Re: Overkill?

Steve Lemke wrote:

>Tony wrote:
>
>
>>Another setup I have in the kitchen
>>is smaller axioms (t3) with a decent 19" amp (kind of like
>>smallest bryston) and that sounds very, very good analog unless
>>my fridge switches on and off ;-)
>>
>>
>
>Geez, that's a lot of audio gear for a kitchen.  I suppose your kitchen
>must be bigger than mine (or else you just have less food and cooking
>gear -- well, I guess it's all about priorities, but then my kitchen
>isn't that ideal of a listening room either).  ;-)
>
>
>
>
Kitchen is about 160+sqft (16m2) so it's not grand but ok. It's just for
crancking
up 'sticky fingers' or Peter Gabriel _real_ loud when I cook something.
Real fun (probably not for my neighbor ;-).
For that I like the m3ti, it has very good low extension for a bookshelf
and very
musical. Kind of pricey though but I would say with a decent amp you are
not
high-end audiophile class but very, very decent quality of music (comparing
to my expensive gear and some outlandishly expensive gear I heard other
people had ;-)
It's not cheap but good value-for-money, got the amp used for ~200$ and
the m3tis were 300$. I know it sounds
expensive for many people but compared to other gear to achieve this
quality of
sound, you have to spend about 2x as much. Even my wife who thinks I'm a
little
insane spending the money on the sound gear and doesn't care for music
really
noticed a huge difference to a 200$ all-in-one sony system we use in the
living
room and she claims is more than enough ;-)  Kitchen is a problem though
since
there are so many appliances switching on and off and it just polutes
the hell of
the power line. I ended up having ferrit filters and high-frequency
cutoffs on all the
power cables. Helps enough to not notice anymore.

And oh, I have no affiliation with any of the companies I mention except
sending
them money for gear ;-)

>>I hope they make those audiotrons again, it's great gear for a great
>>price. Ogg and something like FLAC support would be nice though.
>>
>>
>
>You do realize that someone did a SAMBA hack that will transcode (Ogg
>and FLAC) at the server transparently and ship .wav files to the
>AudioTron, right?  I didn't realize it had been done, but tripped
>across it the other day while looking at the FLAC web site...  Very
>slick.  I recall talking about just such a hack several years ago on
>this list.
>
>    http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/
>
>which I found here:
>
>    http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware
>
>

yes, I tried it but couldn't get it stable here. It was a long time ago
though. May
give it a hack one of these days again. Right now I just have WAV for
the stuff
I really like and listen lots to and insane MP3 rips for everything else.

    -- tony