When Did Your System Disappear?

I'm happy to not have anything heavy that I have to lift or shuffle around anymore, although I do still have a Lexicon amp which I would like to get rid of. The 75 pound ATI amp is gone, the Bryston monos are gone, the KEF ref 3's are gone, the NAD silver preamp is gone as is the Anthem preamp and a set of B&W bookshelf speakers. 
Now I have SONOS in 8 rooms consisting of a pair of delightful Moves, three old amps driving a set of KEF LS-50s in Studio A, an old set of DCM's in the master bath, and a pair of B&W bookshelves in the wife's office, a pair or 5's in the kitchen, another pair of LS-50's in the master driven by a new amp and a Martin Logan sub, a Port in the den running into the Lexicon driving a pair of old B&W bookshelves and a couple of REL subs, and a beam and sub and pair of 1's in the wife's bedroom. There's about 10 grand in wires wherever wires are required. I move the Moves to wherever I want music such as fill-in in the kitchen, the garage , Studio B or Studio X. I can control everything easily with any device that I have in front of me, and I have music everywhere. I even ran the Moves on a recent video shoot on the street. Check out one of my Insta pages @discoballguy. So the next time you ask about disappearances, look no further than toward me, the Invisible Man- or am I?

Yes the house had some dark secrets alright!

1. First day there I removed the carpet in the master bedroom which extended into the closet. There was a file cabinet bolted into the floor. It was a heavy file cabinet and the estate had left keys for me. But to get to the bolts I had to remove the lower drawer but decided I would first look for potential ‘treasure’ underneath the drawer. I reached in and felt a cloth sack. It was heavy...like a gun.
I opened the sack and found a perfect...I mean exquisite German Luger. It looked like it had never been used. I don’t like or own guns...but damn this thing was special and impressive. There were ammo cartridges and a large container of loose change. I called my real estate agent and returned the gun to the estate. A year later when I told the story to my girlfriend, she immediate accused them of being Nazis.
2. The next week after finding the gun, I set up the stereo. I sat in the living room listening on a low lounge chair and looked at the kitchen to see that there was a 1/4” x 3” slot in the base moulding of a cabinet. I went to the kitchen and saw that the slotted moulding extended to the corner of the cabinet. At the corner of the moulding was a ring pull. I pulled the ring and the entire corner with slot neatly slid off...allowing a tiny spring-hinged door to immediately flip down. This door had a small mirror glued to its back that now reflected two LED lights pulsing from inside the kitchen cabinet. I opened the cabinet doors and removed the shelf paper to find another compartment. Inside was a motion detector. The kitchen cabinet lined up with the doorway to the hall which led to all the bedrooms. If an intruder broke the beam...an alarm would activate.

3.My girlfriend did not like the wallpaper in the bedroom. So we hired a company to remove all the wallpaper in the house. After an hour or two, I decided check in on the progress. The guy taking the wallpaper down looked at me a little sheepishly. Behind him and across 4 of the walls were Nazi swastikas and strange runes or symbols. They were written in white primer. They had used primer to treat the walls surfaces where the wallpaper seams met and used the excess to paint runes and swastikas.

Years later I learned from my next door neighbor that my house was the middle of the 3 homes occupied by German families. He had stumbled onto bomb shelter while gardening in his back yard. The concrete ceiling was 4’ thick. It had a fold down mattress and an air pump for oxygen. 
The husband was actually a rocket scientist who worked for Rocketdyne. He probably left Germany after the war. He had done some other interesting things to the house. But It was a fortress. I got locked out once. It took a once cocky locksmith almost 2 hours to get me back in.

"Active Listening" is what audio geeks and perhaps some music fans do...you're present, attentive, and listening closely to the whole damn thing...and if it's good you simply don't think about the gear unless something about the rig just sucks, it catches fire, or the owners of the place come home and you have to get the hell out of there.

Mine disappeared after I had to get the hell out of there.

“Active listening”  is the whole point of the speakers disappearing no matter how good (or bad) your rig is. What you bring to a listening session is the determining factor.