I started being an audiophile in the 70's. Bought my first real equipment in 1975 - a pioneer integrated amp, separate tuner, Dual turntable with Shure stylus (don't remember which one), cassette deck (I know - lo fi, but convenient), and AR15 speakers. The first upgrade I did was the speakers - the ARs were too laid back for me and the bass was not tight and impactful. I replaced them with ADS810s which had 2 8" woofers, much better low end, tight bass and a more forward sound. I always wished I had gotten the 910s with their dual 10" woofers and bigger, lower bass. Much more impactful - but at the time I was just getting started in engineering and my salary didn't justify it. Jump to 15 years later (the 90s) and I had a Carver system - his tuner and preamp and the amazing M500T stereo Power Amplifier. My new speakers were VMPS Towers. 3 12" woofers - one was passive and located on the bottom of the enclosure. THAT setup REALLY could shake up a room - especially after I bought a high end Marantz Receiver and the VMPS bookshelf center channel and 2 Def Tech dipole surrounds. When we played action movies - holy cow!
After 20 years the VMPS was showing its age- I had to replace the tweeters - I think that an early Sony tv, and the Marantz- which was built 1 year before HDMI was adopted, sometimes interacted with the TV and caused acoustic feedback - I remember jumping to turn off the amp whenever this happened. Another thing that was quite amusing was noticing one day that the ported woofers located on the underside of the cabinet had fallen to the carpet. It took a while but I used THIS very site to find replacements for both the subwoofers and the tweeters. The ported subwoofers were actually an improvement. Eventually though, because VMPS was defunct and I was afraid of not being able to get more replacement parts, I sold them to somebody who was using an arrangement of 8 VMPS towers for his home theater.!!
The story will continue.....
