocalist. Flat imaging. Lack of dynamics: On a familiar recording, not enough sudden impact when you know it should be there. At least a couple systems were downright unpleasant to listen to, and I had to leave. I'm guessing it was distortion. And the offender here were the vocals! There was a system I called Roger in to listen to, but in the meantime they had changed the music and what had sounded very nice now sounded very bad. That meant their system couldn't handle just anything, and in this case they were the ones choosing the material. But I don't want to over-emphasize the negative. There were some very nice systems that would probably make 95% of people happy. As I'm thinking about it, some of these included some of the more modestly priced equipment. I wonder if there can be a negative correlation on price and quality []

Thanks, I am going to buy some of his stuff. Sadly, he died some years back.

I was told that the McIntosh system that we heard would sell for . . . wait for it . . . a cool quarter of a million dollars! Some of the private comments I heard about it from attendees are unprintable on a public forum.

Call me horny, but I liked the La Scalas and a pair of Altecs down the hall better than any other speaker systems at AKFest. I did hear a lot of good gear and also some other stuff that I would have not wanted for free, including the most expensive items there. At least the presenters seemed to like their own bad-sounding equipment, even if no one else did. Some of it sounded okay in its range, but when pushed a little would horrify you. Interestingly, though, it wasn't the auditioners who pushed the volume, but the presenters, and they seemed oblivious to the shortcomings they were revealing. Go figure. But there were a lot of rooms that had quite enjoyable systems, if not as engaging as I'm used to at home. This year there were two or three systems showed off exclusively with music servers, some with CDs, and some exclusively vinyl. The vinyl sounded the best, no matter what Dr. Who says. Craig's La Scalas were, for the great majority of the time, kept at levels where you could carry on a reasonable level conversation, without shouting. No headbangers around this time! I sold some LPs and CDs dirt cheap, and picked up several nice records. Gilbert (not the Klipsch Gilbert) played a fantastic recording of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, that I hadn't heard before. I'm going to have to buy this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Kamakawiwo'ole

Craig and I had a fun time experiencing Picky's extremely well-planned home theater after AKFest closed down Saturday night. We wished that we'd have had time for an entire movie. Thanks for the hospitality, Picky.

True audiophiles are single.