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I've always loved music, most of it popular. When I was in elementary school, I listened to LPs of The Beatles and Chuck Mangione with my mom. My audio budget was limited - I had a monaural tape recorder. So, radio was king. I pioneered my own high fidelity recordings by hanging an outboard microphone from the light fixture in my room and placing the trusty clock radio underneath. I'd set the station and wait for a good song to come on, start the recorder and tiptoe out of the room. Imperfections in the studio environment resulted in many of my early compilations having all manner of special effects. Remixes weren't a thing yet then or I might have been onto something. I bought my first system from a friend when I was 16 years old in Kodiak, Alaska. It wasn't much; a dual cassette deck, integrated amp and speakers. The friend somehow got the contract to run the high school dances. We joined forces and used our cheap and tremendously inadequate equipment to entertain our fellow students for two years. The operation required preparing tape collections by cueing the cassettes to the songs we wanted to play. The mixing board consisted of turning down the master volume, stopping one tape and starting the other. If we were lucky, the correct song would come up and all was well. This was not always the case. We liked California Coolers and would bring them to the dances. Usually once things were underway and the lights were down, we'd pour into large McDonald's cups. Musical selections would get interesting a couple of hours in and we had a special menu we weren't brave enough to play except during the last hour. It seemed the patrons were onboard the last hour too, so I think we weren't the only ones cheating the system. In college I wanted power. We played a lot of Metallica and Ministry. This system was now CD-based, with a Proton D-1200 which put out something like 600 watts per channel through a pair of Advent Legacys. My buddy had another pair of Legacys and some Klipsch monitors. This system would shake all four floors of our dorm building. No kidding, every single room in the stack felt the earthquake. It was awesome. After that we rented the upstairs of an up/down duplex. We had all 6 speakers juiced up with the Proton and a big Adcom. We had something close to 1,000 watts per channel in that living room. This potential problem wasn't - a rock band resided downstairs. Our home stereo could hold its own with their band practices and they told us to turn it down more than once. We were so proud. After college, this system followed me for a while. There were changes here and there but the big amp and bigger speakers stayed. When my wife and I bought our first house, she wanted speakers off the floor and on a built-in, chest-high shelf. The Advent Legacys were wide and squat speakers and atop the shelf they were intimidating. This was my first run-in with the ever-famous Wife Acceptance Factor. So, out they went and in came some very nice Tannoy dual-concentric monitors. Other significant upgrades followed. The Tannoys made way for small floorstanders. All was well until I heard about the Clari-T amplifier from Red Wine Audio. At 6 watts per channel, efficient speakers were needed. To play around, I built TNT's Big Fun Box, a bass reflex cabinet with a wideband 8" Fostex driver. The floorstanders went up for sale three days later. My audio worldview jumped the tracks and I was on the hunt for speakers that could deliver the speed, coherence and tone of the BFBs, add some bass extension and lose the ragged edge in the presence band. I found that with Zu Druids, followed by Definition 1.5s and Definition Pros. I've addressed my Pros somewhat differently than usual, enlisting a TacT 2.2XP to handle room correction and crossover between the main and bass arrays. The rest of the system has been in flux. My goal was zero compromise, any music at any volume - and I believe I've done it. I still like the heavy stuff but there's less of that on tap these days. Jazz is in the mix quite a bit. I like acoustic guitar and other unamplified music. Vocals are important. I like electronic music and hip hop - this rig will play it uncompressed and loud with thunderous bass. For movies, the sound is like a modern theater though smaller in size. Being able to adjust all parameters of the crossovers allows perfect blending between the subwoofers and mains so even on upright bass, it's very hard to identify the handoff. All this is fully SET compatible. Since the Definition Pros are entirely passive, the signal path is somewhat divergent between the main and bass arrays. Currently, the primary system looks like this:
Second System:
I hope to promote interaction between manufacturers and music lovers, especially with small and innovative firms. What shape this will take is yet unknown but it sure will be fun to find out. On various forums, I post as miklorsmith. My review columns for 6moons will be tagged Outside as per Srajan's idea to use my somewhat unconventional setup as a way to capture assignments and sensibilities off the beaten path. As the photo shows, outside will suit me just fine. |
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