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In Reply to: You realize, of course... posted by Jim Treanor on February 18, 2006 at 19:44:20:
Terms of Endearment, "I almost made a clean getaway" (his other great line was, "I'd rather stick pins in my eyes").All kidding aside, exhibitors at audio shows won't see much of me, so they can take the neon signs proclaiming me as a persona non grata out of ther budgets. These shows do little to impress guys like me who've been there & done that so many times before. We would rather sit at home to audition products that come down the pike -- we know our rooms intimately and we have some control over what's used to make the assessments that would be meaningful to us. IMHO, shows (yawn) aren't conducive to making rational decisions.
My SA-14 had just been compared to a modified SA-14 that a friend had just purchased off audiogon. There was no question that the modified unit surpassed my stock one in very considerable ways: a greater sense of texture, superior dynamics, and a see-through quality to images that nothing digital I'd ever heard heretofore could match. The next day, the builder of the giant killer showed up at my door with his unassuming little toy carried under his left arm book-style. It had been here twice before, once in its fully stock demeanor, and then again a few weeks later after round one of the replacement parts had been made.
His first round of mods didn't win him any cigars. The image still remained minisule as if one was watching a wide screen DVD movie on a 17 inch TV, but it had addressed serious problems that the stock unit had revealed blatantly. The high end output of the stock unit had me thinking that I had suddenly been transformed into our beloved Teresa: every CD had sounded thin, wiry, lacking any real sense of dynamics, and simply sounding uninteresting in the least. With the round one modifications, the thing began to sound like the Sony SCD 1 I had here a few years back: promising, but just a little too much glare and more than a little glitzy, but no real promise. Round two had our wizard bypassing some circuits in the machine, and replacing a few more caps and resistors. As noted earlier in this thread, this level of modification has taken the CD player to such a level that there simply are no words in Roget's Audiophile Thesaurus to do it justice. It's in the shop for Round 3, so I expect I should be having seatbelts installed on my listening chair for the next audition.
I used both hybrid SACDs and conventional CDs in all the machines that have been here. The Opus 3 Showcase sampler (one of our coterie's favorite references) actually sounds better playing back its CD layer on the giant killer than the best its SACD layer has been able to muster on the modified SA-14.
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Follow Ups
- Well, as Jack Nicholson says to Shirley MacLaine in - sgb 02:59:32 02/19/06 (1)
- Thanks for the details. - Jim Treanor 10:45:56 02/20/06 (0)
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