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In Reply to: Re: Crown IC 150 posted by Joe Rosen on May 04, 2001 at 10:04:12:
You remember more than I have forgotten. Wow, what a walk through the past! I have sampled many a candidate you have submitted. Oddly enough, back in oh 1977? I heard a Dayton-Wright SPA sound pretty decent for the time. It clobbered the JC-2. Admittedly, QC was not the best with that line.Ah, the ubiquitous LM-301 chip! That's what powered the PAT-5. Was pretty bad, wasn't it?
I gather you are no fan of William Z's products. To each his own.
rw
Follow Ups:
Actually, of all the High-End companies (save, believe it or don't, Jadis) Audio Research was & is the one I like & respect most of all.
I guess that means not much, but at least it's more than not at all...
I aspired to owning ARC gear many years ago, and still own one quaint antique today (an SP-2C). I saved up & bought a used pair of components, an SP-6B, which I definitely wasn't disappointed with, although I thought it RIDICULOUSLY exaggerated in its bass-heaviness.
The amp, a D-76a, was a total turd. It sounded horrid. And one day, I had an accident whilst fiddling with a crummy old Thorens TD-160 with dodgy headshell wiring, and arced (no pun intended!) my beloved original QUAD's. My mistake, I should have been using the 4 ohm taps, then nothing would have happened other than a loud noise. Instead, I had to spend half a day a several hundred dollars fixing the speaker!
Even if the amp had been good-sounding, it still would have put a bad taste in my mouth. But it wasn't the amps fault, it was mine, but the crap sound WAS the amps fault, or at least Billy Z's.
I kept the pre, and quickly dumped the amp. Anything sounded better. Dynaco ST-70's, Heath AA-40's, even W-5's. Now, that's BAD.
I also bought an SP-3a at one point, and thought it sounded horrible. Dance of the seven veils. O-paque! A buddy had the esteemed (by HP at least) ARC D-150. Nothing more than a horrible D-75/6 series amp with an extra pair of output tubes, some cool-looking meters & handles, a bunch of noisy fans and horizontal 6550 operation and front panel fuses for the screens because horizontal operation is unreliable!
I listened to this amp extensively, also compared to the ST-70, and if anything it sounded worse than the D-76a I had, although they were both so bad it was really hard to say if it was THAT much worse. I also heard & worked on D-90's & a D-115, junk both. I liked the SP-8 Mk.II, and heard some good sounds come out of the SP-10. Then the SP-11 came out, and I thought ARC was starting to loose it. The SP-14 & 15 came out, and now I KNEW that they'd definitely lost it!
Then the Classic amps came out, and I heard a Classic 30 in my own system. What a difference compared to the wretchedness of the older all-tube amps! I actually liked it very much! Then I heard the first dedicated Line Stage preamps, the LS-1 & 2B. And I liked them even more!
I made my phono pre, and it sounded far better than the SP-6 did, and I built it out of old Dynaco PAS parts. Seeing the legends fall so easily, I was profoundly disturbed. Sure, my ego was boosted. But that doesn't need as much bolstering as my critics would think! I was really on my way to having it in for the High-End magazines at that point, and I'd just gotten finished being totally disillusioned with the mainstream press (I started out as a regular reader of Stereo Review, and learned all my technical basics from reading Julian Hirsch's columns religiously)!
So I flogged off the SP-6B, although in a wonderful irony it looks like I might be getting the same one back very soon (must be the collector in me...). It will bring back a flood of memories too, although I wonder if I'll bother to hook up a turntable to it. I did a shootout with a Convergent SL-1 Signature a number of years ago, and the old ARC handily dusted it! The Convergent sounded great, much smoother too (the ARC is VERY grainy!). There was nothing wrong with it, conditionwise, and it sounded that way. But the ARC just was far more convincing in its dynamic contrasts, the SL-1 sounded over-polite and "small" by comparison. The SL-1 was very neutral, the SP-6B quite coloured, bass-heavy and noticeably dull in the extreme top. But it also had far more depth, noticeably superiour low-level detail that the SL-1 completely lacked. It was the more exciting, more interesting & more rewarding & pleasurable unit to listen to of the two.
Whoda thunk?
This is the problem I have with the ragazines. They claim to be in your corner, and you pay 'em to tell it like it is. They act like they have a monopoly on truth, they pass themselves off as experts.
Ever see 'em admit to obvious past mistakes? Ever get them to admit that some old 10 or 20 year old unit is better than the latest & greatest from one of their big advertisers? Even when it's so obviously true?
Ever read any REALLY useful articles a High-End magazine, like how to set up a turntable, how to check if tonearm bearings are defective or not (they are in an alarming number of cases, I'd say in about 25% on average!), how to go about buying a cartridge, how to REALLY set up loudspeakers in a room (hey, a reprint of one of Dave Wilson's manuals, with permission, might have been a good idea...), I mean, ANY informative general technology articles, or articles to help newbies get familiar with the typical pitfalls & terminology of the hobby at an advanced level...
And I think many of them are experts otherwise, only they are too busy serving their own interests above yours and engaging in cronyism & other not-so-nice practices to merit the kind of patronage from audiophiles that they get. THEY ARE RUINING MY HOBBY. Pissing in their own well, for that matter. And as the median age of audiophiles gets ever-older, they are merely planning for the financial security required for their own retirement, and the hell with anything else! Like principles or honesty, to name two...
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