Babies and Speakers

I bought a new pair of floorstanding speakers the same year my first baby was born (1987). I chose a pair of ADS 1090's for the following reasons: 1) I liked the sound; 2) There was no port where a baby or toddler could insert baby toys or wet wipes; 3) the drivers were protected by a perforated metal grille, which would keep curious baby fingers from poking through and ruining the speaker cones or denting the tweeters; 4) they were floorstanders, so a curious baby couldn't yank a speaker cable and pull a mini-monitor off a stand and down onto her punky li'l head.

As for being able to play them, I played them plenty, but also used some common sense. Since the year of her birth was also when I got new speakers *and* my first CD player, I was bringing home new music and playing it all the time. If you bring a child up in a musical environment, they consider it part of their environment, not an intrusion. I also used common sense and listened on headphones when mom and baby went to bed at night.

Some of the speakers offered by AV123.com use perforated metal grilles.

Jaybo, we do think alike (I think).

I was going to recommend the MAggie mmg as well.

Inexpensive and best sound at low to moderate volumes with least amount of baby (and wife) disturbing potential.

Its a no-brainer.

Congrats on the imminent arrival! Life changing stuff...and all for the good.
Play the music as much/often as possible, albeit at lower levels, at first. As Riley says, they get used to it and in the case of my daughters, learned to sleep thru most any volume setting.

Low levels on any system will work.

Low levels on mmgs might be the best sounding and very cost effective.

Give them a listen sometime if you think you will not be satisfied with what you have at low volumes, otherwise you'll be fine.

For what it's worth, I owned Maggie 1.3c's when both my children were babies. They slept well and have grown up with a nice appreciation of music as well.

Every baby will be different. I was in your shoe about 4 years ago. We live in the Silicon Valley, so houses are fairly small in comparison. We kept our main system in the living room, while I converted our guest room into the baby's room. And with that, my second system got disassembled, and turned into a headphone based system in my study room. We read all the horror stories and saw all the funny videos on TV where babies fed cereals to the VCRs, etc.

I thought the day of me listening to my main system was over, so I was really into building up my headphone gear. Well, now I have 3 headphone amps and 3 pairs of headphones, I don't ever use them. I've been back at listening to my main gear, mostly late at night when my wife and son go to sleep. Yeah, I don't crank it up that loud, but still pretty good listening level. If you train your kids from the start, they will sleep through everything. Take them out to cafes and noisy restaurants, let them sleep while you enjoy a nice meal or a cup of coffee. Walk through the malls while they sleep in the stroller. Get them used to loud noises early. Worst thing you can do is to train them to sleep only when the environment is quiet.

My son enjoys the music with me some times too, but mostly he's in the back playing with his toy while I have my system going. But these days more CD then LPs as more often than not that I'm playing with him or running around doing stuff.

All my gear are in open racks. I had supervised my son to turn on/off stuff for me. So the novelty worn off early on, and he never touched anything again. I got him a little CD player hook up with a pair of computer speakers in his room. He considers that his system. So he plays with that most of the time. But once in a while he would ask me to play something on "daddy's system", and we would enjoy it together.

FrankC