So, you’ve got a budget of $15K to $20K. Correct?

About the only place you might find such a cabinet is places that sell unfinished furniture. Those places sold tons of cabinets like the one in the image. In fact I have one in my attic that has a solid wood top instead of a hinged glass lid. Pity you don’t live in the Seattle area, I’d gift it to you. 😁

The quality of the music produced from a particular flac file will be essentially equal to the original. In this case the quality of the flac will be the equivalent of the original m4a file. It just will not degrade with recurrent use like files in lossy formats inevitably do.

I still have the pair of Allison Two loudspeakers I bought in college. I put new surrounds on the woofers and plan to re-do their crossovers once I finish my Beogram restoration that’s gonna take at least a year to do.

The short answer is yes. It’s very easy to get caught up in the pursuit of better gear. It’s one of the reasons that more and more online reviewers are literally telling people to find gear with sound that makes you happy. For me, it’s a warm yet detailed sound capable of exposing gobs of detail that makes me want to listen to music all day and night long and yet still manages to be able to make even the worst recordings still listenable. Whether it’s playing on my vintage Beogram 4002 or my Denafrips Hermes/Pontus II digital combo or the Technics SL-1200 Mk 7/Grado Sonata 3 combo that will be filling in for the Beogram 4002 while it gets a multi-year restoration that starts this winter once I recover from this Wednesday’s hand surgery.

Most better and unfortunately more expensive DACs don’t use cheap delta/sigma, mass produced chipsets that make more economically priced DACs affordable. Prior to the introduction of delta/sigma DAC chipsets, the only DAC conversion chipsets available were those used in high resolution medical imaging and radar systems that required bit-perfect precision.

Delta/sigma DACs employ shortcuts such as interpolation to cut down on the massive processing and power requirements that bit-perfect conversion requires and for most listeners the small trade-offs aren’t all that apparent. Mind you, the first few generations of delta/sigma DAC chipsets were far from ideal. In fact, what’s often referred to as digital glare was because of early delta/sigma DAC chipsets and flaws that Phillips and Sony had made in the decoding process. Thankfully, the latest crop of delta/sigma chipsets used in current DACs have all but eliminated the flaws that plagued early digital conversion and some truly excellent DACs use them.

Brands like dCS, Mola Mola, PS Audio DirectStream, Chord, MSB and Denafrips rely on either bit-perfect, non-interpolating DAC chipsets used in high resolution medical imaging, programmable FPGA chips running proprietary digital conversion software to DACs like mine that uses a discrete R2R resistor ladder network to convert digital files to the analog waveforms we recognize as music. There are literally over a thousand, individual, laser trimmed surface mount resistors on the DAC board. My previous DAC was the internal DAC in my Oppo UDP-205 4K Universal Disc Player which uses the ESS Sabre 9038 Pro chipset. It’s excellent and ruthlessly revealing but my current Denafrips Hermes DDC/Pontus II DAC combo simply sounds far more tangible and real. However, if the recording is shitty or the recording engineer got sloppy, both DACs make it painfully obvious.

Cool thing is you can get a discrete R2R ladder DAC from Denafrips. Both the Ares II and Enyo be had for under $1000. Reviewers lost their minds over them.

Two things: Quality of the DAC’s po

Trio electronics were sold as Kenwood electronics in the USA. Good stuff.

CDs and Vinyl along with hi-def downloads.

An older Rockport? Any idea when the photo taken?

Auralex or Sound Addicted makes the pads you’re looking for and unlike the rest of audio, they’re resonably priced.

Two-ways are easier to do right because the crossovers are far simpler. However, tweeter selection is more critical.

Three way crossover designs are more complex and more difficult to get right.

I won’t even tackle driver waterfall response plots, driver position on the baffle and polar response to prevent frying most everyone’s brains.

Strangely enough, house plants are astonishingly effective as sound diffusers. On top, to either side, between speakers and at the points of first relection along the walls of a room are where they most count. Yes, crazy expensive sound diffusers and absorbers are more effective, but aren’t anywhere near as esthetically appealing as lplants can be. They won’t cure acoustical problems but they can go a long way to ameliorate them in a very pleasing way. For bass frequencies, they’re not as effective.

My first system I got all at once, a turntable, tuner, cassette deck, integrated amp and loudspeakers. Over the years I’ve replaced one part or another, until I had enough orphaned components to assemble a second system I could use in another part of the house. I have done that for years.

I added surround processors, additional amps and speakers so my main system could also be used for watching movies. My main system has a stereo preamp with an HT bypass, surround processor, a five channel amp, a pair of monoblocks for my stereo loudspeakers.

My current system still has the same B&O 4002 turntable I bought in 1975 along with the latest Schitt Mani 2.0 Phono Stage for analog. It’s about to be temporarily replaced by a Technics SL-1200 MK7 while the B&O undergoes a multi-year long restoration, motor rebuild and optical systems update.

I’m approaching my end game for digital. There’s a NAS drive to store bit-perfect FLAC files. A custom PC running JRiver Media Center that manages the library and features bit-perfect playback and DIRAC Live room correction. I stream music with a Wiim Pro music streamer, An old Sony ES stable-transport handles cd playback. All three are connected to a digital processor that buffers and galvanically isolates the digital data stream before dual OCXO’s reclock the data stream and sends it via i2s to a discrete R2R DAC that decodes either PCM or DSD digital formats.

Of course, it all goes up in flames if something new comes out. (sigh)

My main goal is to get my system powered to the point where the system has an effortless quality that only high powered amplification can provide. My system is remarkably accurate and has a remarkably wide frequency response and is wonderfully transparent to sources. I have a LOT of music on both vinyl and digital so my system has to play everything extraordinarily well. Sources I’ve got pretty well sewn up now that I have a decent streamer.

So, the only thing I have left to get are a pair of 900 watt mono amps. And the crazy part is that it’s not about playing loudly. It’s that effortless, unrestrained quality that only tons of power can provide when playing uncompressed music. When music’s dynamics are unrestrained, it takes on an unmistakable realness that low wattage systems simply cannot approximate.

My observations with audio cables: The most important thing for cables is multiple layers of EMI/RFI shielding. It’s easily verified and quantified so it’s only the boneheads that find controversy, here.

Power Cables: Your goal is to keep the EMI/RFI that radiates from ALL electrical cables from reaching the outside of the power cable. Good power cables have at least three layers of shielding to keep all that noise INSIDE the cable sheath. If you doubt it. Go get yourself a no-contact electrical current cable tester. It will sing with extension cords and romex. A good, shielded power cable will test like it’s not even there when plugged in.

Signal cables: Again, shielding is important. But unlike power cables where shielding must keep the noise inside the cable, with signal cables, they must have multiple layers of shielding to prevent all EMI/RFI from entering the cable. Two layers of shielding is the minimum for line level signal cables that carry between 2.0 volts (RCA) and 4.0 volts (XLR). Some brands like Kimber have models of signal cables that rely on cable braid geometry to minimize EFI/RFI interference.

Phono Cables: This cable requires three layers of shielding and is used exclusively to transfer signals that are small as 0.001 volt. Phono-specific cables are used after the phono cartridge and before the phono preamp and frequently include a grounding wire.

Speaker Cable: If you take care of signal, phono and power cable shielding. Speaker cable shielding is of little concern except in special cases.

Now the controversial stuff…

After shielding comes dialectric choice, preferred metallurgy and cable geometry.

Dialectrics include polyethylene, foamed polyethylene, teflon, compusilex, organic cotton and whatever filament type Nordost uses, laquer, various polymers.

Metallurgical choices: Copper or silver; monocrystal copper or silver, solid core, hollow core, stranded, asorted gauges of solid core wire enclosed within a single dialectric strand.

Geometry: twisted pair, star-quad, braided, hollow-core braid, radial twist over a solid core, etc. Honestly, the variations are endless.

The best and most versatile is JRiver Media Center. Its file management is outstanding and its player is second to none, offering bit-perfect playback, the ability to integrate DIRAC Live room correction, a huge DSP section and so much more. Mind you, start off simple because it can get overwhelmingly complicated if you’re not careful. But, combined with the world’s best CD ripper software, dBpoweramp, you can put together an incredibly powerful multimedia powerhouse since you can also build a massive digital movie library if you want…or you can set it up for music only like I have.

Unfortunately it’s not anywhere as simple. Phase inter-relationships between drivers, accuracy of high frequency extension all contribute to resolution. And that’s the easy part. Enginerds have been desperately try to equate sound quality and resolution to a small set of variables, but so far the only measurement I’ve seen that gives the best hint, in addition to the ubiquitous frequency response graphs, are waterfall plots which indicate driver ringing which causes out of phase signals that interfere with a given driver’s clarity.

And then of course, room interactions can crapify any good loudspeaker’s performance.

Not quite. About a week ago, Blusound (NAD) announced it bought all assets and technology of MQA.

Well, this 63 year old rather likes the 2019 remastered version. And for some dumb ass reason the remastered mono albums sound remarkably better than the original mono albums. Gotta be on account of the new and better remastered versions of the original monos are on FAR higher quality vinyl.