Best Audio Related Story (or joke).

True story about a provincial orchestra in Argentina, performing the 1812 overtue. A trombone player was a tad too effective in entering into the spirit of Borodino and the siege of Moscow. As you would, he put a large firecracker in his trombone, setting it off to accompany the cannon fire at the climax. Good plan, but the firecracker was very large indeed. After the explosion in the brass section, the trombone slide shot through the string section, scattering them like Cossacks scything through French infantry. It then struck the conductor a hefty blow in the abdomen, throwing him off the podium, collapsing the first 5 rows of the audience.
Altogether, a very successful reenactment of the chaos of 1812.

David12, as a trustee of our state orchestra I've been trying to come up with ideas to increase interest in our orchestra and classical music concerts in general. I think your story is just the sort of thing we should do!!

Great story!

I have a friend who is as nuts about classical music as I am. A few years ago, she came down to drop something off at the house. I said "before you go, I want you to hear something." So I got out Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations (she's a piano player), plopped her down at the sweet spot between my Spica TC-60's and hit play. After a minute or so she turned to me with a very astonished look on her face and exclaimed in a rather loud voice "how do they DO that?!" She was referring to the speakers and their ability to soundstage and image. She had never heard loudspeakers do that before.
Weeks later she bought a used pair of TC-60's and a Luxman receiver on A'gon.

Steve O.

After a minute or so she turned to me with a very astonished look on her face and exclaimed in a rather loud voice "how do they DO that?!" She was referring to the speakers and their ability to soundstage and image.

That's why those of us that love music buy the hardware we do. The hardware is only important in that it serves the music.

Great story.

The Luxman receiver Steve O speaks of reminds me of a period of time when I was attending school. I worked on a part time basis in a "stereo" store in Stratford, Ct. Westchester Stereo was it's name and we had a few decent lines for that period... Luxman, NAD, JBL, etc. We were also an authorized service center for Luxman. Our tech, (Donny, The Unit King) was actually a pretty sharp cookie.

We had a Luxman RX-101 come in for a repair. The RX series receivers had a servo driven face (suck face) that would retract and reveal it's front panel controls when it powered up. The complaint with the unit was that the servo face would only retract part of the way back. We wrote a repair order and put the unit on the tech's (who was at lunch at the time) repair bench.

About an hour later we hear this blood curdling male screaming blasting from the repair room. As we ran back through the store to find out what was happening, we see Donny (The Unit King) running with this Luxman RX receiver dangling from it's power cord. Donny jumps up with both feet, kicks the Fire emergency door open and proceeds to fling (with great velocity) the fine Luxman unit out the back door (which, by the way was elevated about 10 feet due to the loading dock).

It seems, the most probable reason the "suck face" wouldn't draw back completely, was that the unit was filled with cockroaches. Which, (when Donny removed the unit's cover) were now running all over his repair bench.

The fine Luxman unit took quite a flight.

About 15 to 18 feet I would guess.

Thank Heavens the store owner's (Tony) 1982 Cadillac Biarritz was parked down below to catch it.

The Fireman told us about the receiver laying on the hood of Tony's car right next to the broken windshield.

That of course was when they arrived with the police due to the fire door alarm which we couldn't stop from ringing.

I think Tony closed the store a couple of years later.