I’ve been an audiophile since high school. Growing up with a jazz musician/Caltech scientist father, I wasn’t allowed to use the system in his study: a Fisher 400 receiver, an ELAC/Benjamin Miracord turntable (with styli for both 33 and 78 rpm; he’d been a band leader in the 1940s, and recorded a dozen or so 78s), and KLH speakers. In college, dorm mates had systems I coveted: ESS speakers with that Heil “Air Motion Transformer” tweeter element, double Advent speakers; even a Heathkit receiver that a particularly nerdy friend assembled one summer. In grad school, a mentor had a huge pair of Magneplanars; that electrostatic magic has never ceased to beguile me. Probably the best component in my necessarily modest system in those days was a Thorens turntable with a Micro-Acoustics cartridge. I lost that in a burglary in upstate NY in 1978, along with some Kenwood separates. My Design Acoustics D2 speakers are still with me, though.

That was then, this is now. The components are still modest, at least in terms of cost. But I’ve heard systems belonging to our local Audio Club members that are worth many times as much and don’t sound any better. Timbral accuracy is spot-on for acoustic instruments and voices, there’s plenty of dynamic slam for rock, yet subtle sonic phenomena are not obscured (the system “noise floor” is very low), the soundstage is deep and wide, and imaging has an uncanny and stable specificity.  A good recording of Mahler’s Eighth symphony, for example, seems so much to exceed the spatial limits of the walls in my listening room, with choirs spread out before and above me, that it amounts to an auditory hallucination. For smaller ensembles up to chamber orchestras, I’m able to pick out individual instruments and follow their musical lines more easily in part because I can “watch” them, “keep my eyes on” the performer I’m listening to— and yet, my eyes are, of course, closed. High-fidelity audio at its best does for me something that I think no other experience in life does, not even being present at a live performance: music, which is a temporal art, becomes spatial. I can “watch” an acoustic drama unfold without seeing, just by listening.

A big part of the success of my system is the room, which has outstanding acoustic virtues even without any special treatments. Still, I recently added a diffusing panel that I made myself at the first reflection point for the right speaker, which is closer to its side wall. Paul McGowan explains that imaging can be adversely affected by reflected sound from this spot, which arrives at the ear so soon after the direct sound that it cannot be distinguished and so merely muddies spatial cues. (McGowan also advocates for diffusion over absorption, since different frequencies are absorbed by different amounts, while a diffuser scatters all frequencies evenly.) And I’ve made as much use as I can of the tips in Jim Smith’s Get Better Sound. The room is fairly large (roughly 20 feet wide by 18 feet deep—but effectively 35 feet deep; the trapezoidal ceiling is about 13 feet high), floored in walnut dressed with Persian rugs, and it opens out to the entrance foyer of the house through a high and wide stone arch behind the speakers, so rear and side wall reflections are minimal. These dimensions help to reduce standing waves, as no dimension is simply divisible by any other (this rule of thumb comes from Anthony Grimani of Grimani Systems); the opening through the stone arch alters them in still more complex ways, and if I want to I can open the floor-to-ceiling French doors to the balcony behind the listening position, partly defeating rear wall reflections. The speakers are set a little less than ten feet apart and are a little more than eleven feet from my ears, which is almost exactly what Jim Smith recommends in tip #77; they are toed in to face the sweet spot, as their designer Mike Maloney suggested they be. I wish it were possible to place the speakers so that I could look at the view from the sweet spot—but then again, Jim Smith claims that looking directly into a window creates a psychoacoustic effect of “glare” and should be avoided (tip #46). The left speaker is about six feet from the left wall, the right speaker is four feet from its wall, while there’s 16 feet from the sweet spot to the quarter-wall opening to the dining room behind the left speaker, and 30 feet to the far wall with the front door behind the right speaker. The sweet spot is five feet from the picture window behind me, with the aforementioned French doors on either side. I’ve experimented with placement; fortunately for the functionality of the room, soundstage and imaging are best exactly where things stand. The coffee table in front of the sweet spot can easily be moved to maximize the imaging space, although its presence does not significantly degrade the acoustics, and is, of course, convenient. Removing both it and the love seat completely does not further improve imaging or soundstage. There’s some very old furniture in the room that’s hard to completely silence, the baseboards buzz a bit; even the wine glasses in kitchen cabinets two walls away are hard to keep from chattering during heavy bass passages. And yes, the cello does resonate, but wonderfully: the decay of final tutti chords in, say, Beethoven symphonies lingers faintly, but on pitch, in the cello for several seconds after the speakers have ceased to sound. Still—what venue is free of sympathetic vibrations? My wife plays piano, my daughter violin, and I play cello and guitar; we have friends who also play various instruments, and we’ve hosted house concerts. I can attest, as both performer and listener, that good recordings played on my audio system sound almost indistinguishable from real instruments.

The star of the system has to be the Scientific Fidelity “Tesla” speakers, designed, built and marketed by Mike Maloney back in the early 1990s. I’ve owned them since then, when I met Mr. Maloney. I’ve recently had the 6.5” drivers in the “D’Appolito array” these speakers employ brilliantly restored by Millersound in Pennsylvania (thank you, Bill LeGall), and I managed to find two unused Danish-made Vifa tweeters on eBay, identical but for a more recent date code, to replace the fully functional but aging originals. Now that the Teslas have been returned to their original glory, they far surpass the PSB Synchrony Ones I bought to replace them before I discovered Millersound. Besides a more vivid, airy, holographic soundstage, precise and stable imaging, and convincingly accurate instrumental timbre, the Teslas are just more engaging and downright exciting, certainly with jazz and rock, but even for solo piano, string quartets and symphonies: more present, richer, fuller, bigger, more “liquid.” The PSBs sound “dry” and dull—“soulless,” as a friend put it—in comparison. The PSBs were initially relegated to a second AV system in the media room/library, augmented by a Polk Audio subwoofer. (So much for reviews! When the Teslas were new, Corey Greenberg gave them a devastatingly negative review in Stereophile. The PSBs, however, were listed by Stereophile in 2012 as a “Class A [Restricted Extreme LF] Loudspeaker Recommended Component,” along with speakers costing up to $80,000 in that category, and as a “Recommended Reference Component” by Soundstage Hi-Fi

—again, in competition with vastly more expensive speakers. Go figure.) I’ve managed to enhance the Teslas’ virtues ever so slightly by placing them on Sorbothane feet (about $80 for eight of them); the Teslas now rather disconcertingly wobble a bit at the touch, but the bass is tighter and overall coherence marginally better as a result. Maybe one day I’ll splurge on Townshend podiums.

Mike Maloney’s Teslas also outshone a pair of B&W 804s and a pair of B&W 805s on stands, by the way— in both A/B/X comparisons, and in extended listening over weeks. The B&Ws were on loan from a friend; his 802 Nautilus were too massive to drive up from Santa Barbara, but he assures me that their sonic profile is not very different from the 804s, especially above about 40 Hz. I briefly owned a pair of Martin Logan “The Quest” hybrid electrostatic leviathans, but simply couldn’t accept how they destroyed the balance and scale of everything else in the living room—although they did sound very good. More recently, a pair of Von Schweikert VR4 Jrs. joined the Teslas in the living room; another local audiophile friend bought Dynaudio Focus 60 XDs to replace them. Yes, the Von Schweikerts are a bit more detailed, maybe somewhat less “veiled” (the Teslas seem to add a bit of aural fog in direct comparison), but again the Teslas are just more realistic, “warmer”; woodwinds sound like they are producing tones with air and wood instead of electrons, while orchestras sound more like ensembles of acoustic instruments. And the Teslas are considerably more exciting when it comes to rock music. The long excursion of those dual voice coil 6.5” drivers can blow out a candle! Finally, there’s that astonishingly vivid imaging, which even the grumpy Greenberg conceded are the Teslas’ strong suit. Still, the Von Schweikerts are compelling; they replaced the PSBs in the media room/library, where it’s easier to bi-wire them, as Albert insisted they should be. Most recently, I acquired a pair of Magneplanar 1.6 QRs from an audio club friend for $300; they were malfunctioning (they buzzed at certain frequencies), but a YouTube video helped me to repair them successfully. Still, despite their considerable dipole and planar magnetic magic (which, as I noted briefly already, I've loved ever since a faculty mentor treated me to a performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" on an early iteration in Chicago in 1980)—from the sweet spot, the Teslas still rule. The Maggies have replaced the Von Schweikerts in the media room/library, where they sound great. Besides their exquisite sound, the Teslas are simply more beautiful than almost any speaker I have ever seen, including those sensuous forms from Sonus Faber, with their vaunted Italian styling supposedly modeled on Cremona viols from Stradivari and Amati. What can I say? Mr. Maloney: chapeau bas!

The Teslas are supported by an NHT Sub-One subwoofer (via a high pass filter set at 50 Hz), with its very useful controller sitting on top of it. No doubt, that’s not the best place for the controller, although I’m not quite sure why not (and NHT suggests this location as a possible placement). Also, the position of the subwoofer is likely not ideal; it fires perpendicularly to the Teslas, and it’s on the extreme left of the soundstage (for orchestras, the celli and basses are usually on the right; to the extent that low frequencies are directional, it would probably be better to have the subwoofer on the right, and firing forward, enhancing bass on that side of the stereo image). Or maybe not; maybe I’ve accidently hit upon the ideal position for the sub, in order to break up standing waves with a (partial) Distributed Bass Array (the Teslas do, by themselves, produce extremely low, tuneful bass). Reversing the phase switch on the NHT also seems to help. And let me point out that the left main speaker is further from the left wall (six feet) than the right main speaker is from the right wall (four feet)—which follows Jim Smith’s tip #84 for optimizing bass response at the sweet spot. In any case, frequencies below 100 Hz are not locatable by almost anyone….and it should be pretty obvious that visual aesthetics are not irrelevant to my overall system conception. Still, visual aesthetics don’t drive this placement. The fact is that I’m getting very low, very tight, visceral bass at my sweet spot; without unnaturally swelling acoustic basses in an orchestra, string quartet or jazz ensemble, and without boominess, rock music still has tremendous, fat, sweaty, palpable presence. Off-axis performance is not as good, but that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t believe in the concept of “background music,” and I rarely play music at parties—and when I do, it’s for dancing anyway. When my system is on, I’m in the sweet spot listening intently, rarely doing anything else.

The headphones are HiFiMan’s HE1000. I’ve believed in uncompromising headphone listening since well before I was able to afford fine speakers. My first pair in college were Koss Pro-4AA, with their liquid-filled ear cushions, their aluminum microphone fitting on the left ear cup, and their fighter-pilot weight and seriousness. These were replaced by a pair of Stax electrostatic “ear speakers,” which in turn were replaced by Stax electrets. Then there were several Sonys (including their active noise cancelling phones, which I still travel with), and the Sennheiser HD580. I’m also a believer in the HeadRoom headphone amplifier, with its cross-channel processing circuit. The HE1000 is truly an “end game” headphone; it not only provides a thrilling listening experience in its own right, but it also keeps the rest of the system honest and reveals where I can make improvements.

Until last year, amplification had been provided by a 1987 vintage NAD 7600 “Power Envelope” Monitor Series receiver I’d enjoyed daily for decades, but which finally reached the end of its life. Fortunately, the universe seems to have been sympathetic; having watched the used market out of curiosity for a long time, only a few times finding another NAD 7600 for sale, a 1989 vintage unit in near-new condition that had been stored for most of its life in the original packaging became available just as mine was about to be replaced by a Primare A30.1 dual-mono design integrated amplifier. The old NAD was having some intermittent problems in the right channel somewhere; the “new” one functions flawlessly (with the exception noted in the next paragraph). I had the Primare in my system for a month, and wanted to like it; a fellow audiophile friend, who took very good care of it, would have sold it to me. I should add that the Primare was connected via balanced XLR cables, while the NAD doesn’t even provide that option. Nonetheless, I found no reason to prefer the sound of the Primare. Don’t get me wrong; the Primare—made in Sweden, it has plenty of advocates, got great reviews and won awards—sounds very, very good, perhaps as good as the NAD, although a little strident in the high midrange. That’s a problem that could be tamed with something like the Schiit Lokius, but the “semi-parametric” tone controls on the NAD can do this as well, with just as much finesse and specificity. These controls are also very effective in compensating for poorly mastered recordings, and can in any case easily be bypassed. The Primare, unfortunately, has no tone controls. And no tuner, of course. And no phono preamp. I know; receivers are supposed to be embarrassing. Ditto for built-in phono stages. But the NAD 7600 is very hard to find fault with. And one should at least consider the ramifications of empirical studies done by Richard Clark, Peter Aczel and others concerning the relative unimportance of amplification, so long as it’s sufficiently powerful never to be driven into clipping. The NAD has a nominal output of 150 watts RMS per channel, but sufficient headroom, via its “Power Envelope” technology, that it manages a clipping level above 500 watts per channel of dynamic power for more than 200 milliseconds (ten times the typical duration for this specification, and a more realistic figure for real musical demands) into a complex 4 ohm impedance. In addition, it has that famous “soft clipping” circuit to prevent speaker distress even at excessively high volumes. But I value my Teslas, and my hearing, too much to risk overdriving them. Radiohead, Massive Attack, and Bruce Springsteen sound great, even at near-concert volume; Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish concuss with scary authority. And the NAD’s powered balance, controllable from the remote, is indispensable. The Primare has this feature as well, which therefore doesn’t figure into my judgments of their relative merits. A powered balance control is a feature not often remarked upon that I would not be willing to give up. The soundstage is fine-tuned by its means.

Sadly, the situation with the NAD 7600 is not quite as unproblematic as I’ve suggested. The “new” unit does function flawlessly…except that the transformer makes a 60 Hz hum—probably a “lamination rattle” due to old and brittle varnish. I tried a DC blocker, on the advice of Audiogon forum contributors; it had no effect. Since an annoying mechanical hum was not one of the problems the “old” unit suffered from, I found an NAD technician about 200 miles away who agreed to swap out the transformers. Unfortunately, by the time I drove both units home, the formerly silent transformer was also humming, albeit less offensively. After many inquiries on Audiogon and elsewhere, I determined that “dipping and baking” the transformer—dipping it in a special varnish, then baking it overnight at 120 degrees C—might resolve this problem. I found a company that does this for electric motor stators, and they agreed to add my transformer to their lineup. But even this procedure did not silence the hum.

So I reconciled myself to the need to replace my beloved NAD. After the Primare failed to rise to the occasion, a local musician friend (he’s the guitarist and singer in a famous sixties San Francisco band) offered me an Outlaw Audio RR 2150, and let me audition it at home in order to compare it to the NAD. Not a SOTA component, needless to say, but it did get outstanding reviews. Once again, the NAD won the shoot-out with the Outlaw hands down. Although the Outlaw’s sound may be slightly clearer or more detailed than the NAD, it is also correspondingly too harsh or bright. And imaging and sound stage are far better with the NAD. So is the natural timbre of acoustic instruments. And the bass in the NAD is both deeper and tighter—and more “tuneful,” by which I mean that very low tones, the kind you feel as much as hear, come across as notes with the NAD, so that one can clearly hear how they relate musically to all that’s built above them. Most dramatically, the NAD phono circuit is much more vivid and exciting than the Outlaw’s. In fact, the Outlaw was downright disappointing with vinyl. Finally, the NAD’s remote is the best designed I’ve ever used at any price: ergonomically smart, solid in feel, with a volume control that is perfectly calibrated, that extremely useful powered balance control, simple function controls, and a cleverly beveled infrared window that allows one to operate the remote with the buttons pointing at your face instead of the ceiling. The Outlaw’s remote, as many have complained, is poorly designed and awkward to use in comparison. For what it’s worth, I also tried hooking up the PSB Synchrony Ones, and compared them through the Outlaw and the NAD. Same impressions. I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with the NAD’s hum. It isn’t loud, after all; the home’s HVAC system is much louder, and so is the fridge two rooms (and two walls) away in the kitchen. With the NAD resting on Sorbothane disks, the hum is hardly audible from the sweet spot during silent passages between tracks. And fortunately, it’s a mechanical hum that is not audible in the speakers at all, which are nearly dead silent even on phono and at full volume. But extraneous environmental noises are easier for a perfectionist-leaning audiophile to accept than any noise coming from the audio equipment itself. Still…if anyone reading this can propose a solution other than replacing the NAD with something newer, please speak up.

My CD/SACD player is Marantz’s SA8005. For Redbook CDs, it’s routed through a PS Audio UltraLink DAC.

The turntable is a Denon DP-37F, fitted with an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge—and routed through the NAD’s RIAA equalized phono stage. Again, I know; audiophiles, especially vinyl fetishists, will scoff. No doubt, there are many better-sounding decks, superior cartridges, and better phono preamps. But indulge me; the Denon is a really sweet thing. It replaced a ProJect Debut Carbon DC, which had a host of design flaws not noted in reviews: it made a mechanical hum I never succeeded in completely defeating, despite many suggestions online from people who had the same problem (it was due to a truly stupid, because self-undermining, motor isolation concept); the cue function was very inaccurate; even the stand for the tonearm was poorly conceived and positioned. The Denon sounds terrific paired with that Ortofon cartridge. It has no audible rumble, wow or flutter; no hums (maybe that’s partly due to the good interconnects I installed); and there’s very little distracting surface noise on most LPs (if there were any less, I’d suspect I was also missing high frequency sounds I wanted to hear in the recording). It tracks infallibly, even on warped or damaged records—a rare Robert Ludwig pressing of Led Zeppelin II with an initial warp that won’t play at all on a friend’s Linn LP-12 with a Sumiko cartridge plays on the Denon with just a slight “whoosh” at the warp. And, despite such faultless audio performance, the Denon also does a lot of the set-up and play routines for you, with sure-feeling buttons and a consistently precise cue that are a pleasure to use and, in the automatic functions, to watch. Let’s be honest: part of the delight we get from our systems has to do with an appreciation of superlative engineering, and turntables in particular can be beautiful machines. This turntable is both beautiful to look at and as graceful as a dancer balletically performing its routines. Besides the ProJect and that old Thorens, I’ve owned decks from AR, Linn, Lenco, Dual and Gerrard, all of them manual turntables; the Denon puts them all to shame.

[For what it’s worth, I’ve found SACDs to marginally surpass the realism of vinyl when comparison is possible. For example, I have near-new promotional copies of the famous Carlos Kleiber recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies with Vienna on DGG LPs—on vinyl, they’re two different discs—and also the DGG CD and the DGG SACD of the same recordings. Digitally, both symphonies are on a single disc, which must be one of the very best “classical” CDs ever made, in terms of both performance and recording. Granted, there may be differences in mastering among these three versions, despite the original tapes being the same; also, volume levels are not identical, which makes a true “A/B/X” comparison a bit complicated. And keep in mind that SACDs must be played through the Marantz’s own DAC; comparing Red Book CDs through the Marantz or through the PS Audio UltraLink, which requires only pushing a single button on the NAD’s remote, always favors the UltraLink. But, given all that, the SACD of the Kleiber Beethoven recording seems to me the most natural (despite the inferior DAC), the vinyl next, and the Redbook CD last—all of them being outstanding in this particular instance. I mention this only in order to contextualize the claim that the Denon/Ortofon rig sounds about as good as it possibly could do.]

I’ve also hooked up a Panamax Max 1000+ Surge Protector/Line Conditioner. Does it make an audible difference? Not that I can tell. But…no harm done. At least, it’s supposedly additional security in case of severe variations in the power input. Still, as per suggestions from members of this forum, I've got the NAD amplification plugged directly into the wall. The builder of this house was an MIT graduate in electrical engineering who founded a high-tech company; the wiring throughout the house is first-rate. And since I live on the California coast, lightning, like storms in general, are (unfortunately) almost unknown. An Emotive CMX-2 is in the sources loop for its DC blocking virtues, and a friend gave me an iFi AC Purifier because...why not? Do they make a difference? I like to think so. Finally, I’ve elevated the cables with terra cotta planter feet: 95 cents each at a local nursery. Again: why not? It can’t hurt!

Interconnects are decent, but nothing special; some are Audioquest, some are Mogami, some are Radio Shack with gold-plated RCA jacks. (As already mentioned, the Primare was connected to the PSAudio DAC with balanced XLR cables.) Speakers are connected with 12AWG braided and shielded oxygen-free copper wire terminating in gold-plated banana plugs. However, the right speaker is quite a distance from the amplifier; the cable must go up and over that stonework arch you can see in the photos. That run is 35 feet, while 10 feet connects the left speaker.  I sometimes feel that the right speaker is not quite as loud as the left, but an SPL meter doesn’t confirm this, so it’s probably my imagination, or the room acoustics. In any case, the balance control easily corrects for this.

Oh, and one more thing. Because of the advocacy of several regular contributors to this site, I acquired a “Schumann resonance generator” from China, which I’ve attached to the switched outlet on the NAD. I hear absolutely no difference made by this device, nor have I been able to find convincing support for the “science” behind it. But then, I can’t have a pain in your tooth, either. If you hear an improvement, bravo; I envy your creative perception.

I mentioned earlier that there are members of our very active local audio club with vastly more costly rigs; one of them built his listening room (a separate house, really, of maybe 1,000 square feet) in consultation with an acoustician, finished it in gorgeous Craftsman woodwork, and filled it with almost a million dollars’ worth of audio equipment (mostly by MBL, including the latest version of those weird but amazing “Radialstrahler” omnidirectional speakers). And yet, in my opinion at least, my modest system images just as convincingly and more accurately reproduces instrumental timbres. Total cost to me of this system, all of it except the Ortofon cartridge purchased used (and excluding the extravagant HE1000 headphones, which were a gift from a friend in the business): about $4,000.

It is a real blessing to have a wealth of recorded music at my command, reproduced with astonishing realism in the considerable comfort of my own home. That, for me, is what this hobby is all about.