Phono Stage

@faustuss I understand. We all listen differently. And no two systems are alike as we know it. It’s the interaction between components, room and our ears/brain. 

When I introduce a new component to my system I tend to listen for changes for a while. Perhaps I listen too hard, but that’s just me. 

@audphile1 Your comment that no two systems are alike is so very true and it reminds me of a funny story from many years ago.  I sold a client a very nice system for the time, McIntosh, Bozak, Thorens.  This was 1972-3 or so.  Anyway a very good system.  The client was well off, had a nice home and nice friends and all the good stuff.  Anyway he brought a friend into the store in short order, a partner in his law firm who was so impressed that he wanted the same system please.  Well, I am a poor college student and systems of this magnitude were a rarity.  Naturally I was ecstatic to sell a duplicate system, which was delivered forthwith and installed by yours truly.  The proud owner cued up the first record, I'll never forget it, Colin Davis conducting LSO.  And we all stood back to admire the sound.  Guess what?  It sounded quite different from the duplicate.  At first the thought was that there must be something wrong, but no, it was the room.  A big lesson for me.  IT WAS THE ROOM.  Boy did I have a lot to learn.  Fortunately my sale was safe.  The house was not.  It was rented anyway and when the lease was up a better house with a much better room improved the situation.

@billstevenson 

yep the room is a component and one of the most critical ones. What you hear or don’t hear from your system depends in large part on room acoustics and system set up. 

The Bozak factory was located somewhere between New Haven and NYC, I think around Norwalk.  The train to NYC used to pass by.  I remember that it looked so forlorn for many years after Bozak folded but the sign was still in place.

Yes Bozak was in Norwalk.  A little piece of Bozak is still with us in the guise of Peter Lederman of SoundSmith.  I met Peter on a pilgrimage to the Bozak factory back in the day.  I was just a young kid with stars in my eyes, but I sold a lot of Bozak speakers out in Seattle.  By the time I graduated from the U of W, I owned a pair of Bozak Concert Grands.  In terms of set up, they were monsters.  The question was what wall in the room should they be placed against?  They were far too big to move out into the room.  I did experiment with placing them one on each of two adjacent walls, which was effective in smaller rooms.  I loved the things though, and owned them for maybe 7-8 years, and moved them from Seattle, to Pensacola, to San Diego, finally back to Seattle before selling them for more than I paid for them.  The Navy footed the bill for the moves to make that feasible.