Hello from Dorset in the UK's sunny South West

[joethebus]

Sometimes.

I scratch a living hiring out a couple of old London buses, and am mostly occupied looking after and cherishing my gorgeous wife and four (now grown up) kids.

In a previous life I worked in film and television as a cameraman while running a small studio in central London, and developed a discerning ear and fondness for decent kit. As the various technologies rocket on (with precious little regard for whether I'm keeping up) I'm trying to figure out how to get high fidelity coupled with the convenience of digital at home as I strive for the sound I hear at the better (ie where the venues are OK acoustically) gigs.

Not everything that has been written on this subject is reliable, I have found.

So I'll be asking quite a few questions. Please bear with me if sometimes I don't seem very articulate, I don't always seem able to say exactly what I mean; but I'm taking all this quite seriously and putting in a fair bit of effort. So any of you, and I'm sure there are many, who are a few paces in front who are willing to help with my quest will have my gratitude.

I can be met at several of the UK Festivals getting the punters on and then off site - and then muscling my way into the best listening positions while the musicians are playing. All aboard The Big Red Bus!

With best wishes to all

Joe

 

[amirm]

Welcome to the forum Joe. My dad has a vacation house in Brighton beach so I spent good bit of time in southern part of the UK but sadly, never made it to the southwest corner. I am going to take your word for it that it really is sunny .

We love questions here. That is what makes the forum produce what it produces (knowledge). So go right ahead.

 

[NorthStar]

---Hi Joe, and Welcome!

Bob

 

[treitz3]

Hello, Joe and welcome to the WBF from a sunny [since about an hour ago] North Carolina! Do you have a system that you currently listen too or are you wanting to build one?

 

[joethebus]

Thank you for the kind words of welcome.

Currently the beating heart of my system is a pair of Rogers Export Monitors I bought for a stupidly insignificant amount of money about two years ago. I listen in a smallish room asymetrically (that is I sit at a bit of an angle to the speaks which are placed fairly well out into the room) with plenty of bookshelves and soft furniture and I'm lucky in that I can't detect any room induced horrors.

Amplification of digital music is by a Rogers E20a valve amp, a sweet device that doesn't have a phono stage for the Rega P2/Aiwa AN-8745 record player; so I have borrowed my brother's Quad 405/Quad34 preamp combo for vinyl.

Digital sources are an Orelle CD-10T deck (SPDIF cable), a newish (late 2011) Mac Mini (SPDIF optical, Pure Music software), and an Antec Windows PC media centre (SPDIF cable, JRiver software) all routed through a Beresford Caiman DAC.

The sound of CDs is as good as can be expected, and well recorded high res tracks played out of the Mac Mini sound very good indeed. The media centre sounds much better through an M-Audio firewire interface than through the Caiman, so I reckon I haven't got the hang of getting decent SPDIF sound out of Windows yet.

What I'm after is a great vinyl sound with the (widely advertised but not always easy to achieve) convenience of digital.

I have recently bought an EMT 948 deck which I will (very soon) equip with a TSD 15 cartridge (do I go for spherical or super fine?) and the transformer mods for moving coil. That should give me good vinyl playback. The next step is that I'll need to learn how to make decent needle drops, and I'll have to get them into a digital library properly catalogued.

That task, I suspect is going to be an enduring nightmare and I'll be floundering about severely in need of help quite a lot while its going on.

I have a wish list, of course, though acquiring the know how to make the most of what I already have (with your help) will help enormously. Ultimately I'd like Harbeth monitors and EAR amplification, audio nirvana for me as I was trained by BBC engineers - though possibly not for all North American audiophile ears.

I know that I'm greatly blessed with what I have, and I'm rather looking forward to making the few incremental improvements in know-how and kit so that in due course I can become completely immersed in the music.

 

[joethebus]

amirm - Brighton I love. I studied at Sussex University in the late sixties and learned most of what I know about hedonism and dissolute living there. It was a gas!

I read Politics in the School of African and Asian Studies - it ruined me. It quickly became apparent that my Dorset Grammar School education had somewhat glossed over the true horrors of our colonial legacy, which left me at more than a bit of a disadvantage when discussing - almost anything - with folk who had grown up in countries we had trashed then abandoned. I have been something of an activist, in a small way, ever since.

Recently I have been working with the Green Party and helped Caroline Lucas, our first Green MP, get elected into the European Parliament for the South East constituency, and then into Westminster as MP for Brighton Pavilion.

Errmmm. And no, it's not always sunny here in the South West. We do get rain, quite a lot of it sometimes, but we are beneficially affected by the Gulf Stream, which is relatively warm, so our weather is seldom extreme!


treitz3 - that would be the Charlotte where all the United Airways airplanes live I guess.

I'm afraid all I saw of North Carolina when my wife and I passed through a couple of years ago was a major runway construction going on - and US immigration. Lots of smiley welcoming faces and hardly any queueing - not!

My bet is that the part where you live is delightful, though!