@carlos269 Thank you for the pointer to Gearspace. Looks like fun.
My home system is all digital these days. I sold off my record collection and turntable. I pitched out my Revox A77, as well as my cassette deck decades ago. Any CDs I run across get ripped to digital. I play everything from a miniPC running Linux with the JRiver media manager.
I run a VTA tube preamp into a set of custom built Linkwitz Orions Iʻve had for 19 years now. Still in love with how they sound on voices and acoustic piano, as well as for chamber music, classical and jazz. If youʻre not familiar with the Linkwitz designs, they are all open baffle systems, run active crossovers and multiple amp channels. The Orions call for 4 channels on each side at 60 wpc. I run 8 channels of a 12 channel B&K power amp.
These Orions have forward and rear facing SEAS millennium tweeters and SEAS Excel mid-bass drivers. There are two 10" Peerless long throw bass drivers on each side. They are located in the bass bins on the bottom behind the wooden grills.
The best reference is live music
For those of you who love classical music and care about imaging in your audio system, I recommend that you check out a San Francisco area group called Voices of Music.
They video record all of their performances and have most all of it on YouTube and free to access. They are extremely well engineered recordings and more than worthy for the very finest audio systems. What makes these recordings especially *useful*, as well as enjoyable, is that being video, you can see where all of the musicians are. The best reference in audio is live performance. Does your system do an honest job of recreating the live performance? Does your system give an image that at all matches what you see on the video?
Beyond this issue, Voices of Music is worthy to experience because they are very different from the large symphonic performances that most classical listeners hear. Instead of the SF Symphony with 100 musicians, Voices of Music will typically have about 8 to 12 players. There are some larger ensembles and some smaller.
They are an "early music" ensemble. Just as rock 'n roll evolved from the early 1950's to what we have today, what we call classical music evolved as well. The instruments evolved too. A 19th century violin (what the musicians call "modern") has a neck pulled back, has steel strings and is engineered to be louder than an 18th or 17th century violin, which has a straighter neck and gut strings. They are in fact, different instruments.
An 18th century instrument will articulate better. The bow is lighter and faster than a 19th century bow. Trumpets of that period had no valves. Neither did French horns. Flutes were typically wooden and had open holes. That period also had instruments completely absent from "modern" orchestras. If you haven't listened to a 1st rate early music ensemble, you're in for a totally new experience.
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@russbutton Thank you for sharing a picture of your system. I second what @devinplombier said, your Linkwitz Orion speakers look great and are aesthetically appealing. Although I have three different turntable systems here at home, I also almost exclusively am all digital these days. I stream both from my local library and from Tidal played back with HQPLAYER, controlled with the JPLAY iOS app. How do your audio recordings sound played back on your systems, through the Linkwitz Orions? Is the sound you hear when playing back the recordings you made of your wife and the other ensembles representative of the sound you heard at location during the recording sessions? |
@devinplombier The stock Orions have a rather Danish Modern look. Nothing wrong with that, but at the time, I was living in a 1918 Craftsman bungalow and wanted them to have something of a Mission style look to them. The local cabinet maker who made them up for me is also an audiophile and loudspeaker designer. Quite brilliant. Heʻs designed/built full range curve diaphram electrostatic loudspeakers, line arrays, horn systems as well as my Orions. He is a close friend and has done a number of other things for me. Today he spends most of his time rebuilding and servicing Quad loudspeakers. Heʻs the guy who turned me onto Linkwitz. He was the one who came up with this look of the Orions. |
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