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Public Nuisance

Entry 427, on 2006-11-16 at 14:43:39 (Rating 1, Activities)

I have been a hifi fanatic for many years (I know that in some quarters "hifi" isn't considered the correct way to describe real high quality audio, but it will suffice for now) but, due to lack of spare cash, I haven't kept the equipment I have had for many years up to date. Partly because of the availability of cheap parallel imports on Internet trading sites I have now been able to improve the situation. The system I have certainly isn't of the quality that people with huge budgets can assemble, but considering its composed of many parts of varying age, it works extremely well.

It all started when my old system started producing more distortion than music. I had had a similar problem in the past and diagnosed it as a fault with the power amp's output transistors. So I decided to buy a new amp, and because we now watch a lot of DVDs I bought a Marantz AV receiver instead of a conventional amp. Unfortunately the distortion remained and, after more comprehensive tests, I traced it to overheated and warped voice coils in my (old but beautiful) Mission speakers. This was also a problem I had fixed in the past. Yes, I know. I'm pretty rough on the equipment!

So I sent the speakers and my CD player away to be repaired. The CD player had been doing a lot of skipping so I thought it would be worth having it looked at as well. Shortly afterwards I was told the CD player, which was a fairly high-end model years ago when I bought it, couldn't be repaired, so it was back onto the Internet to get another DVD/CD player. Now I had everything except the speakers, until finally after 4 months, they turned up repaired.

At last I had a complete system again and have been "test driving" it for the last 2 days. The amp produces around 160 watts into 6 ohms so I can make quite a lot of noise and I am maybe being considered a public nuisance by the neighbours. Of course, if you have the music loud enough you can't hear them hammering on the door!

The new system produces very precise, controlled sound. The bass end is impressively solid: bass guitars, drums, etc are all very distinct where they might just appear as "generic bass" sounds on inferior equipment. The stereo imaging is also surprisingly good, considering I don't have the room and speaker placement ideally set up. And the detail in the top end is quite brilliant. I'm hearing new stuff (including recording defects) in music that I've listened to for years.

The photo shows my current setup: a Phillips TV (data projector or LCD TV next purchase maybe) a Panasonic super VHS video tape player, a Pioneer DVD recorder (with a hard disk for storage), the new Marantz AV amplifier, the new Marantz CD/DVD player, an Akai tape deck, a Rega Planar record deck with a Grace tone arm and Pickering cartridge (not used for many years), a Sony hifi video cassette recorder, my beloved Mission speakers (great sound quality - they don't make them like that any more - some cheaper speakers for surround sound DVDs will probably be next but the Missions are for serious music) and finally the remote controls (with a total of 350 buttons or 800 separate functions - enough to keep any gadget freak busy).

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