Any audiophiles here?
Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2022 1:49 pm
Any audiophiles here? This seems like a better place than Misc to discus hi-fi matters... I've just fallen down a rabbit hole into the world of hi-fi, particularly ironic since I spent the first half of the oughts digitizing my collection of +5000 CDs and several hundred LP's, which I promptly dumped when I moved to Philadelphia, from Ann Arbor, MI in 2006. A few years after that, I left most of what was left of my hi-fi, notably a Marantz surround receiver, in my father's barn in Iowa, in 2012, and haven't bothered to retrieve it. I'd been using an old Bose wave radio for music and as sound system for my projector and was relatively pleased with it, until my boss decided to re-do his patio sound system to a Sonos wireless system and gave me an Onkyo SR 674 receiver, a subwoofer and a sextet ofJamo speakers. all in all, entry-level, but a a leap up from the wave radio I'd been using before. I also got a decent Polk speaker that I've enlisted as a center channel speaker and for an investment of absolutely nothing, I have a not terrible home theater system that pairs well with a 1080p projector that throws a 110" high def picture on my living room wall.
Naturally, I'm not one to leave well enough alone... While I've felt a certain amount of smugness towards my friends who've been flaunting their vinyl collections- after all, I've managed to free myself of the yoke of materialism and shed myself of the onerous burden of stuff... The truth is, listening to digital media negates the tactile qualities of putting on a record and dropping the needle, relegating music to background noise, never mind the arguments over the qualities of digital streaming sounds vs analog. I wasn't actively listening to music, so much as using it to fill up space. With that in mind, I began looking at turntables. My last turntable was a Denon DP45 that I've had since the early 90's, when I worked at an independent record store in my home town, which I left to gather dust in my old man's barn in Iowa. I thought about getting another, and promptly looked at the used market and was shocked to see them listed in the ball park of $400-800. Yikes! This sent me down another labyrinthine maze of vintage turntables... not wanting one of the ubiquitous, but excellent Technics that were in every living room back in the day, as well as taking the majority of Craigslist, Offerup and FB Marketplace listings, I stated checking out more obscure vintage German and Japanese offerings from the likes of Dual, Thorens, Phillips, Kenwood, Pioneer, Denon, Rotel and the likes; not the silvery plastic, modernist looking decks, mind you, but the ones with wood plinths, like our parents had in the 60's & 70's. Much of these were either in dubious condition or had severely inflated prices. I found a Phillips 312 on craigslist that hit almost all of the buttons for me:
The price wasn't exorbitant, it was a handsome deck and I was all ready to pull the trigger when something entirely different caught my eye, a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon that had a recently replaced Ortophon Red cartridge that was listed for $150. I polled my audiophile friends, red reviews and decided that a 4 year-old entry level audiophile deck with an almost new cartridge was a better deal than a nearly 50 year old table with an unknown stylus and any number of problems that could emerge. I made a detour on my way home from work to pick it up and after not buying any physical media in 16 years and despite my partner's admonitions against becoming a record collector, I've now got a Discogs account and have become the old guy digging the crates at my neighborhood record shop. Yay!
Naturally, I'm not one to leave well enough alone... While I've felt a certain amount of smugness towards my friends who've been flaunting their vinyl collections- after all, I've managed to free myself of the yoke of materialism and shed myself of the onerous burden of stuff... The truth is, listening to digital media negates the tactile qualities of putting on a record and dropping the needle, relegating music to background noise, never mind the arguments over the qualities of digital streaming sounds vs analog. I wasn't actively listening to music, so much as using it to fill up space. With that in mind, I began looking at turntables. My last turntable was a Denon DP45 that I've had since the early 90's, when I worked at an independent record store in my home town, which I left to gather dust in my old man's barn in Iowa. I thought about getting another, and promptly looked at the used market and was shocked to see them listed in the ball park of $400-800. Yikes! This sent me down another labyrinthine maze of vintage turntables... not wanting one of the ubiquitous, but excellent Technics that were in every living room back in the day, as well as taking the majority of Craigslist, Offerup and FB Marketplace listings, I stated checking out more obscure vintage German and Japanese offerings from the likes of Dual, Thorens, Phillips, Kenwood, Pioneer, Denon, Rotel and the likes; not the silvery plastic, modernist looking decks, mind you, but the ones with wood plinths, like our parents had in the 60's & 70's. Much of these were either in dubious condition or had severely inflated prices. I found a Phillips 312 on craigslist that hit almost all of the buttons for me:
The price wasn't exorbitant, it was a handsome deck and I was all ready to pull the trigger when something entirely different caught my eye, a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon that had a recently replaced Ortophon Red cartridge that was listed for $150. I polled my audiophile friends, red reviews and decided that a 4 year-old entry level audiophile deck with an almost new cartridge was a better deal than a nearly 50 year old table with an unknown stylus and any number of problems that could emerge. I made a detour on my way home from work to pick it up and after not buying any physical media in 16 years and despite my partner's admonitions against becoming a record collector, I've now got a Discogs account and have become the old guy digging the crates at my neighborhood record shop. Yay!