Aging ex-hippie college professor here. I've been into audio since the early seventies, but only recently came into the time and money to get more serious about it. Currently constructing a two channel listening room in an unfinished basement. It's still mostly unfinished as I am finding it hard to get reliable guidance on what the optimal room dimensions are and what sort of materials would be best. At present I'm just hanging various sorts of absorption and reflection from the ceiling joists and experimenting. It's sounding better than anything I've had before, but still not as good as I dreamed it would. So that may go on for quite a while.
My present system (which replaced decades-old mid-fi stuff) consists of a pair of KEF LS50's, tube pre-amp and solid state power amp from Audio by Van Alstine (T-10 and Synergy 240, respectively), a Bryston BDA-2 DAC playing FLAC files from a laptop (running J-River Media Center). I have an old Rotel CD player, but I seldom listen to it. The convenience of computer audio has won me over. My favorite way to listen is to tell JRiver to play random tracks from my entire collection. Otherwise I end up listening to the same few artists over and over (mostly jazz vocalists).
I joined up here mainly to be able to talk to other van Alstine users, but I can already see lots of other stuff that will draw me in.
