(This site is still under construction. Images will be added later. For now, the ability to read and the attention span bigger than that of a gnat is required)
Cut the crap and take me to the basic improvement suggestions page.
Somewhere around 2012 I bought a used Rotel RMB-1095 power amplifier from a guy who had a very nice setup with expensive speakers, nice speaker cables
and a few more high end goodies that must have cost him thousands of euros.
I was curious why he would sell such a fine piece of equipment so I asked him. He replied he was giving up his hobby, not for financial reasons but
because he was unsatisfied with the sound quality.
That resonated with me. I'm into audio equipment and loudspeaker DIY since the early 80s and until recently I just never was a 100% satisfied.
If I had saved up all the money I spent on audio over the years I would be able to afford a really nice big car by now. But instead I'm still paying off debt because of all the audio stuff.
Does this resonate with you? Am I the only one? Not too long ago I too considered selling most of the stuff. But I didn't because I know myself.
I would definitely regret it later. So I decided a different approach and tweak my devices. That turned out to be the right decision. But first, a bit of background info.
In the late 70s when I was a kid I got a reel to reel machine from someone and I was fascinated. Something about the turning reels and the sound quality, hard to explain. That fascination never left me. In the early 80s I got my first cassette deck, a Sony TC-FX3. A bit noisy but pleasant to listen to. Not long after that I got me a Rotel RA-314 amplifier, Celestion Ditton 15XR speakers, a Sony ST-J2L tuner and another cassette deck, the Akai CS-F110. In the late 80s came an Onkyo (big!) receiver, a Sansui equilizer, an Akai GX-A5X, a Teleton receiver, a JVC SEA equalizer and a bunch of other stuff I forgot about. I was hooked, always trying to figure out ways to get another piece of equipment to add to the collection. Hooked, but never 100% satisfied.
In the early 90s I owned the Bowers & Wilkins DM110i speakers. Decent sound quality but as always I had that feeling that there was room for improvement.
So I started modifying them with case reinforcement and bigger internal cables. I didn't touch the rest (coils, caps etm.) as I didn't want to risk anything. It sounded somewhat better, but...
In the Netherlands at the time there was a magazine for die hard audiophiles, Audio en Techniek. They published the Freek, a small low budget loudspeaker which I decided to build.
That turned out easier than expected and sounded better than the B&Ws. I was satisfied for the time being.
In the mid 90s I built two Cheap Tricks (CT) published by Klang und Ton, easy to build and good sounding for the money.
They were driven by a Technics SU-V600 amp that was capable of driving very low impedance speakers - one of the CTs has a 2 ohm impedance (!).
Unfortunately, lightning nearby killed the amplifier.
Years later in early 2000s, I got a Marantz preamp (forgot which one) and a Rotel RB-971Mk2 power amp. Things were slowly improving
but because of my girlfriend at the time I had to consider the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) so there was no room for bigger speakers.
Instead, there was room for a lot of cats and dogs, which is what the other part of this site is about.
I had a small room for a small setup with Jamo speakers at the time - these sounded terrible compared to what I had before but the cats made up for it 😸
My girlfriend and I broke up and she moved out in 2010 so the WAF was gone. A new era for my audio was about to begin. The first few years I had a Karman/Hardon AVI4500 with 7 Magnat Monitor speakers in a Dolby 7.1 surround setup. Sounded okay but nothing too good. After all these experiences I still wasn't really satisfied.
So in 2016, I built the Klang und Ton Spring speakers published in 2009. A year later I built the Klang und Ton Fab Four speakers, a pretty big four way. Amplification was the Class A Rotel RB-1090 power amp with the Rotel RSP-1098 preamp. This set would almost be considered almost high end, right? Okay, it sounded good, but there was still room for improvement. I realized I had higher demands than I thought.
What do you do if you have some really good amps and speakers? If you have all the stuff that's good on paper but you still hear the room for improvement?
After getting better loudspeaker cables and interlinks, I started tweaking the filter components of the Spring speakers to see if I could get more out of it.
Also I did not turn off the Rotel amps for a whole year (the energy bill afterwards was pretty wild) to see what difference that would make.
Overall there was a bit of sound quality improvent but I still didn't get a hardon. Mind you, many people would consider this a pretty good sounding system
but apparently in this respect I'm not 'many people'.
So you have a good setup, good cables and big room that is acoustically just fine. Still, after a while you'll notice that there is something
holding you from long listening sessions. Either you stop listening after half an hour of an hour,
or you even don't want to start relaxing with your favorite music. Something is wrong but you don't know what exactly. What options do you have?
You either quit your hobby and sell your stuff or you continue trying to improve your existing system - assuming you don't have tens of thousands of euros
lying around for a ridiculously expensive setup.
Here is where it gets interesting. The WOO is - more or less - where the official version is questioned (this does not only apply to audio but that's a whole other story).
What do I mean by that?
In the late 80s, early 90s I was a regular visitor and customer at Radio Matrix in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. I told them that I had used thick speaker cable
as power cord in the Sony tuner I had at the time and found differences in sound quality. I told them it sounded different. They all had a good laugh
because the official version at the time was that power cords could not make any difference whatsoever. I was on the WOO side with my finding.
Only a few years later they started selling audiophile power cords themselves. The phenomenon of audio grade power cords was going mainstream, out of the WOO.