SkiFastBadly
01-30-2013, 06:40 PM
My love of music almost ended my marriage. A few years ago, my CD count went over 1000. I had taken over three bookcases to store them in. In addition, piles of CDs would stack up before I put them back. My wife told me that she was not going to tolerate the disorder and that I had to find a solution, and fast. I decided to go fully digital. I bought a computer with a ton of disc space and a digital PCM out, and ripped all the CDs to the hard drive in lossless mode. I bought used on eBay an Adcom Digital to Analog converter, which is the key component in how good your CDs are going to sound. Now I have everything at the touch of a mouse, via Windows Media Player. It rocks. And there are no CDs laying around..
My kids don’t care about the sound quality of their music and as far as I can tell neither do any of their friends. It’s perfectly acceptable to them to use, as their main music source, an iPod or a computer with highly compressed mp3 files and crappy earphones or cheap computer speakers. It’s not like I haven’t tried, I’ve set them in front of my stereo system, pointed out how much better the music sounds, how the voices sound like voices, the guitars like guitars, the didgeridoos like didgeridoos… to no avail.
It was different for our generation. I, like most of my friends, spent as much money as I could possibly afford on my stereo system. And over the years, I’ve continued to upgrade. (One of nature’s cruelties is that by the time disposable income rises so you can really get great gear, your hearing is shot.) There is a ton of really excellent used gear on eBay that can be had for a fraction of its original price. So last week, I was just sort of poking around looking at stuff with no intent to buy, when I came across a used Adcom GTP 500 II, which is a tuner/pre-amp that is the next generation of the one that I have, which is the GTP 450. I start getting all geeky, looking at the specs, and wow, this thing is better than mine in Total Harmonic Distortion and Frequency Response, has tone bypass AND direct amp output, both of which are supposed to increase the fidelity….I bid $135 and win the thing. It arrived yesterday.
It arrived when my wife was out doing something so I thought I’d be clever and swap it out before she got home and see if she could tell. With some minor exceptions, it looks exactly like the one I replaced. Except for one thing... this one has an input for phono. When I bought the 450 new in 1998, they weren’t even selling preamps with phono inputs anymore. That was old technology, everything was going to CDs. But there’s been a revival of sorts since.
And way back under the stairs, behind the screens and extra dining room chairs, behind the vacuum cleaners and Christmas wrapping paper, sits the old Bang & Olufsen turntable, and four or five large boxes full of LPs that haven’t been played in 15 years….
She’s gonna kill me.
My kids don’t care about the sound quality of their music and as far as I can tell neither do any of their friends. It’s perfectly acceptable to them to use, as their main music source, an iPod or a computer with highly compressed mp3 files and crappy earphones or cheap computer speakers. It’s not like I haven’t tried, I’ve set them in front of my stereo system, pointed out how much better the music sounds, how the voices sound like voices, the guitars like guitars, the didgeridoos like didgeridoos… to no avail.
It was different for our generation. I, like most of my friends, spent as much money as I could possibly afford on my stereo system. And over the years, I’ve continued to upgrade. (One of nature’s cruelties is that by the time disposable income rises so you can really get great gear, your hearing is shot.) There is a ton of really excellent used gear on eBay that can be had for a fraction of its original price. So last week, I was just sort of poking around looking at stuff with no intent to buy, when I came across a used Adcom GTP 500 II, which is a tuner/pre-amp that is the next generation of the one that I have, which is the GTP 450. I start getting all geeky, looking at the specs, and wow, this thing is better than mine in Total Harmonic Distortion and Frequency Response, has tone bypass AND direct amp output, both of which are supposed to increase the fidelity….I bid $135 and win the thing. It arrived yesterday.
It arrived when my wife was out doing something so I thought I’d be clever and swap it out before she got home and see if she could tell. With some minor exceptions, it looks exactly like the one I replaced. Except for one thing... this one has an input for phono. When I bought the 450 new in 1998, they weren’t even selling preamps with phono inputs anymore. That was old technology, everything was going to CDs. But there’s been a revival of sorts since.
And way back under the stairs, behind the screens and extra dining room chairs, behind the vacuum cleaners and Christmas wrapping paper, sits the old Bang & Olufsen turntable, and four or five large boxes full of LPs that haven’t been played in 15 years….
She’s gonna kill me.