[dba-Tech] OT: A big day

Gustav Brock gustav at cactus.dk
Tue Feb 19 11:47:09 CST 2013


Hi all

More than 30 years ago when in the audio business, two of our clients -
audio-visual producers - asked for new top-notch monitor speakers for their
studios. We toured several suppliers listening to the well-known brands,
quite expensive, and then we stopped by at Technics as they had gained much
attention due to a major lift in quality.
That settled it. I still recall how we listened carefully to our selection
of "difficult" music but our real test was the reproduction of high-quality
recorded human voice which is far more difficult to reproduce than most are
aware of. There was no doubt - the SB-7000 speakers with the
phase-correcting speaker alignment were convincing and the price couldn't be
matched:

  http://www.thevintageknob.org/technics-SB-7000.html

At that time I neither had the money nor the space for such speakers but
ever since I've dreamed of obtaining a set of these. By pure accident,
Saturday I browsed a local second-hand site, and there they were, right in
front of me on the screen, at a bargain price - and I have the room. Through
the years I have struggled with some compact wife-friendly speakers - very
good of course, but still - nothing beats a 15" high-quality speaker (except
an 18" but they are so rare).

Now, this set could really be anything - burned out units or misbehaved in
many ways. So I had to go and listen: I brought some music that can bring
down most systems and reveal any sort of misbehaviour: Chick Corea, My
Spanish Heart, and Miles Davis, Tutu, on CD:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Spanish_Heart

It was like coming home! They reproduced perfectly and exactly like I had
imagined with the transparent and completely neutral sound I remembered.
They've two owners only, and no disco youngster had succeeded destroying
them.
So, today I picked them up and can hardly wait to get home and power them
up. Should this day come? From time to time I thought No and resigned ...
but today: Yes.

Through the years I've kept (some sort of intuition or instinct?) this
bright Sony amplifier to power them:

  http://www.thevintageknob.org/sony-TA-N86B.html

Though I have quite decent equipment to feed this, I might be looking for
the matching preamp:

  http://www.thevintageknob.org/sony-TA-E88B.html

But that's another story.

/gustav



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