PureSilver
New Member
I’m starting this thread to share my experiences while getting back into Hi-Fi stereo audio as a serious listener. In the mid 1990’s I was pretty hard-core and voraciously consumed knowledge, listened, tweaked, and enjoyed my system. That was a long time ago and my stereo has been largely on the shelf for the last 2 decades until two weeks ago. So, here’s my journey back to the enjoyment, tweaking, researching, and learning. Before I can ask for help or input though, I think it’s important for y’all to understand where I am now, and for that I think you’ll have to understand where I’ve been with it. After that we should have a pretty good base to start with and be able to move forward with my head dead center in a fantastic sound field. Here’s my gem as she sits today, and the text that will follow tells you more about what it was/is and how I got here.
I started getting into music and stereos like 99% of the rest of world (I assume) when I was in High School. My start was a bit unique because I attended High School in Okinawa Japan in the late ‘80s. As a result I had access to the enormous array of gadgets and electronics being produced in Japan. My dad and I started getting pretty focused on the technical capabilities of the products and had a lot of fun picking things out, listening to them, and playing around with arrangements and whatnot. That’s when I also found a love for what I think is best described as New Age music. Music through our ‘serious’ system was about focus and relaxation- I guess in a way it was meditation. Don’t get me wrong though, I still had my collection of ‘cool’ stuff- Depeche Mode, New Order, Big Audio Dynamite, White Snake, Hoodoo Gurus, Information Society and a host of others- but the pop stuff never really sounded different between cheap headphones and good speakers. I think it was more my mindset when I picked a particular CD (or Tape, gasp) more than anything else though.
My first stereo was a reasonable commodity Sony rack; the CD player (I think it was a CDP-350) was additional; with a pair of 500W Tamon speakers that had massive 18” woofers. That system made it for about a year before it was replaced by a Yamaha C-45 Control Amp and an Onkyo M-502 power amp (CD Player and speakers were the same) and that’s how the system was when I graduated and went off to college. Freshman year it stayed boxed up in mothballs mostly due to the 6 months of transit back from Japan; sophomore year I took it to my dorm second semester (yes, I was written up several times for loud music). One interesting thing that I don’t think much about anymore- I went into electrical engineering in my undergrad because of my interest in stereo gear and focused on Digital Signal Processing because I thought the laser and some digital magic at the core of my CD player we SO COOL- in other words my interest in music runs deep, very deep. Anyhow, the system stayed largely the same as I moved around for college and then my first job. I couldn’t find any pictures of my system, but here are the general components:
After six years of shuffling, moving, graduating, and job hunting, in ’96 I settled down a bit with work in Burlington VT. It was a great town and time for me- I had some cash from work, and LOTS of spare time to listen, read and think. My subscriptions to Stereophile, Glass Audio, Audio Electronics and a few other magazines were read cover to cover and then reread. I started thinking about my equipment very differently. I knew from my EE degree what all the specs meant now, not just from a black box perspective but from a down low circuit level. I started thinking about vacuum tubes a lot, and how components are not all created equally. I opened the boxes on my units- Onkyo power amp, C-45, and CD player. Junk wire, PCBs everywhere, low grade connectors- I saw how I could do better myself. That’s where and when my serious journey began, with a goal of doing it all better.
I started getting into music and stereos like 99% of the rest of world (I assume) when I was in High School. My start was a bit unique because I attended High School in Okinawa Japan in the late ‘80s. As a result I had access to the enormous array of gadgets and electronics being produced in Japan. My dad and I started getting pretty focused on the technical capabilities of the products and had a lot of fun picking things out, listening to them, and playing around with arrangements and whatnot. That’s when I also found a love for what I think is best described as New Age music. Music through our ‘serious’ system was about focus and relaxation- I guess in a way it was meditation. Don’t get me wrong though, I still had my collection of ‘cool’ stuff- Depeche Mode, New Order, Big Audio Dynamite, White Snake, Hoodoo Gurus, Information Society and a host of others- but the pop stuff never really sounded different between cheap headphones and good speakers. I think it was more my mindset when I picked a particular CD (or Tape, gasp) more than anything else though.
My first stereo was a reasonable commodity Sony rack; the CD player (I think it was a CDP-350) was additional; with a pair of 500W Tamon speakers that had massive 18” woofers. That system made it for about a year before it was replaced by a Yamaha C-45 Control Amp and an Onkyo M-502 power amp (CD Player and speakers were the same) and that’s how the system was when I graduated and went off to college. Freshman year it stayed boxed up in mothballs mostly due to the 6 months of transit back from Japan; sophomore year I took it to my dorm second semester (yes, I was written up several times for loud music). One interesting thing that I don’t think much about anymore- I went into electrical engineering in my undergrad because of my interest in stereo gear and focused on Digital Signal Processing because I thought the laser and some digital magic at the core of my CD player we SO COOL- in other words my interest in music runs deep, very deep. Anyhow, the system stayed largely the same as I moved around for college and then my first job. I couldn’t find any pictures of my system, but here are the general components:
After six years of shuffling, moving, graduating, and job hunting, in ’96 I settled down a bit with work in Burlington VT. It was a great town and time for me- I had some cash from work, and LOTS of spare time to listen, read and think. My subscriptions to Stereophile, Glass Audio, Audio Electronics and a few other magazines were read cover to cover and then reread. I started thinking about my equipment very differently. I knew from my EE degree what all the specs meant now, not just from a black box perspective but from a down low circuit level. I started thinking about vacuum tubes a lot, and how components are not all created equally. I opened the boxes on my units- Onkyo power amp, C-45, and CD player. Junk wire, PCBs everywhere, low grade connectors- I saw how I could do better myself. That’s where and when my serious journey began, with a goal of doing it all better.