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The stats I had were full-range curved diaphram loudspeakers made by my buddy in the San Francisco area. He's the same one who did the thing with the Sound Exciters and foam core. The stats had wonderful clarity and detail, but just didn't image well in my room. I also had to add some DIY sub-woofers to get some low-end. My buddy is also the guy who introduced me to the open baffle designs of Siegfried Linkwitz, a retired HP audio engineer. Visit his website at:

Linkwitz Lab

There's a ton of information there about loudspeaker design that will take you days and weeks to plow through. This guy is the real deal audio engineer, not the usual hi-end snake-oil salesman.

I now run Siegfried's Orion design which has a similar tonal balance to my old stats, but also image much, much better. I made that switch about 9 years ago. Siegfried's latest designs are even better and are well worth consideration for anyone who wants incredibly great sound at a price we mere mortals can afford. I've always been a guy with champagne taste and a beer budget. Many of my projects have been DIY.

His LX521 design is the successor to my Orions and is extraordinary. They perform as well as any speaker at any price. You can build them for about $3000 and then have to add in the cost of 10 channels of amplification at 60 wpc. There are 12 channel amps from B&K and ATI that cover this quite well for a reasonable amount of money. You could also build 10 channels of chip amp for a modest amount of money.

Oh. One other thing. My speaker cables are 14 gauge zip cord I got from Parts Express. And I still consider myself to be an audiophile...

Old? Having an mp3 player makes you old? Hee, hee. That's funny!

I run a Linn LP-12 turntable (serial #1956) which is 44 years old. It's in tip-top shape. I have a Rega RB-300 arm and a Denon DL-110 cartridge. I run that into a tube preamp (http://www.tubes4hifi.com) which feeds an active crossover for the Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system. I use an Ubuntu laptop with the Banshee music player for my digital source into a Peachtree DAC. Decent grade, but nothing special Parts Express interconnects and 14 gauge zip cord speaker wire. Everyone who hears my system leaves with envy.

*All* headphones suck compared to what I listen to at home. I don't care if you're listening to an mp3 player, a iPhone or what headphone amp you're running it through. It all sucks in comparison. If you want something that actually sounds good AND is affordable for the Common Man, point your browser at:

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/LXm...

CDs have no background or media noise the way that vinyl does and vinyl is typically compressed a bit. It just doesn't have the signal to noise ratio that digital does.

I record the concerts my wife's string quartet does at 96 khz/24 bit, and when I down sample to 44.1 khz/16 bit to made a CD, it seems to me that I can hear differences there as well.

Personally I buy recordings to listen to the music. I like to listen on better gear just like everyone else does, but the hi-end can get waaaaay too anal retentive for me. I keep my vinyl because there's so much of it that will never make it to CD. I've got some jazz recordings you'll never see on CD.

And if you ever think you want to get into some real hi-end sound without spending an insane amount, check out

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

Where's my mod points when I need them? You're right: Bose is a good compromise for people who do not want big speakers but still get decent sound. And yes, it's a decent system for people who are not too discerning about sound quality, i.e. most of us. These days you can do better for your money, but for a good while Bose was the only name in town for those looking for small speakers with decent sound.

Personally, I'm still looking for speakers that excel at reproducing music (modern as well as classical) but also do a good job in a home theater setup. I settled on a pair of Acoustic Research Status S-50 floor standers, good but still a bit of a compromise. Hearing good things about the LinkWitz Orion but I still have to find a pair I can listen to, to decide whether all that extra cabling and equipment is worth the effort.

I'm not sure at what level you think "hyper-expensive" is. The top end Bose loudspeaker, the 901, is only about $1400/pair, which is pretty pedestrian these days. To me you'd have to drop $20,000 or more to begin to get into what I think is "hyper-expensive". Certainly you can drop $50,000 to $100,000 to $200,000 on a two-channel system without much trouble. That's where I put the phrase, "hyper-expensive"

I'm an Old School, two channel audiophile. To me the word "audiophile" is someone who loves listening to music in such a way that it attempts to approximate the original live performance. This is really only relevant to acoustic music.

Sadly to many others, the word "audiophile" means someone who is anal-retentive to the max and spends insane amounts of money on cables, room treatments and a lot of other wacky stuff.

I'm a big band trumpet player and my wife is a professional violinist, so acoustic music is what we listen to. I love hearing the life-like quality a good recording can bring into my home. I've probably got about $6,000 total into my audio rig and feel that it sounds as good as any other system I've ever heard, at *any* price. Oh, and I use 14 gauge zip cord for speaker wire.

If you want to hear truly extreme hi-end sound without having to sell your wife and children into slavery, check out the Linkwitz Orion system at:

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/orion_challenge.htm

Could you get sound this good with the top end Bose stuff? Not a chance. Not even close. The Bose 901 was a screwball idea when it was new, but it was fun.

But if you really want to ruin your life, go hear a Linkwitz Orion rig. Three dimensional, detailed, life-like and a great pleasure.

I say BS. No phone camera lens can come anywhere close to my 50mm f1.4 Nikon lens. Sure, the smaller lens might have less chromatic aberration and a larger depth of field compared to a wide-open lens, but CA isn't really a problem (my camera automatically removes it) and if I want the depth of field I just stop it down. I can easily shoot photos which are impossible for a camera phone, especially in low-light situations. I can use a narrow depth of field for the situations where I want the subject to be in focus and everything else out of focus. You won't see pros shooting much with cell phones, even if they were 50MP.

It's easier to make a tiny lens sharp since it inherently has a large depth of field, but it also has a lot less light gathering ability as well and a tiny sensor has a smaller dynamic range.

There's many parameters that make a good lens including sharpness, contrast,flare/ghosting resistance, brokah and depth of field. There's a reason that those cinematography prime lenses cost so much, otherwise they'd be shooting with cell phone type cameras.

See http://www.linkwitzlab.com/dpp/camera%20lens.htm

I have done live location recording to analog and then transferred to CD grade and there is a perceptible loss. I have a number of recordings on both vinyl and CD. There are differences, though it's not so clearly that one is better than the other. Sure the CD has much less noise, no ticks or pops. But the timbre of instruments is different and tangibly more live on the vinyl copies. It's not a huge difference, but it is distinctly there.

All that being said, the point of all this isn't that my system is better than yours. The real point is simply the enjoyment of music. Most music listening is either done on headphones or in automobile systems, and in either case true high fidelity is irrelevant. True high-end high fidelity not only produces a very nuanced reproduction of instrument timbre, but imaging and dimension. Live acoustic performance has a great deal of dynamic contrast, which is a color that is completely missing from modern pop music, which is only punctuated by when a singer is screaming or not screaming.

On a true hi-end, 2 channel system, it's not terribly important whether the source is CD or vinyl in that there will be a level of enjoyment and sensual experience that no set of headphones or automobile system could ever reproduce, let alone those crappy home theater systems. For an example of extreme hi-end audio that won't require you to take out a 2nd mortgage, point your web browser at:

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

Bullshit. There is not a "free space" driver anywhere that audibly reproduces any frequency below 300Hz.

LOL... maybe you do need some guidance, you obviously are out of touch. Then again, maybe I should get your lazy ass to prove that no free space driver can go below 300 Hz...

But anyway, I'll indulge you quickly; I'll only post a couple links since apparently all I have to prove is that there is one driver that will work (there are many, many free-space drivers that go well below 300 Hz by the way):

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/thor-estim.htm

http://www.d-s-t.com/peerless/data/830500.htm

http://www.doranproaudio.com.au/products/product.a sp?catID=19&subcatID=94

"Morons, your train is leaving"