Written over 10 years ago, the book remains pertinent as ever  and just proves  that car audio has not advanced in any way shape or form since the early 90’s despite what manufacturers would like you to believe!

Offered as an online book, it has been read over 90,000 times.  Recently another car audio enthusiast  discovered our web site and has this to say:

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When ones finds himself in the middle of the hi-fi pond the obvious question never changes; “From this huge selection, what is the best sounding piece that I can afford?”

They all claim greatness, many look like audio jewelry, and you can usually find reviews of some sort that say it’s good so how does one weed out all the imposter’s?

We live in a world of mass production.  The overwhelming majority of audio gear in this world is mass produced.

It’s a lot like the fast food franchise known as McDonnalds.   They hire food engineers and tasters as well as some top chefs to design their food.  However, when you walk away from McDonnalds there is nothing more than fast food in your bag, and it’s certainly nothing to get excited about.  When you actually want a satisfying meal you don’t purchase fast food.  When you want to experience a meal to remember you find a chef who hand selects fresh ingredients and hand prepares the meal for you.

Can anyone explain to me how hi-fi is any different?   Fast food is like mass produced mid fi gear.  Fancy and more expensive fast food is like mass produced hi-fi gear.  Real food is like hand made gear prepared to order by a seasoned chef with years of experience and a well placed reputation.

People just don’t realize how rare it is to still be able to purchase hand made audio gear that is not mass produced and or sub contracted from China.  There are really only a hand full of good restaurants left!  Who’s hungry?

Steve Deckert

I’ve been asked more than once what I think are the some of the best recordings on CD available by my customers and frankly one of the first that always comes to mind is MA Recordings.   One of the closest to analogue sounding labels I know of anyway.   Why am I plugging MA recordings - A) they fully deserve it and B) the recordings make a wonderful demo of our gear.

-Steve Deckert

Always a sucker for the sincere but broke audiophile who likes to solder, Steve has come up with a way to own a real SE84C Zen Triode amplifier for under 300 bucks!  Using the same circuit, components and proprietary transformers make it’s sound almost identical to our production models!   Here’s the link to the new kit!    SE84CDIY

Enjoy!

If you’re thinking about purchasing your first tube amp and understandably tempted by the huge selection of Chinese built amps showing up on ebay I should tell you that they are heavy well built amplifiers. The one pictured was purchased for around $600 plus shipping of from China. It’s claim to fame is the super heavy transformers.

This one ended up in my shop for repair when one of the resistors on the circuit board blew up and cooked the board. This incident was believed to be tied to a bad tube. The owner had a new replacement tube ready to go for when it got fixed. Assuming the repair would be no problem the owner was interested in tweaking the amp because he was never that thrilled with sound. I replaced the bad resistor that I assumed failed from a shorted tube and fired it up only to watch different resistors located all over the board heat up and start smoking just before the fuse blew again.

It’s a shame too, because the although the appearance and weight of a $4000 amp is here - the actual circuit design and sound is not.

Many of our customers have purchased amplifiers from us AFTER experiencing similar disappointments. I don’t know what this gentleman is going to do because I’m not going to fix it. With no schematic I’d have to reverse engineer it and even then a repair would only leave us right back at square one with an amplifier that is what it is… ready to break.

So save yourself the cost of a too good to be true amplifier from China and the aggravation and apply it towards something that IS good. It always saves you money in the end.

Steve

Want to improve the sound of your audio system? Can it ever really be good enough? Being in the business of manufacturing audio gear I see the audiophile frenzy to upgrade components from a rather inside perspective. For some it is an never ending quest, for others it stops when the pocket book runs dry.

The weakest link game is about spending as little money as possible while getting the highest fidelity you can. And it starts with the fundamental understanding that a chain is never stronger than it’s weakest link. The audio chain is no different. You absolutely will NOT hear anything sound better than the poorest sounding component in your chain.

The motivation for writing this paper comes from seeing people handicap their audio system on a daily basis. (( MORE ))

Over the past 30 years in this country, there has been a trend in audio to go for convenience first and high fidelity second. This has resulted in the DOWN SIZING of speaker cabinets to increase the marketability. While this generated a garden of cute little speakers (little being the key word) it has done little for efficiency or fidelity. What suffers the most when you down size a speaker– bass response.

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A gentleman came to me the other day, a pleasant young man who was very intelligent, he needed to install a new computer here in the shop. (We won’t get into what happened to the old one!) He brought in a pair of speakers, one pictured at the left, in hopes that I could repair them for him. I could see he thought they were really good speakers… and I didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise. I hope he doesn’t bump into this page, or if he does, I hope he appreciates the education.After he left it dawned on me that so many people are like him, victims of ignorance, and by no fault of their own… really. So I thought I would just snap a picture of his speaker and use it as a visual aid to help educate the average person of the mass stereo crazed public!

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