Thoriated_Tiger

Herr Beethoven was doing angry loud Heavy Metal before tubes even existed I didn't know this thread was limited to rock? I just don't have any rock box sets..

Huh.. All of mine are by Deutsche Grammophon / Arkiv In no order: 1. The Bach Organ Works as played by Helmut Walcha. Split in two "eras" (1950's and 1970's) with two different organs, one's a Schnitger (first half) the other's a Silbermann (much, much nicer, imo.) The Schnitger's kinda dry and etched to my ear, those mixturs *hurt* The music and playing, of course, is spectacular no matter where in the 11 discs you are. Walcha was the cat's meow, imo. 2. Mozart's Piano Concertos, Pinnock and the English Concert. This is so yummy it ain't even funny. Of the 3 sets I mention here, this box set has tbe best recordings. Puts you there. 7 discs. 3. Mozart's Symphones, Pinnock and English Concert again. Those kettledrums.. mrrrrrow. 12 disks 4. Beethoven 9 Symphonies, Elliot Gardiner & Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique. A departure from the 'everyone's done it' way of doing Beethoven.. I found it to be an aquired taste, but one I enjoy once acclimated to its different sound and Gardiner's rather brisk tempo. 3 disks + 1 with commentary. This is the recording which forced me to ditch my Stereo 70 and get somethng which could handle this recording. I hate it when that happens

Do you have a different power amp you can connect to the humming preamp? Or one you can borrow? If you've got everything 2-prong, then there should be no groundloop issues.. if it is humming with everything 2-prong, then something else is fishy. Alternatively, try a different preamp on the power amp.. at this point, the humming preamp is the suspect. Who made it and serviced it, out of curiosity? I don't know if an impedance mismatch between pre and power will make for hum.. I doubt it, tho..

I concur, ground-loop is most likely the issue. Here's where I diverge from the previous post. If the preamp has a 3-prong plug, leave that one as - is, and use cheater plugs to lift the grounds on all other components, including the power amp. The interconnects will provide a ground path for all the other components, grounding them all (once) to the preamp, which in turn is grounded to the electrical system. A ground loop is having multiple paths to ground. You want only one.

---------------- On 2/28/2005 10:52:00 AM rplace wrote: My screen has been up for about a month now and have watched a lot movies including several with lots of dark scenes. Either I don’t have a very tough to please eye or Panasonic and Carada have made blacks a non-issue in my HT. ---------------- It's interesting, to be sure. I have mine in Natural mode, lo-lamp, iris on, tweaked with thx optimizer for contrast and brightness, I had to eyeball the colors using Mahoromatic (anime) and a cel from said show. At an intellectual level, I know it can't produce black. Put it in shutter mode, and you'll see a dark charcoal -- LCD can't go black. Feh. Tell it to my eyes. Painting the back wall (opposite from the screen) is what really transformed the projector. I can't stress that enough. The screen helped, it does brighter and whiter whites than a bare wall -- but the big boost in percieved contrast and percieved black was painting that back wall. Cartoons are very tricky because the blacks are *truly* black, especially eye pupils.. and the whites are truly white, esp. eye highlights (in japanese animation.) The Panny 700 does 'em right, does 'em vibrantly and convincingly. Watching Mahoromatic (which is widescreen) on a 96" diag is spooky ^.^ And that's all I ask out of a display. Well, 2 things... can it do toons.. and can it do black and white. This one can! But it takes work. You *have* to cut out as much light from hitting the screen as you can -- and that includes the back wall, else light from the PJ will hit the screen, bounce back to the back wall, and from there back to the screen, washing out the picture -- just a little, but enough to destroy black perception and shadow detail. Put in fewer words, painting the back wall was like getting a whole new projector. No kiddin'.

My HT is nearing completion. Painted the back wall a flat, deep, royal blue, this alone did more to improve the percieved or apparent contrast than any other change I did. Not to mention the deep blue really shows off the panny ae700 (which is all silver.) The screen went up Sunday, it is a 96" diag 16:9 Carada Precision. The frame construction is awesome, 2 inches wide by 3/4 inch deep, flocked in black velvet. The frame just screws together forming a very stiff structure. The black velvet sucks up any overspill you may encounter in framing your picture. The screen itself is Classic Cinema White. Attaches to the back of the frame via snaps. A fair bit of stretching is needed, but the end result is drum-tight and extremely smooth and wrinkle-free. The screen is under tension from all sides. The end result is quite stunning, far better than I had anticipated from an LCD. It may not do true crt-level black, but it sure fools the eye and mind into thinking there is deep black. Cartoons look spectacular. Even something as tough as Master and Commander, with most of it being locked up in a smokey, dark ship, looks pretty good, with enough shadow detail to satisfy. So, in short, for those looking for a reasonably, sanely priced fixed screen, Carada is a go. The 96" diagonal cost me $600 delivered, and I feel the build quality is better in the Carada than in the "entry-level" Drapers and Da-Lites I've seen. For a lot less cash. No affiliation to http://www.carada.com other than being a satisfied customer. Now all I need is drapes in that same deep royal blue...

Supertramp's "Give a Little." The girl that little piece of music is attached to is long gone, but I still wince when I hear that guitar intro along with the kickdrum. Any of you have a record in your shelf that you can't play? It's there, you're aware of it, yet your fingers manage to flip past it on their way to another.. On the plus side, "Appetite for Destruction" reminds me of my last, fiercest rebellion in my late teens, when I told those who "raised me" to shove it, told my "friends" to shove it, and left for an uncertain and mildly frightening future, alone. That was the soundtrack for my departure from what I knew, 15 years ago, to where I am now, with a 10-year interlude in the usaf. The funny thing is, buried and mixed in all this life soundtrack is classical, which *never* fails to calm, soothe, inspire, and at times, rile me -- for some reason, to me, classical is immune to associations with people or places. To me, classical's always been there, from the very beginning, and cannot be tainted by any force i've yet encountered. When things get rotten, Mozart plays.

Blackout cloth -- the white stuff behind heavy drapes. Any decent fabric shop will have it, by that name.

Speakers have grilles? Off. No kids, no pets. I like seeing the drivers.. espcially big ole horns. The sole exception is a pair of infinity rs1000s I use at work. Too homely to have naked. They look plain wrong without the grilles.

I'm curious as well. ThinkGeek carries 'em too, and they're not known to carry non-functional garbage. Pointless stuff, yes, but not non-functional

I suspect any ex-Bo$e employee *knows* their product is sub-standard. All the folks at Indy have to do is sit this guy between two K-horns properly fed, and playback this guy's favorite cuts. After they get his heart going again after *that* experience, I think he'll be OK An engineer is an engineer is an engineer. Seems to me Klipsch is getting ready to unleash a major can of whup-(censored) in the next 5 years. Put another way: Were I the head cheese of Ferrari, I would *not* object to snagging a top-shelf engineer from Ford. Chances are, the Ford guy had his hands tied by Ford corporate culture. Ditto for this Bo$e guy. Once Klipsch de-programs him from Amar's lies, he'll be fine. Yeah, I know this Bo$e guy may well be reading this. Welcome to the strangest speaker co. in the world, imo The *funniest* part would be if this ex-Bo$er has a pair of horns stuffed into his corners at his pad.. sometimes one must do dirty, horrible work to pay the bills...

Now that I see it at work, on a nice, calibrated Sony monitor, it's most definitely some kind of exponential (!) horn for the HF. Noticed the *center* channel has one too! This system should kick the llama's (censored). I wonder -- what's the low x-over point for that big Tractrix?

The monitor here at home is *really* hosed, so I can't really tell -- but is that a HF horn I see sitting underneath the big Tractrix in the towers? If so, that makes me a lot. Here's hoping they will at least match, if not outperform, my Fortes. In every way. That's a tall order, and I know Klipsch can fill it

---------------- On 2/22/2005 5:06:44 PM Scudd wrote: If Klipsch wants to position themselves as another fast food retailer of AV goods thats fine. Wow, look how much they have changed if they perceive Bose as there bench mark for competition. I remember the days when Mac and Klipsch were like brothers. If you had one, you had the other. Far be it for me to think that Klipsch is Mac's equal or Krell for that matter. ---------------- I'll feed this troll one last time. Bose isn't a performance benchmark, good lord, my old Telfunken Allegro tube radio sounded better.. it is a *sales* benchmark. Bose sells more speakers than anyone else (is it true K finally stepped over 'em? WTF? That's great news!) Bose has made it a business model to snooker gullible fools into shelling out big bucks for really sub-par sound. There's nothing wrong, imo, in putting Bose smack in the middle of the gunsight. They deserve to be knocked down a peg or ten, and I can't think of a better speaker maker than K to do so. I consider K's philosophy to be the Anti-bose. Whereas bose sells smoke and mirrors, K sells performance. If you dislike K that much, why not go buy JBL? Oh wait -- their hi-dollar horns aren't sold here.. Asia only. Or why don't you buy Tannoy? Oh wait, you'll be putting food on some Englishman's table. Can't have that, can we? As for performance, I feel little out there can touch Klipsch, be it Reference or Heritage -- and that's Big Ole Altecs or *really* Big Ole JBLs. Everything else sounds like a wet blanket to my ears. (Except 'stats ;o) The biggest 2 challenges I see K fighting is: a) de-programming the audiophools from their anti-horn stance, de-programming Joe Sixpack from believing what Amar Bose tells 'em. Oh, and 3 -- dealing with narrow-minded folk who can't see beyond their noses and into the future.

I'd love a shallow, 6 1/4" coaxial horn (a-la-Jensen / Tannoy) for my car... Some would consider such a K speaker heretical, I say build it. ;o) Didn't Panasonic use to make something like that? I dimly recall a coax 'horn' 6x9 back in the stone age.. Problem is, you'd never be able to make a midrange horn for a car. The one in my Fortes is small, it's a 700hz horn, and it's like a foot and change long.. the only horn-loaded part would be the tweeter. But it'd still sound sweeter than the Infinity garbage I got screwed into my car doors.

Hey Scudd -- That Sound Advise dropped K was good. I think it was the other way around, though -- I think Klipsch told SA to go take a hike. When I bought my SF2's there in '02, the salesdroid tried to get me by hook or crook to go with Boston Acoustic. Now why would I want a speaker which sounds like it's got a wet blanket draped over it?! He also resorted to the old 'horns sound like megaphones' bit. I walked out, with my SF2s, and never went back to SA. I don't buy in retail stores anymore. The sales 'help' is beyond pathetic. Knowledge in this field is close to nil. The web has replaced retail stores for me. The latest bit I bought for my HT, a *sizable* purchase, was done sight-unseen over the web, and I'm happy as a clam with my new projector. Ditto for my Fortes. I bought 'em off the web unheared. The closest to a Forte I had heared was Cornwalls a friend has. Klipsch didn't dissapoint, the Fortes floored me from the very first note. As for china? We did it to ourselves. We've transitioned from making widgets to a service-based economy. Other countries are more than willing to make our widgets. My SC1 is MIC. Looks and sounds just fine. I'll be a green monkey if I can tell the difference without looking at the sticker. So lay off it. The only way I'll say Klipsch has sold out is if they drop horns and adopt soft-domes (granted, I feel the Synergy and Refs are a little short of the mark, but the Reference Premiere should fix that.. a return to the midrange horns.) To me, as long as klipsch uses horns and *doesn't follow the crowd *too* closely* they're okkay in my book. Would you rather Klipsch had become one of those fondly-remembered brands from ye olden days like Dynaco and Fisher and a host of others? They didn't survive -- Klipsch has, despite making what most audiophiles consider to be heretical speakers not worthy of their time. (joke's on them, I think even the low-end Klispch beat the tar out of most conventional speakers.) It's fashionable to beat on this company as of late. Fashions come and go, and are usually questionable.

Driving mine with a 60wpc pushpull 6550-based Audio Research D-70 II. It wasn't for power, it was for the cleanliness, control, authority and sheer *whack*. Cleanest thing I've ever heared. Like if they were made for each other. Colin, you find the Forte bass lacking? That's the first thing that grabbed me by the ya-ya, once I got past how *clean* the mids are.. Bass-shy they aren't ;o)

700 sq ft shoebox 1-bdr, South FL, just me, 3 computers, a lot of juice-eating vacuum tubes, ac on 24/7 @ 75F (except when it's cool enough to actually open the windows.. maybe 2 months out of the year..) ...33 kwh/day. 120 bucks. Stays fairly steady, dips a bit when its cooler and I can open windows. Will hit ~150 bucks during the dog days..

Maybe it's the cartoon lover in me but I like these paintings. Yeah, they're not toons, but they use the same idea: put an animal into a human situation and give it human qualities, or in short, anthromorphise it. *shrug* Now a black velvet Elvis, now y'er talkin'...

skonopa, nice end result! Yeah, I knew it. Massive case of video hangover. The AE700 let me throw an eight-foot wide picture, on bare wall for now, the screen's coming next week.. need to sit down and evaluate samples to make a decision. The AE700 was good 'nuff to do Vader's costume right. You can see the texture on his cape, and it looks black. We know LCD's don't do black, but this one fools your eyes into seeing black. O.o I calibrated with THX Optimizer, then fine-tuned color using an anime called Mahoromatic.. of which I have several cels.. that's as close to perfect as I can get it. Result.. no tint change, and a -2 on color from factory default. Outstanding device. I swear the hi-fi sounds better now with the bigger image I'm still about 3 weeks from completion.. need new, short narrow gear rack, the screen, and painting the back and side walls to minimize light feedback onto the screen.. new drapes are called for, too... it never ends.. The hardest thing.. is being at work today... I wanna go home and pway wit my new toy!!! I get the impression front projection is the visual equivalent of the fully horn-loaded speaker..

...had never torn down an existing HT rig to build a new one. 3 hours into it, and I still don't have the shelf for the PJ built, let alone installed the PJ. 3 hrs to dismantle, clean and move the previous system out of the way and ready it for pickup by its new owner.. The audio rig, however, is back in place.. i'm just taking a breather.. I'm one shelf build away from my having the pj in place and running.. panny ae700. Finally, a picture big 'nuff to go with the big, big audio the Synergies (sf2/sb2/sc1) give me. The prior display was a 35" sony trini. Back to the construction.. I have a feeling I'm showing to work tomorrow AM with a bad video hangover..

I very rarely fall asleep at the hi-fi. Mine just doesn't let me fall asleep -- it demands my undivided attention. I can't even use it to play background music because of this. But I fully dig what Colin says. I get into this disconnected half-here-half-not-here state where the body remains in the chair, but the soul just wanders off wherever the music takes it. Which is why I sometimes call my rig the Warp Engine. It bends timespace and takes me to other places and times. I find it easiest to get into this trance-like state late, late at night, lights out, low volume. As low as possible while still getting good bass impact.

---------------- On 2/10/2005 6:13:41 PM DeanG wrote: You guys are killing me. You better have some serious quality gear behind your eBay Heritage setup if you want to dance with a set of RF-7's and a high quality sub. ---------------- Some of us do have top-shelf gear behind our Heritage boxen. Really top-flight stuff abounds in the forum, y'know. Most keep it quiet, because quality gear speaks for itself. And I find your attempt at belittling the Ebay Heritage folks rather distasteful. If one can find better sound for less buckage via ebay, well, c'est la guerre, ne? Unless you enjoy blowing a large wad of cash just for the fun of it.. that's always your choice. Come over. We'll have a couple of ales, and then proceed to crush your chestbone with 60 very nice, utterly dynamic, very transparent, and *extremely* wide-band, fully balanced tetrode watts. We won't even have to play loud. 80db will do just fine. You will also notice the lack of subs -- the Fortes don't need crutches to pulverize the listener. I'd still wish for a horn-loaded bass, but hey.. I have an apartment, not a house. There's no way to make a small bass horn. While we're at it, you may also notice that voices, and instruments sound *different* through these. You'll likely note the voices and instruments float in space and are *completely*, utterly devoid of the "am-radio" scratchy hash common with cones (yes, even the pretty copper ones). It's actually quite eerie the first time you hear it. It makes you realize that sometimes the old, original way is still the best way. ---------------- I've been listening with K-55-V's and Type A's on my Klipschorns for the last few days, if you're good -- I WON'T tell you what I think. ---------------- Go ahead and say it. They need better bracing on the cabs. The mid horn could be better. So can the HF horn. If you don't want your k-55, A-network K-horns, I'll gladly give 'em a home even though I don't have the space they require. It's obvious they don't satisfy, and only the all-conquering sent-from-heaven Rf-7 will float your boat. I'll say this: I found the RF-7's midrange to be almost as hashy and un-remarkable as those in common garden-variety speakers. If Klipsh coulda pushed the crossover to a much lower point, sub-1khz, they woulda absolutely rawked. They're better than the norm, but not by much, not enough better to justify the expenditure, in my view. The fortes, tho, were stunning from the very first second. They had me the instant the needle hit the vinyl, the instant the laser hit the pits. Now why is it that neither the Syns nor the Refs blew my lid off at first listen? I wonder. The only, *only* redeeming quality I found in the Rf-7 is the sound of that absolutely wonderful big Tractrix HF horn. I will concede it has the upper hand over the old exponential phenolics in transparency and clarity.. but not by much. Nice improvement. Was that midrange hash the thing that prodded you to try and change what the Klipsch engineers determined was the best crossover for the RF? To try and cover up what can't be cleaned up? I can only think of how nice of a midrange Tractrix Klipsch could build today, should they choose to do so. If it's half as good as their HF horn on the References, they'll have an instant classic on their hands. The thought of a big Tractrix starting at 500, 600, 700hz makes me grin a very spacey, very content grin. Till then, Enjoy your cones.

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. ---------------- On 2/10/2005 11:52:22 AM Joshua Ryan Hall wrote: Paul W. Klipsch absolutely chose horns for their efficiency. I know because he told me. ---------------- I stand corrected. It is sometimes difficult to separate efficiency from low distortion, when reading Mr. Klipsch's writings on the subject and the writings of those who have interviewed him. I'll put out this little nugget from an interview of Mr. Klipsch for Speaker Builder, done by Bruce Edgar: (BE) What inspired you to build horns? (PWK) They are more efficient. It was many years after we built horns commercially that we realized efficiency per se wasn't all that important. The best reason is the lowered distortion you obtain from horns. Clear as Lowther? (mud?) I appreciate your comments and reassurance, Mr Hall. I don't think anyone (yet) has flat-out accused Klipsch of selling out and becoming a "me too" speaker maker. If anything, I think the Reference is visually striking, and won't be confused with anyone else's product. The problem is one of perception. Many die-hards who remember or still use your outstanding speakers of yore perceive the modern ones to be a little less than stellar. Frankly, to my ear, they are. But y'know what? They *still* slaughter most of the competition, at least in my estimation. I bought SF2 instead of Reference because I didn't find the difference in cleanliness to be that much bigger in the Reference. Not in the limited time I had to hear both. Then I thought about upgrading to Reference anyway (more expensive = better, right?), and that's when I heared a pair of Cornwalls at a friend's house, and heared, again, what that midrange horn does -- I scrapped my plans for Reference, and bought Forte. The SF2s migrated to my HT, where they displaced a five-channel Infinity SM system, and were joined by an SC1 and a pair of SB2s to complete the 5 channel Synergy setup. Much much better sound from the little Synergies than from Boston Acoustics, Bose, Infinity, JBL, and a host of others I listened to prior to getting the Synergies and Fortes. As I opined in an earlier post, the RF and Synergy line handle the mids with cones. This is so contrary, so heretical, so anathema to the Klipsch philosophy that it can color one's perceptions about the whole line. The lack of midrange horn is noticable in a direct comparison between Heritage and Synergy / Reference, at least to my ear. It isn't subtle, it's pretty blatant. To me, anyway. That's why I was rather pleased to learn via this thread Klipsch apparently has this thing called Reference Premier which will be handling the midrange with horn. That pleases me because it lets me know y'all didn't forget why all the old Ks have a midrange horn... not to mention, give us Heritage-like performance in a more space-efficient, more modern package (I personally prefer the older speaker style, short n' squat, but I'm in the minority these days, I guess.. progress n' all..) As long as y'all make speakers which are *noticably* cleaner than the conventional-thinking competition, you're okkay. Aw hell, the way the market works, you could just make mediocre speakers like Everyone Else and still make a killin'... but that's not the Klipsch way.

Oh bloody 'ell with the dupes... this one was my bad.