Impress Your Friends and Seduce Women!

I really like Lucinda Williams "Car wheels on a Gravel Road" trks #7 and #12-- very dynamic and incredible soundstaging. This is an HDCD disk and is great music. I also very much like Emmylou Harris' "Cowgirls Prayer" for its detail, softness, and great music. I think Ucmgr's post above had it right, at least for me; I now listen at lower levels-- 60-70 dB much of the time, but I also want lots of clean power to provide ease, naturalness and low level detail-- not huge SPLs. Cheers. Craig

Hi Charlie; Daughter was home last week-end with a stack of Lyle Lovett CDs. Due to her's and your influence, I've gotta have "Joshua Judges Ruth" (and maybe some others)-- don't specifically remember trk #4, but I liked the whole CD a lot. Cheers, Craig.

Onhwy61 - I don't think I disagree with anything you said. One thing I have learned is to NEVER buy any gear that is not neutral or is dynamically constrained - if you ever do, you quickly tire of it and can be sent on an expensive and futile quest to compensate for it. Stating my point more simply, if I tell a novice how much my amplifier costs the first assumption they make is that it must deliver squillions of watts. When they hear the system, they ask how far the volume is turned up, because they figure it must be able to go a lot louder than this if it cost so much. Bencampbell - Sometimes I feel it is maddeningly close but that there is something going on, that if i could just eliminate it... At other times, I grab a book, put on a CD and read until the CD has finished and think that it had been so sublime that if I played another CD it would ruin the moment - and I retire with the audio equivalent of the aftertaste of the finest Burgundy. I suspect the difference is often driven by my state of contentment with life at the time rather than the state of my stereo.

Redkiwi everything you said in that last post I say "amen" especially concerning neutral components, as I keep on finding out myself.

Why is everyone concerned about impressing other people ? I don't give a damn about what they think about my 'audiophile spending' habits. It is only for ME ! It is for MY love of music. After all, they drive a Mercedes, I have it in my living room :-)