2004/07/05 13:33:00
I brought my stereo while at university and it is superb. I first got some smoke damaged speakers and an Amplifier, hooked up my old “party center” stereo and went out the next day to buy a tape player that sounded less like it was playing down a bad phone line. The next year brought a new student loan and more summer work and so it was time to move to the digital age and I got a pioneer CD player for it’s clean open sound. Then it was a new amp as the old one was not quite there. I spent a whole afternoon with a bunch of CDs and a very nice man at a Hi-Fi shop in Manchester, trying all types of Amp’s. My final choice had ample base, but not to much and a nice sharp, crisp and throughly British sound. I had found the Kenwood too soft and the NAD too Bassey for my speakers. Many happy hours followed getting lost in music and life was good. I I had a really nice sound and the music I was listening too sounded completely different from before. I was actually starting to notice CDs that were badly recorded! Now, many years later,after setting it up again I am having a couple of issues.
1. My CD player is
busted, the lens dropped of the laser and even though Richer Sounds
managed to stick it back on again it is still not reading a lot of
CD’s. I can get a new laser and could probably fit it myself
but it would cost £63 plus P+P and may not even be the real
problem!
2. My speakers are huge. Well they are not the massive floor
standers that I would have in my ideal audio setup but they are
pretty big. They also have to stand about a meter away from the
wall to get the best sound so they take up an enormous amount of
space. Smaller shelf mounting speakers would solve this quite
simply as there are some of equal quality to mine now.
3. I have also discovered an interesting earthing fault somewhere
in either my stereo or my laptop as when I plug the laptop into my
computer speakers all is fine but plugging into the stereo, creates
a lot of static. I have even tried just touching the earths on the
side of the connectors and the sound goes all funny (technical term
that) on the computer speakers.
4. The office room where I have setup all this lot is full of
humming computers!
5. I have not made any time to sit down and listen to the albums
that I have brought. I put them on, then a huge list of other
things that I should be doing springs to mind and I get up and
leave.
So to this end I am looking at changing things slightly. I am going to have a try of Sarah’s old CD player, but I feel that I could get the same sound from a PC playing the flac encoded files, that I have ripped from my CDs, using the Sound blaster card in the server. My latest ideas center around a DAC of some description so that I can pipe music down a fiber and away from noisy computers to either a separate DAC or AV receiver.
I may re-investigate the dining room as audio room as well, but this will require a rug to absorb some of the sound as it has a wooden floor and also a sofa, again to absorb sound but also to sit on! I do like the idea of having a pull down screen and projector in that room and I could also drop A/V cables down from the office above to play music and movies.
This would probably mean getting something like the Denon AVR-1804 and possibly some Mission m30 Cinema speakers. And a DVD player with SACD or DVD Audio support. Then again I could buy a small car for that much so I may just leave it for now!
Just putting some ideas down really no concrete plans as yet. Much as I really like the sound of my current stereo setup I think that it may be time for some big changes.
Anybody want to by some sweet Hi-Fi Components, boxed as new?
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