ah oh JPN

The sound of music from good audio systems from bygone eras is as addictive as the sound of a good engine in a classic car...



 
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I have messed around with audio equipment since high school. I think that interest was what motivated me to become an electronic engineer.

My first big project was a sand filled cabinet speaker. Seems silly today, given that my driver was some dinky 8 inch thing, but building a double cabinet and filling the void between the two sections with sand made for a very dead, very heavy cabinet! Unfortunately my carpentry skills were such that it leaked sand all the time, so my room floor was always a mess.

I have had a wide array of stereo systems over the years. Today's is by far the best one:

Magnepan 7i speakers
Two DIY 12 inch sub woofers
NAD C658 streamer
NAD C298 power amplifier
Rega Planar 6 turntable
5 TB hard drive for hi def digital files
NAD C538 CD player.
Adcom GFA 555 200 Wpc power amplifier (for the subs)

Use a Bluesound app on my iPad to control things

I also have eight Adcom GFA 565 mono bloc 300 watt power amplifiers. I found these could be bought cheap because most of them didn't work. I figured out what usually failed (leaking electrolytic caps that poison the voltage amplifier board) created a new board, and have rehabbed a couple of them. I was going to use them in my system, but the NAD C298 is so good, I'll probably just sell the Adcoms.

In 2016 I designed and built a complex multi-rate multi-source streamer, but about the time I got that operational NAD came out with the C658, which did all of that plus Dirac room equalization, so I shelved that project. Was an interesting learning experience though. Good digital audio is ALL about the clocks!...

Back in about 2003 I built a DecWare WO32 sub. that was an interesting folded horn cabinet with two heavy 10 inch drivers. Very clean and fast, but huge!
 
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