Hi. Thank you for posting images of your fantastic system. It must sound amazing. I'm guessing that the speakers work with the SET amps that you have. I'm wondering why you went with the Sophia Electric 300B's as opposed to a WE or the readily available Chinese tubes.

audiophile77 August 25, 2012 14:16

Awesome system. I am a big fan of Conrad Johnson equipment myself. I currently own the Conrad Johnson Evolution 2000 amplifier and the PV-12 preamp. I also had owned their PF-2 preamp in the past. I find their sound to be unparalleled.

If you want to see my system you can find it here on "Conrad Johnson Owners.com". You may want to check the site out as it's a completely Conrad Johnson audio equipment dedicated forum site. Or you can just google "Conrad Johnson Owners". Kind of cool to have a dedicated site just for Conrad Johnson equipment.

Well, like I said. Congrats on the system it's really beautiful.

invenio78 August 22, 2012 20:06

Hello,
From England what a lovely set up you have and good taste re your decor and rugs.
My Chimeras will arrive from Wilson Benesch in two weeks time I was pleased to read your info re SET Amps driving them with no problems.My amps are the Italian Mastersound 845 Monoblocks 50 W output into 8 or 4 ohms however as you know the Chimeras can drop down for short periods to 2.5 ohms so hope I dont have problems but after reading through your write up all should be well.
Have a nice day.
Kind Regards,
Peter.

petestereo February 21, 2010 16:55

Thanks for your kind words.

The only time I dub tapes is either for friends who want copies, or more often because I come across back coated tapes that are "sticky" and need to be baked. After baking them you have about a 2-3 week window to run them off to new tape before them become sticky again. Whether or not you can repeatedly rebake them without inducing loss is a question that is debated among people I know in the tape world. I prefer to err on the side of caution so I bake once and dub a fresh copy to new tape. It won't sound as good as the original but baking is kind of a nuisance anyway so the idea of baking tapes in batches in anticipation of playing them is kind of unrealistic.

You do lose some fidelity when you dub, certainly. One of the big discussions people get into when they start collecting master dubs is how many generations away from the actual master is the dub in question? The more generations removed, obviously the more loss. I am not sure if it's as cut and dry as 3 dB although that may in fact be true. The dynamics of most the master dubs I've worked with are so dramatic that even a 3 dB loss would still render them vastly more dynamic than most source material. But you definitely lose some transparency and highs when you dub, and some detail and resolution. A lot of it depends on the decks in question. Some decks make better recordings than others. Another issue is that most R2R decks have terrible sounding output stages. They're old 1970's or 1980's solid state based devices, many with opamps etc. Now while it's true that tapes played on those machines will still blow your mind because the source material is so much better than what most of us are used to, it is definitely the case that one of the biggest improvements you can make is to bypass all the internal electronics. (There are some exceptions to this statement - namely the Levinson ML-5 modified Studer A80RC and also the Stellavox.) There are some Class A solid state rigs out there, and then there's the Manley if you want tubes. That way at least what comes out of the deck is as good as possible. Then you can work on the quality of the recording electronics on the other end if you want to obsess that much... there are some places you can get custom recording preamps for R2R setups.

The Masterlink does a good job. I have a few friends who feel that you can make better Redbook CD's with other burners these days. The advantage of the Masterlink is that you can accumulate material on the internal hard drive rather than being forced to burn in real time. So I can just play tape after tape and then worry about editing and trimming and spewing out CD's later when I want to devote time to it. I can also just use it as a sort of high resolution music server. The hard drive holds a fair amount so I can keep a bunch of tapes on it at 24/96 if I want.

But most of what I do with the Masterlink is pull down 24/96 to its hardrive from tape and then burn out onto CD-R's with WAV files on them. At 15 ips you only get 20 minutes or so for a 10.5" reel of 1.5 mil tape, and a regular CD-R can hold that at 96/24 when you use the Masterlink. You can either play those CD-R's back on the Masterlink, or what I have done is used my Mac to compile DVD's of uncompressed PCM 24/96 files. I burn out DVD-R's formatted for DVD-Video using Apple DVD Studio Pro. I just bring over all the files and chapter them in one by one. The DVD-Video standard supports 24/96 uncompressed PCM but won't go up to 24/192. But since my Masterlink doesn't do 24/192 it works out ok.

michaelkach July 19, 2005 19:40

Perhaps one of the best put together, beautiful systems that I have seen on this site. I see that you have two open reel tape decks that you dub one upon the other. I am curious on your source material. I have only one R2R and it is one of my most used components. I listen to factory pre-recorded tapes at 3.75 and 7.5 IPS. Do you dub these factory made tapes from deck to deck ? I read somewhere that when you do this you lose 3 dB of dynamic range. How is the sound of these dubed tapes compare to the original ?
Also I was thinking upon purchasing an Alesis MD 9600 to copy R2R tapes along with vinyl. How is the sound quality of redbook CDs' Again I am envious of your system. Enjoy it.

surfgod July 19, 2005 08:47