Stereo Systems: What do you have ?

[Rhodes]

Never had a hi-fi system from the 90s. Have a Rotel CD-player and a Cyrus One amplifier plus two home made speakers ( built by a electronic professor, colleague/friend of my father).
My father was more vinyl and had a Thorens player. Sadly i have not room to have that assemble and connected.

But I might have if a discard some stuff around here...

[Rockstar]

I have a table top Klipsch The III. It’s a wireless speaker that I think has pretty good sound for the price and size. I can play my Spotify tunes, podcasts, pretty much anything and everything via blue tooth 4.0 from any of my devices.

https://www.klipsch.com/products/the-three

[Skybird]

How is the bass in that thing^? I read its too excessive, but else the sound is described to be extremely good.

Could one place a small disc player on top of it without interferences of any kind, and connect it via cable??

I'm thinking about getting rid of that big component HiFi system of mine. Takes a lot fo room, plus two boxes, and then I only rarely use it.

However, I feel I am no ready to give up on my double tape deck, although I do not use that that much anymore, too. But I simply love tape cassettes. And I also recorded a lot back in the days.

[Catfish]

We built a Klipsch horn in our twenties, with cupboard dimensions. "Impressive" does not quite describe it, it was just about loudness and bass. They also had one in a disco, protruding some 8 feet into the room
But Rockstar's new Klipsch device seems to have gone through a lot of develpment, i am really interested in the quality and frequency range of this thing.
I have an older (30 years now?) english NAD amplifier with NAD CD player, an NAD vinyl player and an old Kenwood tape deck, playing over AE loudspeakers. I recently switched to a Pro-ject stream box and with the quality provided by this the old HiFi setup sounds like crap

[Rockstar]

I’m no sound or music expert, my caveman opinion is “me like”. It has an 8 x 10 inch area of space on top to place a small disc player. Analog 3.5 mm AUX, Left/Right RCA jacks and Digital Audio USB are in the back and I believe the sound quality improves when hardwired. But wireless sound is in my book still impressive and quite convenient.

[Commander Wallace]

The NAD systems like Catfish is talking about were excellent and had great sound qualities. Likewise, Klipsch always built fantastic speakers and sound systems. The setup Rockstar is talking about is awesome in what they can do. For the living room, we bought an Onyko TX-NR 535 a number of years ago. It is Blutooth and Wifi enabled. It sounds Ok.

To date, we have never used those features. It's an AV receiver. I have it tied in to the TV and can do theater things with it. However, that's dependent on speakers
placements and acoustics as well. We have really only used that a few times as well. It has Dolby and DTS formats as well. Since I have many CD's, we do like the five disc CD / DVD Carousel player that we have paired with the system.




It also has a USB port. I have music on a 128gb memory stick in various sub music folders and put that in a big music folder and plug it in. It literally could play for days. The bad part is that all settings have to be done on the TV through the remote control.

Skybird had mentioned recording CD's and no loss of quality. I would say that's dependent on the software suite. The software I have used in making CD's creates very " sterile " examples as the software wasn't able to differentiate between anomalies in the recordings and the subtle nuances originally in the songs itself. This might help explain why there is a resurgence in people going back to vinyl albums and turntable production. I have turntables and albums as well.

I believe if you have good pieces of equipment with low signal to noise loss ratios and harmonic distortion levels, it hardly matters how old the equipment is. Pair that with good speakers and you're in business. I know a number of Audiophiles that use analog equipment and get great sound out of their systems. The only other consideration is the space available, needed and used, as Skybird said.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions, everyone.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Commander Wallace

Skybird had mentioned recording CD's and no loss of quality.

Recording tapes I meant, cassettes.


However, I burnt a couple of MP3 on audio disc as well. And I said that most people will not recognise the difference between a CD and a MP3 file at high kbit/s setting. If the MP3 had a low rate set at creation, then it might be something different. Below 100, you can hear it, even easier so when knwing what to pay attention for. From 196 on I fail to realise the differences reliably. 256 and higher is fail safe, imo. 300 and more is overkill. I did my MP3 library at 196 and 256, therefore, even if 368 was available. Costs only space.

So I challenge everybody to reliably discriminate between a CD and a 300+ kbit/s MP3. The overhwelming majority of people will fail, promised. Amongst them many insiders, sound accoustic professionals, musicians.


What I always found hard to tolerate is a scratchy record, and the typical "by-noise" you got from record players (as long as they did not cost deeply in the 4 digit range...) when listening via headphones. Alsol overdonbe Dolby on tapes. Dolby B was good, Dolby-C to me always was more distortion then quality improvement via noise reduction.