Hey everybody! I stopped by to re-read an old thread on Jolida mods (for the tenth time) and decided to just join up. This will be at least my dozenth time registering on an audio board (I've joined so many I've lost track of them all - Audio Karma, Audiogon, Klipsch, Steve Hoffman, et al). AudioCircle seems at least as friendly a place as any I've seen yet. I've got no product to sell but I've been at this hobby for the entirety of my adult life (I'm 52). I've dropped enough dough on gear both good and bad, used and new, ugly and pretty to put a kid through college. All through the 80s & 90s, I would pore over my Stereo Review, Audio, and Stereophile magazines and then go hang out in stereo stores and lust after the latest fads while making just enough purchases to keep the owner happy. Then one day I realized that buying brand new gear is almost always a waste of resources. It is much more fun to cruise garage sales, thrift stores, estate sales, and pawn shops looking for diamonds in the rough, taking them home, cleaning them up, and adding them to the collection - or better yet - passing them along to a music-loving stereo-less friend or neighbor. In this way, I've learned to do simple mods, repairs, and tune-ups. I've also restored many pairs of speakers including Original Large Advents, Klipsch Heritage, and late-70s Acoustic Research. I've reconed, redomed, refoamed, built crossovers, reclothed grilles, and done cabinet work. My latest passion is tube amplification (hence my lurking on that Jolida mod thread). I started out with vinyl & cassettes back when I was a kid in the 70s then went all-in with CD in the mid-80s and then went crawling back to my first love - vinyl - about six years ago when the current "Vinyl Renaissance" was just starting to gather steam. I love pretty much all music but would rather hear something from the 70's (on vinyl of course) than almost anything from today. I used to have a dedicated listening room but recently moved and now have my Home Theater rig sitting side-by-side with my analog 2ch rig in a finished basement "rec room". The last new gear I bought was a pair of ELAC B6's. I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor after letting them blow my mind. Well, I reckon that's enough about me and my obsessions... See you all around on the circles!
