aerius

Well, to be honest my experience with vinyl rigs is pretty limited, I can count the number of turntables I've heard on my hands and have fingers left over. I haven't heard VPI's Clearaudios or any of the highly promoted Stereophile brands so I have no idea how the Nottingham Dais for instance would compare with a VPI TNT6. With that said, I really like the Nottingham Dais, record playback done right. To me, it sounds pretty much flat from 20-20k, there's no bass hump, midrange boost, treble roll-off or any other funny business. It's very fast and will keep up with any music that's thrown at it, even something like Metallica's S&M album. It's basically like taking a great CD player and then adding more resolution, more detail, and more realness. I've heard the Dais up against the Audio Aero Capitole SE, and as good as the Capitole SE is, there's still a big gap between it and the Dais. The Pro-ject RPM10 is nice and a great value for its price, but frankly it gets embarrassed by the Dais. They're not in the same league, not even close. It's not that it does anything wrong like farting up the bass, rather, it's just that the Dais does so much more, then again for 3-4X the price it better. The Capitole SE can match or surpass the Pro-ject in most respects so I can't really justify getting one. The Nottingham Space 294 and Bluenote Bellagio turntables were pretty interesting, the 294 is the Dais with less goodness but the same family sound. It's very linear sounding and clean sounding, I'm told this is the Nottingham sound. The Bluenote is closer to what most think of as vinyl sound, there's a definite emphasis on the midrange, and in that area it can pull out a bit more resolution than the 294, but that comes at a price. Its midrange is definitely coloured, vocals & guitars sound a little too bold, they got emphasized too much. It sounds nice, but we all agreed that it wasn't really right.

It snowed good yesterday.

Unfortunately I don't have the room for one of those things, my room's too small and there's no way I can fit a bigger work desk in there. Ah well...

I go with about 9-10' since that's long enough for me to lie in bed or sit at my workdesk. Unfortunately, the cables on my Grados aren't long enough to reach to the workdesk, but they still reach to the bed so it's not too bad. I haven't decided if I'm going to build an extension cable or build a whole new system near my desk.

There seems to be an unhealthy fascination with gimps around here...

You're a shining example for why abortions should be legal and freely available.

I don't believe he's smart enough to do a search, but since I'm in a generous mood right now I'll help him out a bit. http://www.head-case.org/index.php/topic,1796.0.html

If you weren't an idiot with a reading comprehension problem, you'd understand why Zanth ranked the HP-2 the way he did.

I'm going to be nice today, for once, since it's getting near christmas and all that. A few pieces of advice. If you don't know what your point is and what you're trying to say, you should think about it until you do know, and then express yourself in a clear, understandable manner. Typing a bunch of barely comprehensible posts just because in your words, you "just like replying and throwing crap out there" is not going to make you very popular in this forum. Here at head-case, we value quality over quantity. And last, but not least, remember our golden rule.

Can we have that in proper English cause you're really not making sense here...

Get one of these, cause it's radioactive, and it'll glow in the dark for the next 20 years.

Yup. Given the tendencies of the ETF crowd, chances are it's a transformer volume control. I don't think they're bare wires, but it's hard to tell. And yes, those are capacitors, 3.15kV 6.3uF units to be precise. Scaling from the resistors they're at least the size of a 1lb coffee tin, and they'll kill you dead.

Man, that must've been one hell of a mind blowing experience. Master tapes with a truly state of the art system, an experience like that will just totally redefine the boundaries of audio for you. No kidding, I could never justify it unless I win the lottery or a rich long lost uncle dies and leaves me a fat wad of cash in his will. Still, it's nice to know that something like this exists, a man's gotta dream...

I wonder if postjack will be (un)fortunate enough to see the infamous Grado dance...

The Tape Project, wherein they make dubs off the original master tapes with custom built gear and you get albums on 15ips 1/4" half track stereo tape. Reel to reel tape, as close to the master tape as you'll ever get without owning the actual master tape. The catalog is pretty limited, unfortunately.

Earlier today I came across the pictures from ETF '07. http://www.dhtrob.com/etf/index.php?start=23 This is a picture of a totally out there headphone amplifier using transmitting tubes. Those tubes are around 7" tall, and the plate dissipation is up to 100W. For a pair of headphones. And though it's not a headphone amp, this is just stunning.

As we all know, once a flagship headphone is no longer in production it automatically becomes 10 times better than whatever the company is currently producing. I'm almost tempted to sock away a bunch of the old style RS-1's, then use my dummy accounts on Head-fi to shill the crap out of them. Write a couple "reviews", derail a bunch of Grado threads, that kinda stuff. Then in a few year I sell my RS-1's for twice what I paid for them.

A thought - Given that Grado has now released a new style of RS-1, it might be a good idea to stock up on a few extra pairs of the old style ones with the button. Another 2-5 years and I'm pretty sure they'll be selling for more than the retail price of a new style RS-1.

I can tell you that the 6DE7 tubes are pretty good since I've played around with them in a DIY project, but that's about all I can tell you. Transformer quality, circuit design, parts used in a Woo Audio amp, well, I have no freakin' clue.

Clearly, a euphemism for masturbation.

For $1500 it better come with a night of full service from the hottest hooker I can imagine.

I had to use great diplomacy to keep from saying "these things suck donkey balls" to the Ultrasone rep. I felt dirty afterwards. It's an experience which is best forgotten.

I'll probably get the CD lathe thing checked out at my local dealer sometime in the next year or so once I get around to getting a few other things taken care of. My plan is to burn a couple identical copies of my equipment audition CDs and have him use the lathe to perfectly round & bevel the edges on one of the CD's, then do a listening test. It's not exactly on my priority to-do list but it's I'd like to look into.

Which audio shop is this, so I can go visit them sometime? I've done this at my local dealer as well on Audio Aero gear with Quad 57's and Wilson Benesch Discovery's. As you've rightly stated, it's a surprisingly good recording and the guitar tone is damn good. My dealer was like "aww man, you can't do this to Quads" and then a minute later he was like "this is pretty good" and went to crank up the volume. While you're at it, check out the entire Audio Aero lineup as well as the EAR CD Player at My Kind of Music in downtown Toronto. Anyways, thanks for the excellent impressions, and hopefully your CD player quest works out.

For the kids it did start around the same time as it did for you guys down there. For me, well, we're just 10-15 guys (and a couple women) who rent out the ice to play pick-up hockey on weekends, we're not in a league or anything, it's all just informal pick-up games.