[2004-10-9]

For this Atomic City Audionerdz meeting, we descended on Mike's house to hear his Klipsch horns. He just got them and is looking for amplification. We brought a selection of stuff from a monster Adcom solid state amp (which didn't sound too bad despite my thermionic prejudices), Bottlehead Paramours, my 2a3 monkey amp, and my 6v6 hifi amp. Source was an Adcom Cd player and 1 of 2 Foreplay preamps.

Horns are so cool. It is really amazing to hear dynamics like this, and the bass was much better than I imagined. Some folks liked the bass better with the solid state amp. The only drawback was that in this configuration, they didn't really image. It felt like we couldn't get far enough away from them for them. A bigger room would be interesting.

This was a very revealing system, and so it left us with a good impression of the qulaity of the recordings we were listening to. I am just beginning to learn about the recording process, but it is clear tht many recordings are not up to the challenge of playback on a system like this. Most sounded compressed, glaring, and non-live. I would like to hear this same setup with a good vinyl front end. Maybe next time.

Mike and his wife were welcoming hosts and we very much enjoyed our time there, listening to music much to late (and much too loud) for a "school night".