Any Audiophile Steamers Out There ?

[bccap]

I agree with the consensus here that speakers are the most important bit of kit . Though the audiophile mantra is source first ..... I bought my Gershman Avant Gardes directly from Ira Gershman when Vancouver was the last stop on the audio show circuit . It is quite common for audio manufacturers to sell their equipment after the last show so they don't have to pack them back to where ever they come from..... Following Ira's advice I paired them with an 8 ft. pair of Nordost Red Dawn speaker cables ...... I love them and would only consider replacing them with Wilson's should the time come .....

But streaming is about the media played. A few years ago when my Sonic Frontiers tube CD player died I went to my local stereo store to replace it. Where I found that the high end in CD players was dead . Even Linn was not making it anymore .... So I educated myself a bit and dragged out a Stax Talent DAC I had in the closet and proceeded to load Itunes into my computer ..... However I quickly discovered that though Itunes supports Lossless files all they sell is MP3's ..... I got around that through Pirate Bay where there is a large audiophile group recording Flac recordings. Flac is easily converted to Lossless with no degradation of quality ..... The sound was pretty good . Close to the level of my Sonic Frontiers .....

Then recently I bought a streamer ..... Well the sound quality is even better and the added benefit of 24/96 HiRes files ...... Not to mention for 14 loonies a month I now have access to virtually every recording ever made ...... Imagine walking into a record store and realizing you have a hundred times their inventory in your tablet on the coffee table .... Doing a search on Miles Davis for example brings up all his recordings. I never counted them but I think there is over a hundred. A similar search on Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac brings up massive list of all their albums .....My biggest problem is not jumping around. I want to hear everything at once .....

In the below pics you can see the first page of my album collection after two months of owning a streamer. { around 200 currently } . So you can see why I am searching for a way to organize them ...... I am constantly editing it to keep the quantity manageable ..... I do everything from the comfort of my couch, from music selection to volume control .....

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[LAB3]

I agree with the consensus here that speakers are the most important bit of kit

That's why I ended up with the Advent speakers. Went into the local audio store after getting a nice lump sum payout on a gig job and was ready to plop down some hard cold green on a killer stereo. Had my mind set on a high wattage Pioneer receiver and some low end speakers that could handle the power.

A salesman approached me and we got to talking, he asked what I liked to listen to and at that time it was mostly the Grateful Deads acoustic stuff, New Riders of the Purple Sage, John Prince etc. He explained how staging works and I went out to the car to grab a couple of cassettes to bring in and try.

He set up the system I was looking to purchase and we plugged it in, then he put on a Led Zeppelin tape to hear on that system and cranked up the volume.

Then he set up a system with a similar price point with a basic JVC receiver and a set of Advent Prodigy towers, not audiophile per se but certainly higher quality than what most people where buying. DAMN, he hade sold on the spot and it opened up a new appreciation for music production methods in general, a few hundred bucks well spent (except for replacing cassettes with CD's)

[bccap]

To give you guys an idea of the massive amounts of recordings available streaming . Below is a screen shot of a search I did of the Grateful Dead . You can't see where I scroll down further but I stopped counting at 250 recordings .......

graterful dead.jpg

[bccap]

For Fleetwood Mac I did count them all . 129 recordings ......

fleetwood.jpg

[oldGSfan]

To give you guys an idea of the massive amounts of recordings available streaming . Below is a screen shot of a search I did of the Grateful Dead . You can't see where I scroll down further but I stopped counting at 250 recordings .......

I was stunned at how many recordings the Dead have on this site. Over 17,000! Too bad I got burned out on them for life back in '79 when I lived with a couple of Deadhead ski bums in Mammoth Lakes CA.

https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead

[Rob S.]

Starting in 1966, I believe, the Dead began recording all of their performances, as a means to help them improve. There are hardly any concerts of theirs that are not available in one form or another right up to their final show in 1995.

PS I usually only listen to their shows up until the middle of 1972. 1969, '70 & '71 are their peak.

[LAB3]

About 15 years ago I was offered a loan of a 1tb hard drive full of DAT recordings that where taken directly off the mixing board from several years of Grateful Dead shows by a friend who was there to record it. The Dead where quite OK with people bootlegging their shows and I quite clearly remember seeing an area around the sound booth at their shows where people set up their recording equipment. Perhaps the ONLY thing I clearly remember....

Yes, Archive.org is THE place to grab those recordings these days, back in the day it was all done by trading them in person.

[Rob S.]

The Dead where quite OK with people bootlegging their shows and I quite clearly remember seeing an area around the sound booth at their shows where people set up their recording equipment.

Yes, the famous taping area. A lucky few were usually allowed to plug right into the sound board. Others held their microphones atop tall wooden sticks.

As magnanimous as most Dead tapers were, offering free copies to anyone who supplied the blank tape, some would alter the speed at some point or introduce other imperfections so that they would have the only perfect version. Human nature!
But this is no reason to get 'steamed.'