My wife accepts no serious audio equipment and it can be the prettiest eye candy gear on earth after years of my accumulating the stuff. Her thumb at my nose is insisting on acting like a cool kid by using in ear devices and own not one but two iPods not fake ones either. She knows that this hobby has been part of me since birth. My late Father was a serious audiophile during his brief life and I always kept his JBLs and use the Sherwood s5000II int. amp-thats the 7868 version. His TT is long gone I don't even know what is was. The big mid 60s SONY reel to reel was always half broken and no one not even him really got used to it's finicky behavior but we liked the sound if it worked. I think that met up with a trash can fast.
Back to WAF
My wife is a or was a very good violinist. In fact she was considered a child prodigy. Indeed even got on a couple of pieces of vinyl.
She lived as a musician, music camp, music friends, music for gig money, a street quartet outside Avery Fisher on weekends that nearly netted a weeks pay at her real job even though divided by 4.. Don't be stingy but don't feel all that bad either for these starving artists. She made a tidy sum doing that.
She knew even though she played in the college orchestra (Yale no less) and was praised, that she was good, not great. So she went to be an actuary Teaching disinterested kids and the other small jobs that keep regular musicians alive was not a life she envied.
None the less she really loves music even taught me to appreciate classical music. Before we became victims of this financial problem we had season tickets to the Philadelphia Symphony Orch. A series you know what I mean.
She also had a passion for the live overwrought dramatic dance music of the New York subculture Club scene in the early 80s. She would get there when I went to bed. I never went with her at midnight when these after hours clubs started to open. Honest they were still dancing at 9AM when she would go home and sleep.
She liked playing my old Kenwood amp real loud after getting drunk when we were younger and liked getting inebriate. Then the amp gave up its last measure of devotion around 2000 after 25 years of loyal service . I said "honey I need to go out and buy a new amp". When I innocently started to look for the local stereo stores I couldn't find the listings or ads nothing. Not a single place. I was utterly Confused wTF happened. I asked a bunch of people where they got theirs and the answers were odd little shops by appointment? What an appointment whatever for?
My good fortune working with a great student who just happens to be a AGon member and he told me that everything I wanted was now called "Hi End." OY!
I spent months studying which amps to try should I go for a modern tube amp while my heart was firmly planted in 1977. which was the more power means better and SS amps had power
.
I dragged my wife out to an evening appt at Quest for sound which is not even that local but one of the few places that even permitted me to audition the goods.
She was deeply annoyed that I became preoccupied with looking for equipment. I told her that I wanted her opinion because of her experience and ear for "correct" tone etc.
I asked her yes? no? what do you think tell me come on please. She liked the small footprint maple veneered VR2s which was when nothing else mattered to her great musician an ear, my eye, my wife, now WAF meant something very real.BTW that veneer is still very beautiful and has not self destructed a good job before ah they were outsourced to...the demos were slightly darker than the NIB pair we own. Mr. Monte had set up these WAF speakers with a 40wpc pp tube integrated and a ridiculous CD player that would take only one CD at a time but sounded great to me a CD-25 by Music Hall, with a list price over $400 an unheard of amount to us. She got more and more annoyed with every comparisdon and almost screamed at me "just buy it" buy what I asked that whole thing she said and be done with it I am sick of this. But she did make a pint of insisting on a pair of those VR2s.
I still have every component I bought that night and incredibly all of it works even the CDP works great but is a 3rd or fourth stringer.
She became permanently annoyed with my fascination with Audio and built or shall I say furnished the basement for the next rig I bought .
The WAF system has a different CDP a Jadis DA 60 which is much more eye candy but she hates the class A heat which you feel only when within a foot or so but it is hot class A and tubes get hot I remind her that she should avoid grasping the tubes when it is on and that it uses lethal voltage so really try not to stick anything in it not you or anything else. She never seems tempted. further WAF A hardly ever used MMF-5 TT all sorts of tweaky cabling. I never told her when I made cable chamges. A restored early Sherwood tube tuner Circa 1961 it's stereo. A sansui TU 717 for decoration.
The once fun lving dearest has become a very sober and mature pooh and will rarely play something and then at maybe a whopping 70db.
Now anything audio is evil and just takes up space. The little amp is in the living room where the WAF is but in a box.
