[Baumli]

I have two items I'm wanting to move, and thought I'd offer them locally before going elsewhere. One is a Dahlquist DQ-LP1 crossover, completely upgraded by John Hellig--new caps, a better op-amp, a hard-wired high-end cord (after I tested many using one of those little adapters), and it's in excellent cosmetic shape and perfect working condition. I have the original manual (which gives values for setting the high-pass side), and also the original box, although with this new cord the unit won't fit in that box anymore. I'm listing this piece here as a matter of conscience. Someone in GAS, a few years back, asked me to promise to give them dibs on it if I ever wanted to sell it. (This was before I had it rebuilt.) But I can't for the life of me remember who that was. What do I want for it? I've got about $700 in it with the rebuild, but I know that would be asking a lot. So maybe the right trade? A piece of ultra high-end wire? Something that would take me to nirvana? Also I have a Mission turntable. It's a minty 775 with the tonearm removed. It has a perfect dustcover, the center clamp, and everything's there including the box and manual too. It's a great turntable, but not as good as my Merrill "Heirloom" which I put the tonearm that was on the Mission table on. (A Mission 774.) So if anyone's interested, just let me know. The idea of trying to sell on the comatose Audiogon site is discouraging. About a year ago I had some old Musical Fidelity processors with the deluxe OPS units, extra cables, extra parts, and so on. I put them up for sale on Audiogon and during the entire listing got not one query or offer. So I put them up for sale on eBay, had 6 people watching the batch up to the end, and sold it all for just a hair under the thousand I was asking for on Audiogon. This says something, gents.

[Bob in St. Louis]

Don't forget about our Gateway Flea Market Thread.

[sturgus]

Mr. Baumli, Do you have a pic of the table? Also how much?
Sturgus

[Baumli]

Dear Sturgus,
For God's sake, please don't call me "Mister Baumli." We've imbibed too much Scotch together for that. I don't presently have pictures of the turntable. My son (at college) has the digital camera. I can get some before long though. And I can send them, although if you want you could just drop by and have a look at it. As for price: I was thinking $175. I've seen them bring about 2&1/2 times this much, but I definitely do not want to ship the thing. Give me a phone call, or I'll ring you up.

Francis Baumli
(314) 966-2167

[Baumli]

Master Bob,
I'll put these items on the flea market thread if these don't sell to my nearest neighbors. I always like to keep transactions close to home. This way, if later I regret having sold the item, I can at last beg to go see it and drool on it.

Best,

Francis Baumli

[Bob in St. Louis]

Master Bob,
I'll put these items on the flea market thread if these don't sell to my nearest neighbors. I always like to keep transactions close to home. This way, if later I regret having sold the item, I can at last beg to go see it and drool on it.

If you ever call me "Master" again, I will convince Sturgis, and the rest of the GAS clan to call you "Mister" for the rest of your natural born life. 
Just call me "Bob". Please.
I even made it nice and easy for everybody to spell and pronounce. For you added pleasure, you can even spell it backwards.

Bob

[SteveFord]

Yeah, what boB said.

[Bob in St. Louis]

"BOB"

sorry.......

[Baumli]

Dear Bob,
I am abjectly, cravenly, and profusely sorry for having referred to you as "Master." I shan't do so again. However, I fear you have inflicted upon me a grave peril: Since I am terribly dyslexic, I am afraid that I'll never know whether I am spelling "Bob" forwards or backwards, and I'd hate to not know if I am spelling it "Bob" or "boB" or any other variants such as "Bawb" and such. So please cut me some slack here, and don't throw me off the site just because of my helpless, albeit reprehensible, handicap.

Humbly yours,

Francis Baumli

[Baumli]

Dear Mazzuh boB,
Speaking of dyslexia, I note that you don't even spell Sturgus' name correctly. I daresay this honorable gentleman deserves more vigilant attention to the details of his august name than that. Maybe, as a miniscule token of apology, you should do something generous, like buy him a turntable.

Yours dyslexically,

Francis Baumli

[thunderbrick]

Bob or boB, just remember it has only one "o", regardless of what the rest of us might think.............

[sharpsuxx]

Francis, PM sent

[Bob in St. Louis]

  Sorry Sturgus.   

No worries Francis, I won't kick you out of the sandbox. 

[Baumli]

Dear Bob,
This most enjoyable interchange of jocularity causes me, as such interchanges often do, to effect a 180-degree turn of circumspection with language. Humor causes us to use words to mean things they don't quite mean, or to suggest much more than they usually mean. I experience this enjoyably, then do an about-turn and think about how in audio the power of words is so manifestly shown insofar as we now have words we once didn't have. At age 64, and having long been afflicted by this perversion called audiophilia, I remember those good old days which weren't so good for high end audio. Back in the late '60s and early '70s it was called Hi-Fi. Words like audiophile, soundstaging, imaging,, dynamics, warmth, holographic, and so forth didn't even exist in our audio vocabulary. And not much existed in the way of what we now call the high end. I still remember when, living in Columbia, Missouri in the very late '70s, I walked into an audio store and saw about a dozen huge spools of 12-gauge speaker wire made by Monster Cable. I asked the salesman if he thought it would help my sound. I was using either 16-gauge or 18-gauge Radio Shack zipcord at the time. He asked me how long my runs were, I told him (I think they were 8 feet), and he said it probably wouldn't help. Being a working musician, I bought some for my speaker cabinets which I used in performance, and what a difference! So I did try some for my home stereo, and again, what a difference! It's easy to forget that at one time such equipment wasn't even being used. And I daresay that as the quality of equipment has evolved, so has our language for describing sound, and each has helped the other. So we have been privileged to live in an era where a new gestalt about reproduced sound has evolved, and also a language for describing this experience has evolved. I find both developments immensely exciting, although one certainly is cheaper than the other.

Cheers,

Francis Baumli

[daves]

Francis, call him Bobwa Ann, see how he likes them beans. 

[Bob in St. Louis]

Good morning Francis, you are certainly the wordsmith. Much more so than I am.   Regarding the language used to describe audio, is like using words to describe colors. I find most of it to be useless chatter. Either I can hear what they're talking about, or I'm not cut from the same cloth.

Regarding what Dave said........ummm, "No".

[Baumli]

Dear Bob,
Comparing the language of audio to the language for color is of merit. But the real comparison would be between audio and art that is produced by colors, e.g., paintings. We've long had a language for sound--the notes, pitch, emphasis, staccato, pizzicato, etc. And we have quite a language for color: purple, burgundy, mauve, etc. all for colors that are close to one another. But for audio, we long lacked a language and now we are forming one. As for paintings, that area has long lacked a language and it has barely begun to form one. There are those who make the attempt by being hortatory or by borrowing from other disciplines, e.g., Salvadore Dali, or Andy Warhol. Others make the attempt by being modest enough to stick with pedestrian terminology, e.g., Gaughin or Gentileschi. But none of these people do a good job of describing, with words, what is going on in paintings. Which is a shame, because many of these people are brilliant writers. Gaughin's writings about Van Gogh are wonderful. Rembrandt's comments on himself are poignant autobiography. Ruben's letters are some of the finest literature I have ever encountered. So these people can indeed write well. But they never write well about painting because they do not have a language for it. And they haven't even yet begun. I know many painters, a few of them famous, and I know those who study painting and painters; their feeble attempts to explain what they are doing, or comment on what other painters are or are not doing, are just ridiculous. But people in audio--we now can do this, whereas fifty years ago we could not. For example, about three years ago I was with two other fellows and we were comparing four pairs of identical Grado headphones. Two of these later got sent off and rewired by you-know-who with Cardas wire. When they came back, one was clearly defective. The other one--the good one--sounded exactly like what one would expect from Cardas wire: warm, smooth, relaxed, laid-back. The two which retained their factory wiring sounded more dynamic, accurate, detailed. One could easily understand why some people would prefer the original wiring (I did), and others would prefer the Cardas wire. But note: when I write "warm" or "dynamic" you know what I mean. Fifty years ago, neither of us would have understood these terms. What is interesting in all this, for me, is how painters have always been so lacking with a language about their art and composers of music have not been. I tell you, writings on music by people ranging from Mozart to Schumann to Charles Mingus are just stunning in their eloquence, precision, and excitement. Schumann especially is just amazing. And if you want to read what I think is one of the best books ever written, avail yourself of "A Mingled Chime" by Sir Thomas Beecham. All this said, you are not wrong to opine that often audio language is just chatter. It becomes this when it is overused. When I come across phraseology by reviewers such as "palpable midrange" or "air around the instruments" or "worth two or three times the price" I grimace or yawn. The words have been used so often they become pap--or, said in a different way, they become boringly popularized to the point that, even though they have meaning, we stop noticing their meaning. I think the meaning is clearest when we are using the language in a relaxed attempt to be precise. If I were to say, "The Cardas wire sounds more mellow and warm, but the Grado wire sounds more dynamic and precise," you know what I mean. If I were to gush, "The Cardas wire made me forget I was listening to headphones and focus on the music, while the Grado headphones didn't distract me from the listening to equipment even though I noticed that my toes were tapping," you would be wondering what pen-name I use when writing for the big audio magazines. My point is: audio now has a language, and it can help us appreciate, communicate, and further what audio engineers are trying to develop if we use it, not sparingly, but in a way that is at one and the same time both precise and creative. For example, some time back an engineer sent me a revision he had done to a pre-amp, and while I praised it in many respects, I registered a criticism: "You have succeeded in making the soundstage extremely wide, as you hoped, and there is a middle that is solid. But about two feet to the right or left of that middle, there is a hole--only about a foot wide but all the way up to the ceiling--where there is nothing. That needs to be fixed." He understood exactly what I meant, and when he got the pre-amp back he was able to hear exactly what I had described, and in a later encounter with this pre-amp I would happily discover that he had accomplished his goal of a wide soundstage without those two holes appearing. But yes; often there are so many words it all becomes chatter. That is why we keep listening, if we are wise. I say this because I have known too many audiophiles who would rather talk about their equipment than listen to music with it. In fact, I know a fellow in Kansas City who has had a high-end turntable for about 25 years. He used it for listening to music for about a year. Since then, he has done nothing but work on it. He puts on a different tonearm, changes his mind, must get a different mounting boss, drill, mount again, then he changes the suspension, and on and on. He has a 'table worth five grand (without tonearm or cartridge), and he's probably spent another ten grand making changes on it, not one of which he has ever used in actual listening! Perverse, yes? But perhaps I should desist here, or I will find myself going on about my own audio perversions. (And I'm not being facetious in suggesting that these do exist!)

Back to Mozart,

Francis Baumli

[Baumli]

Dear members,
I get a phone call at 2:10 A.M. just as I'm about to leave the computer asking me what the four identical headphones were? Well, okay. Somehow I felt I should be polite and not say. They were Grado RS-1i headphones, all brand new, though well broken in, and then three months old when two of them came back with their Cardas wire--whereupon they again got burned in before critical listening was done. Now, please, no more phone calls at this hour. Just because I'm crazy enough to be at the computer at 2 A.M. doesn't mean I'm paranoid enough to again rush for the phone at this hour, thinking it's someone in the midst of an emergency. In my life, there are no emergencies, since I am never not in the middle of a crisis.

Grimly,

Francis Baumli

[Baumli]

Lastly,

A postscript: I spelled the model of the headphones wrong. They are Grado RS1i's, not Grado RS-1i's. The dash shouldn't be there.

Pedantically,

Francis Baumli

[Scott F.]

Somebody actually called at 2AM? That's just bad form.