Holy smokes, would you listen to this old fart?
"If it's too loud you're too old!" HAR! HAR! Trust me folks, it wasn't that loud! I swear! Jerry's exaggerating, just like he exaggerates those things he believes he hears when you swap the cables carrying the 0s and 1s to the DAC. You should've heard him whining about his poor ears afterwards!
What a big crybaby!
"Melancholy Emperor" is one hellaciously heavy doom metal tune, obviously the Billy Anderson 'artistic overdrive' tonality was too much for mister Sensitive Ears here to handle! MUWHAHAHA!!!
Well obviously I picked the wrong stuff to impress this elitist jazz snob with! I wish I would've had more time to choose stuff for good "hifi" content. Yep, the Tourniquet tune was very dry, but I played it cause it was a cool track with lots of energy. There is, almost by necessity, a fundamental difference in the way amplified rock music is recorded verses the way acoustic music is recorded. I can understand full well why Jerry likes the stuff he's played for me (to be fair I've only heard a tiny fraction), because they are wonderful recordings. Lots of presence and roomy ambience. I like that sound a lot, but when a man wants the sound of a Marshall cab he wants it big and in-your-face, not nice and polite! I wish like hell there was more ambience and feel to metal recordings, but the fact is it's hard to come by. Doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the music though. By it's nature, distorted guitar is naturally compressed by the amplifier, so there really isn't any dynamic contrast. Drums on the other hand... All too often those are overly compressed too. Sometimes they even have the kit set up with MIDI triggers that play samples. Evil, yes, but that's what SOME producers\engineers have been known to do.
But this kind of music is like a motion picture; you are taking the parts and manipulating it into a whole. By definition it is not "high fidelity" as J. Gordon Holt described it. It's entirely possible that rock music would not be as popular if they plunked down a single mic in a room and recorded the band playing. For one, the vocalist would be drowned out. I'd love to hear someone try it, though. Can you imagine if musicians were forced to actually mix themselves and create a coherent sound of their own instead of each loud-as-hell piece being 'distilled' into a manageable form?! The mind boggles...
What the fock does this have to do with the SE-9? Nothing yet. Now Jerry initially said he didn't have any "compatable" speakers. "Feh!" says I! You got an amp? Got a speaker? Plug the darn things in and try it! Well, indeed the mere 9 watts of pentode power satisfyingly drove those big monsters. Didn't quite have that bass punch as the aluminum gargantuans, and the very highest frequencies seemed softened, but to me there wasn't anything that said "Oh god, turn it off!" For 400 bucks I can't complain. And it looks cool, which is my big thing. My eyes are more keen than my ears. Must be from listening to all that Devil Music all these years right Jerry?
Hell, I wish I
did have more sensitive ears; then I'd be worried about which overpriced interconnect I was going to buy, cause anything less would be UNacceptable! I mean, how could I enjoy the tunes with that inferior $300 cable!?
Okay, razzing the hell of of Jerry aside, the point is that Norh's little amp can play on something besides 100db efficient horns or what have you. Just don't expect miracles if you want it real loud or have a big room. I wished we could've done some meaningful A\B comparsions but as we all know, switchboxes are the devil's work.
<--- there he is! Run! To Jerry's credit he did correctly identify which was the tube output on the Shanling, although he thought the Solid State output had better sound. (a 50\50 chance though! Ha!) And to Shanling's credit it's good that SOMEONE hears a difference! I just wish you didn't have to be such a keen listener like audiojerry to hear it! If you look close you will notice that his earlobes are actually starting to turn gold. I'm not kidding!
I wish the Shanling had an Apple\Watermelon difference, not a Kiwi\Strawberry difference! Heh! But I don't care, it looks cool and chicks dig it.
Unfortunately, it had a very disturbing effect on her, and later that evening she told me she was concerned for my well being. She feared that Nathan was trying to indoctrinate me into some type of devil worshipping cult. Nathan assurred me that this was not the case, and that one of the groups we listened to, Tourniquet, I believe, was Christian based. Right Nathan - so how come 3 days later I am still fighting the urge to want to bludgeon the next person I see?
I dunno, maybe because you're upset that you spent $10,000 on a 200 watt tube amp that consumes 600 watts of electricity (at IDLE!) when you could've had 90% of the performance for $9,600 less?!
Another thing, we're already part of a
cult; the cult that causes otherwise intelligent people to spend so goddamn much money on fuckin' audio equipment!!! We may not be dreaming about riding on a comet, but we sure as hell are dreaming about some kind of intangible holy grail of audio bliss! Come on folks, you know it's true. Why does this board even exist? Why do we keep buying more and more stuff even though we've already got plenty? It's a cult that's why! Obey your master, master! (a little metallica reference there
)
I would love to hear the SE-9 on really senstive speakers though. I do very much like the Omega's as I was made aware of thanks to AC, but last night I realized I could convert my old Fischers into full range drivers. I think I'm gonna take out the old drivers, MDF up the sides and mount a FE206 8" or two on the side. Worth a try. I am tending to side with the low watt\high sensitivity crowd. At least it's cheaper than the battleship-sized SS high watt\low efficiency approach. I still don't expect to get the monster low end from full range drivers though.
So cheers to Michael Barnes and Bowers & Wilkins for creating a match made in heaven, only 19 years apart!
And I hope everyone will pray for Jerry's soul as I slowly begin to take it from him!
