Arizona Speaker Geeks 2006     Lou's Homepage

This year's shindig was thinner in attendance than prior years. Some too busy, some too broke. I'd like to think we traded quality for quantity. More time spent with each setup on a wider variety of music. My photography isn't as good as some of my other skills. Doug B offered up his daughters new home. Out thanks go to them for putting up with us old farts. My recall isn't terrific so any of you who want to correct me (or submit new photos) feel free. I'm not going to elaborate on the subtleties of the boxes. I didn't hear anything I wouldn't own. We had too much fun getting caught up, swapping stories, grazing the vegetables and snarfing a meatball sub or two. I don't know about anybody else, but I had a great day.

Many thanks to Craig H. for lugging and setting up all the source gear. Again my personal thank you to all of you who helped me with my gear and the stairs.

Thanks to Darren at Parts Express for the door prizes, I think everybody went home with something.

Write ups are below the pictures.

1. Doug B. put together these huge towers to match up with his younger daughter's new DLP TV. Seas mid & tweeter, four Silver Flute woofers and a side firing Dayton sub. One of the more elaborate cabinet designs I've seen. (Doug, I'd be happy to host a photo shoot) The finish is actually a roller applied Ralph Lauren acrylic paint. Very attractive, nice texture, looks pretty durable. Oh, BTW sound is BIG, balanced and smooth. The new owner was "alllowed" to extensively audition with her own source material. I think she's pleased. (more detail below)
2. Ken reworked his series crossover for these way cool three ways. Hand cut walnut inserts guys. Traded out the original boston acoustics woofers, went ported. I didn't think he could improve these, but he certainly did. I'd be hard pressed to pick between Ken's and Doug's boxes for "most intimidating speaker" catagory.

3. My KanToo towers. A pretty sweet design--unless you here them after the big boys are done. (Can you say sub). They were a very nice match to the 8 watt tube amp (#6) and were very listenable even with low power. On some source material, they seemed a little laid back, on others fairly bright. Seems to be charateristic of the ribbon.

4. A consignment design I call the U3. I finished these on Friday afternoon so this was their first audition. After hearing this stacked up against some of the other boxes, I was really very happy with the performance. Again, it needs a sub but overall a very balanced & detailed presentation. I'll be writing this one up.

5. Craig's Seas P17-SS 9300 MTM. Craig provided almost all the electronics this year. He put this box together with a simple "text book" Coil/Cap crossover at 2200. Other than needing a bit of baffle step, this was a nice warm and laid back box. Shows what one can do with clean, higher quality drivers.

11. Russ brought in this Adire WRS-125 full range driver in a vented P.E. cabinet. No crossover components at all. We were all very impressed. A nice balanced presentation with ultimate limitations at the very top (and very bottom) of audio spectrum. Making that little driver punch out the bass limits it's power handling. Run it on "small", add a sub, and you could easily put together a top notch HT system with no electronic skills at all. I know the driver is a bit pricy, but certainly seems like a great alternative to the Jordan JX92. More info HERE
6. Russ's 8 watt tube amp from a kit. It pushed my KanToo's loud enough to keep everybody happy. You don't need a ton of watts to listen to the music.

7. Craig brought this DAC. I think it's commercial. Handles optical, AES/EBU, coax input. Balanced & unbalanced output. We used my cheapie Pioneer DVD for all our souce material. Absolutely clean.

8. Here's where I lost it. (I'm not sure I have everything straight with 8 & 9) I think this is Craig's home made DAC.
9. I believe this is Craig's My_Ref 318/3886 amp with PGA 2311 preamp/volume control. Ruthless amplifier. If there's a problem with the source, this will show it.
10. Craig's Class A Aleph 2 clone monoblocks. These bad boys do about 60 watts each of music power and about 500 watts of home heating. I'm not an electronics kind of guy, but I know good sound when I hear it. I suspect you could grill a wiener on them while listening.

Some of the crew (you guess if you don't know) Hint: The lovely young lady was our hostess.

 

 

 

 

Doug's cabinets in full regalia