OK, so I finally got my stereo hooked up. I had been listening to it for quite a while up in my tiny room, but I now have more room to spread out. Setting up was delayed for a week because I needed some more speaker cable. Plus, I wanted proper connections on the ends of the wires. The binding posts on my current amp are a bit of a pain to use with bare cables.
Anyway, got it set up and I’m really enjoying it. I now have a decent set up for the first time in… 5 years? My God, it’s been a long time. Things are a little different with this system though. I am streaming my music either from the internet or my computer through my squeezebox player. I switch tracks with my iPod touch, it’s the ultimate remote really. I have full access to every song in my library, plus all of my internet radio stations, and I can also control the volume. Here’s the kicker, the only way I could set it up involves the listening position to be in my bed… I don’t think I could imagine a better set up:-)
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The speakers are about 9 feet apart, giving me a pretty big sound stage. I still need to fiddle with the distance from the wall a little to tame the bass. Listening again is just sumptuous. No, this isn’t perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than I’ve had in a long time. All of my music is pretty compressed, it was all ripped into the computer for portable listening. I need to go dig up my CDs, rip them in some sort of lossless format, and then get rid of them. Do people still buy used CDs in bulk anymore?
I’m also starting to fantasize about getting tubes back into my system. I own a really nice set of amps, but they are a bit large. Last year, out of the blue, a friend gave me a 300b based amp. I got a chance to listen to it a couple of times and I’m totally in love with it. Plus, it’s a lot more compact than my current amps. Of course, my regular amps use $10-15 dollar tubes, this one uses 150-900 dollar tubes…
With a new computer in my future, I think I will try running the server software I need for the squeezebox off of it. If that doesn’t work, I might invest in a dedicated music server. Once I have the tube amp and some decent source material, I think things will be as good as they are going to get for the foreseeable future. I plan on spending lots of time relaxing, listening to music into the wee hours of the night:-)