Your audiophile embarassment

Mine: at one time believing all this nonsense

 

I like to fall asleep listening to my Bose Wave Radio. Don't hate me for it....

 

I've managed to bend not one, but TWO Jico SAS styli. I'm REAL careful now with my third since they don't make them anymore!

Years ago, I believed the iTunes BS that 128 kbps AAC was "CD quality". I'm still re-ripping CDs to lossless.

 

Finial LT-1 laser turntable. Sounded great but I spent more time cleaning the record than listening to it. Sold it six months later at a heavy discount.

 

Now that's funny

 

Every Canadian's right

 

Fortunately, this didn't happen to me, but ages ago a music professor friend of mine bought a Bose 901 system and never hooked up the equalizer! If you thought they sounded bad with the equalizer...

 

Back a year or so, explaining to my wife exactly why I needed 12 headphones and four headphone amps. Now I'm down to 8 phones and 3 amps I feel so much better.

 

Spending an hour trying to figure out why the cassette deck wouldn't record off my stereo and the realizing the mic/line input selector was on....Mic!

 

Embarassment?

None really... yet.

 

Between 1989 and 1990 I worked at a Philadelphia area Silo, a regional appliance/stereo store. I took advantage of the employee discount to buy some Monster interconnects and speaker wire for my Harmon component system and Ohm speakers. What a waste.

Fast forward to 1994 and I'm back in the game at a specialty stereo and home theater shop. At the time Audio Quest OWNED the back cover of Stereophile. I never sold any AQ interconnects prodicts above the Turquoise. They had a nice solid RCA connection and shielded cable. I'm sure I could paid the rent and eventually mortgage if I could have learned to sell the snake oil but I couldn't do it.

 

I washed them all with dish soap, yet lost a few. One I later ripped to a computer using error correction. Now it just has a slight click but plays. Also, soon after the incident, I cancelled my subscription to Stereophile.

 

I heard three different Polk dealers refer to it as a design flaw. I used an Adcom GFA-555 Mark 2 amp with these speakers at the time which was a very well respected amp. I did not play the speakers very loud either. Yet the tweeters failed constantly. That level of unreliability constitutes a design flaw in my book.

 

Today I drove around Brooklyn listening to a Bee Gees disco compilation I found for 99 cents.

I wonder how great a Starless era Crimson cover of Knights on Broadway would be?

 

Um...can someone explain the theory behind armour all on CD's?

 

I know every model of SDA speakers like the back of my hand, there is no design flaw. It seems like you were tripping the polyswitches rather than blowing tweeters. Why that happened to you I can only speculate.

 

I've blown out way more speaker drivers than I care to admit

 

Good amp, no volume overload...I'm not sure why these would fail so frequently.

 

Years ago I was remastering an album, I forget which one. It played and recorded okay, but when I went do to the remaster, I had no sound output. I thought "The mastering program doesn't have the right sound card selected." It did. Thinking "It must be the sound card drivers.", I removed and re-installed the drivers. Nothing. That left me with "It must be the CABLES! There's nothing left!" So I ran new cables between the computer and the preamp, total elapsed time probably at least an hour, at which point I noticed.....

The power amp wasn't turned on!

 

Forgetting to turn the Mono switch back to Stereo.

 

I too often take my headphones off and put them right beside me when I'm relaxing outside, forgetting they're still attached to the player in my pocket. My kids get a kick out of seeing me walk around like a fool, headphones dragging through the grass behind me.

 

C'mooooooooon?!?!?!!!

 

I wouldn't call snake oil a theory, but the thinking goes something like this - Armor All fills in the scratches. The rubbing levels off the surface on the CD and the Armor All fills in any remaining imperfections of the surface of the disc. This improves the quality of the reflected beam because the Armour All and rubbing process has fixed the diffraction problem caused by the irregular surface of the scratch. The reflected laser beam will be more accurate and rely less on error recovery which results in better sound quality.

Of course that is nonsense, a compromised disc will either play or it won't, or at best skip or get stuck. There is no degradation of sound as long as the disc can play. The biggest purveyors of this snake oil (and the green marker pen) was the Stereophile magazine, which not only claimed night and day differences, but differences which can be heard by most of their staff. Of course, this is the same mag that claims night and day differences between expensive cables, cable lifters, sound qualities of gear at odds with their specifications etc. There is an interesting article on this below.

Disappointingly, Music Direct continues to sell those green marker pens, claiming it improves the sound quality.

And Now -- The Latest Thing To Improve Cds »

 

Just picked up a used set of the Name and put them between my Oppo and Rogue. Letting everything warm up right now. Bought them from a member on another forum who has a good track record so I would think they are real. They are a lighter yellow that my other VDH.

I have a pair of the VDH d102 mkiii that I like a lot but these are cheaper. Guess I'll find out.

 

Did you buy them from an authorized dealer? The ones on eBay from Chinese sources are fake.