This is fun!! My first real speakers were Dynaco A-25's from 1972-1981. I built the Dynaco SCA-80 amp when I should have been studying. Those were inexpensive acoustic suspension jobs and they sold a million of them. Then in 1977 I went with a friend to a stereo store in Jacksonville FL and they had Dahquist DQ10's, hanging upside down in the room corners playing Dreamboat Annie. I was literally shocked. My friend had Bose 901's in his apartment upstairs and I was blown away......by how bad they were, considering they were supposed to be this big deal and all. I moved back to Texas in 1978 and got my DQ10's and a Threshold 400A (I think it was an A) by Mr. Pass. The DQ10's were multi driver units mounted on small time-aligned baffles with the visual look of Quads. I might as well say I've been a bipolar guy from then on (!) although not exclusively. I got Acoustic 2+2's with subs about five years later with a NYAL OTL amp that routinely shut down, overloaded by ZZTop. Shortly thereafter I met a young guy who was an air traffic controller via the Reagan shutdown who sold equipment out of his house. I actually went into business with him, storefront type. He sold me my Martin Logan CLS's (1st version). You know how you love someone despite, maybe because of, their flaws? That was the deal here. No bass, dreamlike transparency. I was driving them with two huge OTL tube amps a guy in Houston made (dangerous voltages). I loved those things but then he told me ML had a new version and I wanted those rosewood frames. They took my old ones away and the new ones sounded like shit, just horrible. ML had jacked up the power requirements and the OTL's were not hitting it. I traded in the CLS II's for Monoliths. Later in the late 90's I got Avalons because they looked cool and I was getting discounts on everything. Didn't like them either, not at all. Then my Dad (an EE) passed away and I decided to build a 2A3 amp in honor. 2 watts, Audio Equipment Supply, part of Cary. I had job & personal upheaval then, ending up moving but first was in New York with two of my boys and dropped into Red Rose Music, a little place Mark Levinson was ginning up as high end equipment for cheap. We were the only people in there, along with Mark (kind of distant) and a couple sales people. His bass was in the corner. He was into cheap speaker cables, in case you're interested. I bought 2 of his little bookshelf boxes, they ran on the 2A3, and weren't bad, just not special. Then I moved to another part of Texas and most of the two years I was there I was building an open baffle job designed by Dick Olsher of Stereophile while listening to fairly big, highly sensitive, very cheap Athenas from Canada. The new Basszilla Diamond Editions had a 16" Eminence driver in a great big bass reflex box I made out of Appleply with glue and endless screws and multiple coats of Watco Danish oil. The big plexiglass baffle up top had Lowther DX-4 drivers and Chinese electrostatic tweeters. Madisound made the crossovers. The little 2A3 was in heaven. Avatar pic of those speakers up there in the corner. That was the setup until I retired in 2016 and moved south of Nashville to a townhouse where that big stuff didn't really make sense. Got rid of almost everything and bought a PSAudio Sprout (it was on one of those pubic funding sites) and some KEF LS50's. In my small space those things were great! I really couldn't believe the imaging they pulled off, so when I moved back to north of Houston in 2024 I got KEF R7's (the cool titanium-looking ones) and eventually a Pass INT-60. I've been very happy with them in my big room but, after a while, something was missing. I'd been spoiled by those big baffles, but even then I'd needed subs, and that wasn't cutting it. My Pure Audio Project Trio 15's should be coming in about a month. I have a big enough room, and, like I said, I'm a bipolar guy. Or maybe I should have said dipole......
