Ever Have One Of Those Evenings?

Zaikesman, you ever get things working?

Thanks for asking, Maxgain. Both I and the folks at Thiel were away over the holidays. Next week, I will arrange to bring the speaker to Lexington, Kentucky for crossover repairs and a factory tour at our earliest mutual convenience. Harmonic Technology will replace all the connectors on my set of Magic One Links with their 'new & improved' variety for $25 each plus shipping, or about $110. I believe I will probably take the opportunity to have my VTL mono's upgraded while the system is down, so who knows when I'll be with stereo again. To tell you the truth, I'm kind of enjoying not having the system imposing itself on my life on a regular basis. I find myself musing a bit these days about just chucking the whole rig once it's working again and returning to the simpler life...yeah, right.

Z...go catch some LIVE music this winter. You'll be respirited I'm sure. Works for me! Ern

Rest assured, I catch as much live music as I can year 'round, but there's a lot less I'm interested in seeing these days than was the case 10, 15 or 20 years ago. Part of that has to do with the venue situation where I am, but mostly is just because I'm not into a whole lot of what's being made today. Still, I probably average a show every month or two - not as much as I'd like, but as much as I can stand. C'est la vie.

UPDATE: OK, here it is over four months after my speaker first went bad, and I'm finally back from Kentucky country with a supposedly fixed-up speaker (I haven't unpacked it yet, but of course it was tested by the factory before I left). It turned out to have *both* a bad woofer *and* a bad crossover, the former possibly a result of the latter. The rasping tweeter on the other side was swapped by me for the one in the dead speaker back when this all first happened, so I also got a new tweeter installed by the fatory.

As usual, Thiel service was great, and I got to take a factory tour, which I'll post about separately. I also found out that the problem with my 2.2's crossover is a common one involving an under-spec'ed resistor, and I'll make another new post alerting folks to that situation. Now I just have to make the resistor upgrade preemptively to the other speaker, and then get on with the business of re-breaking everything in again.

During the intervening time, I must say that I got very used to listening in mono (my amplification is monoblock, a necessity for this usage when you're talking tubes and only have one speaker available - a stereo tube amp cannot be run with one channel's output left unconnected to a speaker load). This is a little easier for me than for many of you, as I am a big listener to vintage 45's and mono LP's. I think I might actually wind up missing this, 'cause it does have its advantages, which I'll also post about in a separate new thread.

Anyway, after so many various delays in our being able to make this trip, my girlfriend and I did at least manage to turn it into a week-long vacation. Eastern and central Kentucky (Thiel is based in Lexington) have wonderful terrain, and the state maintains a particularly good network of large wilderness parks, many complete with extensive hiking trails, campsite facilities, and even several very nice (but inexpensive) park lodges. There are impressive gorges, mountain ranges, waterfalls, natural sandstone 'bridges', cliffs, caves, and other features of interest to visit, both in KY and in West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. Living in the DC area, I was already familiar with the better-known Blue Ridge and Shenandoah areas of the Appalachians, as well as the more distant Smokies of the Carolinas and Tennessee, but this area was new to me, and I will certainly be going back someday for more.

Of course, you know I scored my fair share of old vinyl in thrifts and fleas while I was there! And of special interest to sound freaks, we also visited what is billed as the world's largest all-wooden cathedral, the Buckhorn log church remotely situated in the small town of the same name. Built entirely of oak planks and beams (without even nails - all the joinery is wooden) in the rustic Scandinavian style by a wealthy transplanted New Yorker during the early 1900's, it has what looked to be about 40' high ceilings and contains a fairly large antique pipe organ moved from Philadelphia. We didn't get to hear the organ play, much less the choir sing - the church is unheated and doesn't open for regular use until later in the season - but talking and walking around inside the building it's clear this place has an amazing and unique acoustic. Too bad the man who admitted us told us when I asked him that no commercial recordings have ever been made there though.