I will be driving in from Minnesota with one of my ace builders, Nathen Field. We will be staying with Jim Salk and look forward to being able to see his amazing operation.
I will be taking home a new pair of speakers, either a set of V3s or new HT3s, depending upon which I really like better. Note that the V3s do not have to be absolutely as good as my existing HT3 set, just good enough for the upstairs AV system. My walnut HT3s now need to be moved to my sound lab as Patty's HT3s finally went home to her newly finished lower level rec room. I am back using my old highly modified B&W 801 Series Two speakers downstairs now.
I installed the complete system for her last weekend, Ultra DAC, Ultra SL preamp with remote control, Ultra 550 amp, the gorgeous set of heartwood HT3s, in wall wiring for four sets of speakers, interfaced with satellite TV, CD/DVD/VHS combo player, a Sony HDTV set and more.
I handled the speaker switching functions in an interesting and rather foolproof way without needing a switchbox.
We used Radio Shack dual banana plug wall plates that fit in normal electrical boxes. At each speaker location there is a wallplate with a set of dual banana plug jacks. At the system end, there are two sets of wall plates, each with four pairs of dual banana plug jacks. Each speaker wire is connected to the wallplates at each end. I used a C-cell battery wired to a dual banana plug for testing. It got plugged in at each speaker location, and with a voltmeter at the system end, I was able to verify both continuity and polarity of the connections.
Anyway, the amplifier is equipped with short speaker wires terminated in stacking dual banana plugs at each end. Speakers are selected by simply plugging the amp wires into the appropriate set of banana jacks in the wall plates. I also made up two more sets of very short speaker wires with stacking banana plugs at each end. To play more than one set of speakers at the same time, they just need to plug the short wires into the source banana plugs from the amplifier, and into another set of speaker jacks. They can repeat the process to play three sets at once. The arrangement does not allow for using all four sets of speakers at the same time as the load impedance would get very low, even for the big Fet Valve 550 amplifier.
They can choose high quality audio sound by turning on the AVA electronics and turning off the sound on the TV, or if they are lazy and just want to catch the news or something like that, they just turn up the TV sound and leave the audio components off.
The fourth set of speaker connections are in the rear of the the main listening room, which allows the future use of a discrete four or more channel system if they ever want to do this, or a passive Dyna arrangement too, but the sound from just great two channel audio there is so good I doubt if they will ever do this.
Hey it even all worked right the first time.
Regards,
Frank Van Alstine
