“This is my ‘Stealth Sonos,’ situated in a vintage Zenith tabletop radio. People always comment on how good the ‘old radios’ sound, but when I crank it up, their jaws hit the ground and they know I’m up to something! Thanks Sonos!!!” – Scott M.

Read the full review here.

Golden Ear Triton 3 Tower Loudspeaker

When he came by, he had an amp and preamp in his car.  The amp was an Audio Research D76, an all tube amp.  The preamp was an Audio Research SP3A-1, probably one of the most famous tube preamps of all time, but back then I had no clue what I was in store for.

The preamp that inspired Audio Advice to come into existence!

I can clearly state, the sound of that Audio Research stack is what inspired me to open my own business selling high performance audio!  I was just blown out of the water.  I had never heard my DQ-10’s sound so good!  Simply and utterly amazing!  We kept comparing pieces and discovered the preamp made a bigger impact on the sound than the amp did.  I’ll never forget playing my system later on that night after the ARC had left the house and just wanting to throw that Crown preamp in the trash!  It only took me a week to replace the Crown.  There were no ARC dealers around and it was far more expensive than I could afford, so I wound up getting a Conrad Johnson PV-1 from Vickers in Chapel Hill.  This was an early value oriented tube preamp.  While it was clearly not as good as the ARC, it did make me very happy and I was back to enjoying music again.

Travel in the time machine to 2013 and I’ve got another great ARC preamp in my house once again, the REF5.  Audio Advice has been an ARC dealer since 1981 (they would not sell me the brand at first as we had no track record) and its been one of the most consistent great sounding product lines we have.  They now have a full line of tube preamps, both solid state and tube power amps, and digital products that all are at the top of their class. The preamps start for as little as $3995 and for that you get 100% American made build quality with a lifetime of great customer service.  While most of their pieces have a 3-5 year warranty, the thing that amazes me the most is they can still completely rebuild anything they have every produced!  How is that for customer service!  If you want your system to just come to life, try out an ARC preamp, you’ll probably have the same kind of reaction I had back in 1977!

 Share your comments on Facebook about your experiences

Back to our HiFi Enthusiast page

At that point in time, there were lots of high performance audio stores spread across the Triangle, 19 to be exact. My first audio upgrade was a pair of Fried Q speakers I got from Stereo Sound in Chapel Hill. I remember connecting them up in place of the Cerwin Vega’s and noticing a huge difference in clarity. So at that point I caught the speaker bug and within 3 months changed them to Infinity Quantum 5, then the bigger Infinity Quantum 3. Sam Goody had become an Infinity dealer and in that day and time these were great speakers. The Quantum 3 was the first speaker I ever had with pretty deep bass response and I immediately noticed my Lenco turntable had this disturbing low frequency rumble. I wound up getting the HK Rabco ST-7 straight line tracking turntable with a Micro Acoustics 2002e cartridge (how in the world I remember all these models over 35 years later boggles my mind). That got rid of the rumble as it was belt drive compared to the idler wheel drive of the Lenco. It did have a tonearm issue I discovered later on though.

My first decent turntable

The Quantum 3’s were pretty hard to drive which had me constantly blowing fuses in my Marantz integrated amp. It had pre-amp outs so this led me to get a Phase Linear 400 power amp. Now that one really made my speakers come to life! To add to the never ending speaker fun, I bought a pair of original Advents and JBL L100’s just to play around with. Yes, I had the bug bad! Every piece I changed showed me a pretty big difference in sound, so I thought, well, its time to upgrade the Marantz to a real preamp.

Sam Goody did not have any decent preamps so I went back to Chapel Hill and wound up with a Crown IC150A preamp from Stereo Sound. This is another one I’ve not forgotten to this day. I took it home, connected it up, played a favorite song and thought, hmm, something does not sound as good as the Marantz. My first disappointment. Now of course I know, the Crown gear never did sound very good but was just made to last forever. I did love the look, feel, fit and finish of the Crown, so I decided to keep it.

Now, bear in mind, everything I’ve described above all happened in about 1 year’s time. I was living in a cheap rental house with a bunch of my college buddies and had nothing better to spend my money on.

I made the mistake of starting to watch my Rabco turntable carefully and noticed the tonearm kind of waddled across the record. I thought, this can’t make for the best sound, so I switched it out for an original Rega Planar 2 and Infinity Black Widow tonearm. Huge difference!!! Yes, turntables make an amazing difference in audio quality.

By then, I had started reading all the audio enthusiasts magazines of the day and was fascinated by this new speaker out called the Dahlquist DQ-10. It had each driver in a separate enclosure and had them all time aligned. I bought a pair of these from the Audio Center on Ridge Road, which later became an Audio Advice store! I really loved the DQ-10’s. They were so much more revealing than anything I ever had and was having a ton of fun playing music. I moved out of the house into another one that had a great big open living room where I set everything up and wow, did that make a huge difference too!

About two weeks later I was working the late shift at Sam Goody and a customer walks in and asks me the strangest question….more in the next blog

 Share your comments on Facebook about your experiences

Back to our HiFi Enthusiast page

“Calm down, ladies. When a man wants his own space in the house — be it a cave, garage, bar, media room, billiards hall, woodshop or bowling alley— it’s not a red flag indicating that he’s rebelling in your relationship, trying to avoid you or shirking social commitments. In fact, having one’s own personalized space is actually necessary and important psychologically for everyone.

“Space is very important for regulating emotions,” says Sam Gosling, a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Gosling studies how space is a powerful mechanism for evoking our emotions, and he’s seen firsthand how having your own space, decorated by you alone, can positively affect emotional well-being. “It’s incredibly important to be in one’s own space and resonate with who one is,” he says.”

Read more here.

“Integra is packing both WiFi and Bluetooth into its latest receiver release.

The Integra DTR-30.5 is the company’s very first receiver to include both of those popular wireless technologies. It’s also important to note that the component has 4K pass-through and upscaling, just in case you’re interested in adding one of those new Ultra High-Def TVs into your setup.”

Read the rest here at Electronic House.com.

New Integra DTR 30.5 AV Receiver

I got everything all connected and was enjoying the system and thinking: “that wire sure is little compared to the size of everything else!” Now, working in a wholesale auto parts store lets you see all kinds of battery cables. The next day I brought home a set of battery cables and tried to modify them to connect to the amp and speakers. I could get them to stay connected briefly and noticed much more bass. However, they were so big and heavy they kept falling out, so I wondered what would be bigger than speaker wire but a little easier to work with.  I found some smaller electrical cables in the parts bins that were about 12 gauge and used those instead – which were also a huge improvement.  I guess I missed a big opportunity – in 1979 Monster Cable came out with their very first product, a 12 gauge flexible speaker wire and went on to become a $500/million company. Monster Cable became the de facto wire to use if you wanted better sound, and they dominated the market for several years.

In 1985 I had just finished the basement in the first house my wife and I had purchased. I remember being so excited to bring home a pair of Vandersteen 2Cs to listen to. I connected them up to the Monster Cable I had laying around and thought: “huh, something is just missing.” The reason I thought this is – we had just started carrying a wire from Karen Sumner, called Music Hose. I drove back to the store, grabbed some Music Hose, and to this day I can remember how stunning the difference in sound was. The system just came to life! Lots of other people started to experience and enjoy the differences in better speaker cables as a whole industry was spawned. Karen’s company became Transparent Cable, one of the most successful high performance cable companies in the industry, with her products being found in most audio and video production studios around the world along with millions of homes. (Yeah, I know. I should have started Leon’s Wire back in 1972!)

Fast forward to 2013 and I’ve got some pretty decent gear at home. My buddy Brad, from Transparent , calls me up and says I have to hear their latest Reference cables. When I connected their newest creations up to my system, I felt like it was 1985 again. Even though I had some very high performance products in place before from another brand, this was a huge leap ahead in musical involvement. I found myself listening to all my favorites over again and enjoying them more than ever before.

So the moral of this story? Wire (or cable as the industry likes to call it) can make a huge difference in how much you enjoy your system. Just give it a try and you’ll see what I mean!

Share your comments on Facebook about your experiences

Back to our HiFi Enthusiast page

“The ARC’s ability to render instrumental images holographically on a bed of air with extraordinary detail and ambience meant that I was frequently fooled into thinking a live musician was playing in my living room…. The Reference 75 touched me on a deeply personal level. I enjoyed listening to music so much through it that every time I entered the listening room and saw its silvery hulk beckoning to me, I turned it on and played some music. More than with any other component I’ve reviewed, when the Ref 75 was in my system, I went out of my way to make sure, every chance I could, that music was playing.”

Read the rest of the review here.

Audio Research Reference 75 Power Amplifier

The beautiful new Sony 4K TV

Several lucky customers have already had these installed in their homes and are now enjoying the most beautiful picture you can get out of a flat screen TV.  And in a real turn around in TV sound, Sony put some pretty decent speakers on these new sets.  If this is not your primary TV, they work really well for just normal casual audio.

Even on current 1080p or 1080i content, the picture will make you go, wow!  Black levels are so good on these sets, when you put on a 2:35 movie, the black area is identical in color to the black frame of the TV.  We’ve not seen any LED set in the past pull off such great black levels.

The future also looks great for 4k content.  Sony has announced their new 4K player will ship in July and only be $700.  It will come pre-loaded with about 10 4K movies to enjoy.  We do not yet know how much they will cost to purchase or if there will be a rent to watch once method.  What we do know, and this is incredibly well thought out (and a surprise for us and most mfg’s usually miss the boat on things like this), the player is set up perfectly for a 4K TV in an older system.  Most current A/V receivers and processors can not pass a 4K signal through their HDMI inputs.  In a brilliant move, Sony put 2 sets of HDMI outs on the upcoming player. One will pass both 4K video and audio, the other passes audio.  This will let us run an HDMI direct to your new 4K for the best picture and route the audio to your A/V receiver or processor!  You can keep your current gear and get all the great benefits by just adding a 4K TV and the player.  Very cool!

The upcoming 4K player

We invite you to come in and check out the new 65″ and 55″ sets from Sony, you’ll probably be picking your jaw up off the floor!  The 55″ is $4995 and the 65″ is $6995.

Google had a substantial upgrade to their music service this week.  It’s now another player in the very congested space of streaming music services such as Pandora, Spotify, MOG, Amazon, and many more.

Like Spotify, it has a monthly fee of $9.95/month, although if you sign up before June 30, 2013, its $7.99/month.

You can upload all your purchased music to their cloud service (up to 20,000 songs) for playback anywhere.  They use a matching service which will greatly speed up this process.  One pretty neat feature, if you have a lot of songs in your library that were purchased at a low bit rate: if Google Play finds them, they will now play back at 328kbs (depending on your internet connection speed).  Bonus!

I have to say, the new interface is really slick as you would expect from Google.  It’s pretty much a copy though of Spotify, however, I’m not sure how they could have added much more anyway.  You’ll easily find a bio on the artist and a list of related artists.  The visuals are great for moving around and learning more.

The Google Play Interface

A feature I enjoy in Spotify is the “What’s New”.  Google Play has this as well.  A quick check today, though, showed only 25 new albums under Google, whereas Spotify has 40.

Another very interesting feature is the recommendations section.  While I’ve not played enough music yet for this to start working well, Google claims it will learn the music types you enjoy and start to show you more music of similar types for you to check out.  If (and this is a big if) Google harnesses the full power they have in their search engine technology to pull this off, it will be awesome.

One the other side of the ledger for Spotify, they have a section called “Rolling Stone Recommends” which is lacking in Google Play.  This is a list of new albums that Rolling Stone magazine thinks are significant and I think it’s a great way to find new artists and music.

Pandora changed the way we all listen to music with their artist or genre type stations where you can fine tune them with a thumbs up or down.  This is the area Google Play did take a leap past the competition.  As you probably know, in Pandora or Spotify you do not have much control over the next song.  Well, in Google Play, you have a list of the next 25 upcoming songs with full ability to play any of them on the fly. They also have the same thumbs up/down feature found in Pandora or Spotify.

I love the way their radio feature works!

So, all in all, on a computer, the Google Play system gets a thumbs up from me.

However, if you are an iPhone user, you’ll currently find it sorely lacking.  There is no official app for IOS, so you have to go to Google’s website for Play, where you will find an extremely rudimentary interface lacking in most of the great features I described above.  To be fair, the Spotify mobile interface is fairly dumbed down as well.

Finally, in playing around I noticed something that just made me think – huh??  Google’s search engine is fantastic for taking into account misspelled search terms and figuring out what you really meant.  They must not have flipped the switch in Play for this feature as you can see in the comparison screen shots below.

I misspelled Bonnie Raitt

To summarize: I think if you are just getting streaming music and like Android devices, you should check out Google Play.  Especially with the deal for $7.99 month before June 30, 2013.  If you already use Spotify you will probably not want to switch.  However, if you are mostly a Pandora user and want to learn about more new music and artists, I would check both of them out!  One thing that could make your decision easy, at this point in time, the world’s best music streaming device, Sonos, does not have full support for Google Play.