{"id":893,"date":"2019-06-29T16:58:52","date_gmt":"2019-06-29T23:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=893"},"modified":"2019-06-29T17:03:10","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T00:03:10","slug":"audio-pavement-back-to-the-penthouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/audio-pavement-back-to-the-penthouse\/","title":{"rendered":"audio: pavement back to the penthouse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Audiophile confession time: for months I&#8217;ve been listening to music on a $200 <a href=\"\/blog\/2017\/09\/audio-finding-a-jambox-replacement\/\">Jambox<\/a> the size of a wine bottle, because one of my 40 kg VTL Signature 450 tube power amps blew up all my spare fuses for reasons as yet unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/audio\/amps_ss_and_tubes.jpg\" alt=\"Bryston and VTL power amplifiers\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Friends loaned me a Bryston 3B amp (the smaller box in the pic) and&#8230; wow, baby&#8217;s back!! Bass is leaner, &#8220;polite,&#8221; but it&#8217;s part of the music extending octaves downward instead of a tubby sound effect. Stereo isn&#8217;t a left-right direction but life-size musicians spread out over 3 or more meters and sometimes front to back. And the Magnepan ribbon tweeters (from beautiful downtown White Bear Lake, MN) are lightning. Even at low volumes Joni Mitchell&#8217;s dulcimer is cold blue steel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I enjoyed music fine without it, the change isn&#8217;t black &amp; white to color, but the opening up in sound and space of a good hi-fi is a wonderful intensifier. Hear some before you die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As to whether the solid state sounds better than 8 <a href=\"\/blog\/2009\/04\/audio-tube-servicing.html\">finicky Russian tubes<\/a>&#8230; who knows? I am more and more distrustful of my ability to tell the difference between electronics. The Bryston amp in bridged mono mode is about 2.5 dB louder than the VTL so I turn the balance control towards the tube amp to roughly equalize their output levels, but even with a mono source switching between equally loud identical music, maybe the left speaker has better reverberation in my room, or my right ear is misshapen, or &#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Audiophile confession time: for months I&#8217;ve been listening to music on a $200 Jambox the size of a wine bottle, because one of my 40 kg VTL Signature 450 tube power amps blew up all my spare fuses for reasons &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/audio-pavement-back-to-the-penthouse\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":897,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}