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