I'm up early this morning drinking some excellent Kenya Kangunu coffee from Stumptown, and listening to the Maestro's VOTTs system I've put together, which is so musically beguiling it's hard to convey how satisfying it is to listen to music with, and in a small room at that! Yazaki-san's SPEC RSA-M3 EX Real Sound Amplifier is a... Read More »

This is the Thanksgiving Holiday week in the USA, where we commemorate a romanticized version of a 1621 harvest festival feast in which refugee Pilgrims honored a Native American man of the Patuxet tribe, named Squanto, who had taught them how to fish & plant corn, and had negotiated a peace treaty for them with the Wampanoag Nation, ensuring their survival, in their first year... Read More »

I'm not entirely happy with the way the Western Electric WE16GA power cords for my vintage McIntosh MC30 monaural amplifiers came out. Similar to when I tried the WE16GA in a pair of RCA interconnects, the WE16GA just sounded a little too forward & direct for my Tannoy Westminster Royal SE loudspeakers. The Western Electric WE16GA sounds fantastic as speaker... Read More »

As I reported yesterday, my first attempt at a USB interconnect didn't go so well: "I also tried building a USB interconnect out of vintage guitar pushback wire (all the rage for re-wiring electric guitars for that beautiful ‘vintage tone’ experience), which is tinned-copper with a cotton cover, which reminds me a lot of the... Read More »

My Maestro's VOTTs & SPEC RSA-M3 EX Real Sound Amplifier room has become my go-to coffee nook in the morning. I've developed a week-day ritual of rolling out about 4:30 a.m. and firing up the SPEC RSA-M3 EX, the Mhdt Paradisea+ USB DAC, and my old MacBook that I'm using as a source. Then I wander into the kitchen to... Read More »

If you read The Vintage McIntosh Experience article in Issue 77 of Positive Feedback you know I'm a big fan of the vintage McIntosh MX110Z tuner-preamplifier. The MX110Z makes vinyl & FM sound astonishingly good, it even makes digital your friend. Performance-wise it can easily hold its own against contemporary preamplifiers, and feature-wise it outclasses any modern preamplifier on... Read More »

Yesterday Ron and I embarked on an audio adventure and drove to the Emerald City of Seattle to look at (and listen to) a pair of vintage Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre loudspeakers that were custom built for Leopold Stokowski (April 18, 1882 – September 13, 1977), while he lived in New York and was conducting the... Read More »

With all the cable rolling I've been doing lately with the Belden 8402 microphone cable interconnects, and the Western Electric WE16GA, I thought I should mention how handy Alan Kaftan's audiodharma Cable Cooker is for running in cables and getting them to sound their best. I use my Cable Cooker all the time on cables when... Read More »

A couple of posts ago I told you about my adventure of building up an AC power cord with the Western Electric WE16GA and trying it out on my Mhdt Havana USB DAC. It takes a while for the Western Electric WE16GA to settle down, but I thought my newly constructed WE16GA power cord sounded promising, and... Read More »

With its cooler temperatures and wetter weather, Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is a time when life starts to shift indoors. It means kicking off new audio projects, getting the fireplace going, getting out a good book, with the muse of music stirring thoughts of the past as well as dreams for the future. So it is also with my... Read More »

Here's another of The Jeff Awards for 2015, and these are all things that I personally use and enjoy, and I think you'll like them a lot too. It also happens that most of these are relatively affordable gift ideas that will fit into a Christmas stocking, so the 12 Days of Christmas Stocking Stuffers Award... Read More »

I am continuing to roll out The Jeff Awards for 2015. One of my biggest revelations over the last few years was how ridiculously good restored vintage vacuum tube gear could be, and I'd like to recognize the superb restoration work done by the vintage McIntosh specialist team of Tom Manley & Terry DeWick of McIntosh... Read More »

Due to your critical acclaim, the Jeff's Place Readers' Choice Award unanimously goes to Mr. Shirokazu Yazaki's 'Real Sound' recommendations for the Western Electric WE16GA wire and the Belden 8402 microphone cable. I particularly liked the way that Mark Paul said it in his nomination to me for the Readers' Choice Award, "I think it’s safe... Read More »