Audiophilia Nervosa, I Guess

I suppose I should slap the 'audiophile' label on myself. I'm reluctant to do it. Not because I'm embarrassed in any way by being devoted to fine-quality audio, but because a lot of folks think of audiophiles as older guys in Hawaiian shirts who get all starry-eyed about interconnect cables and who seem to have this weird thing for Diana Krall records.

And that's not me, except for the older guy part. Nothing much I can do about that. Otherwise, I think of those guys who plop down $20K for an AC power cord as being slightly, if not wholly, off their rockers. Oh come on, I think. Get a grip.

The modern-day version wears a Hawaiian shirt

Nor am I potty about vinyl records played on turntables that cost as much as a small house and require specialists just to set up and get running. I mean, I like vinyl records well enough, and I have a fine-quality turntable from VPI Industries on which to play them, but that's about it. Most of my listening is done via digital files stored on my computer and played out into a Bryston (yeah, it's an audiophile brand) digital-to-analog converter (DAC) into a home audio system powered by a Luxman 505u integrated amplifier into a pair of Bowers & Wilkins 803D speakers. Damn good system, but almost poverty row compared to some of those off-their-rockers audiophiles.

I reside happily in the middle tier of audiophilia-dom. Not only does the stratospheric pricing that accompanies the high tier repel me, but I view a lot of that stuff as being more sizzle than steak. I really don't care if the case is machined out of a single block of fancy aluminum or if each resistor on the motherboard was hand-made by Cornish monks. I like fine craftsmanship as much as the next guy, but only if it serves a real purpose beyond bragging rights.

Recently I decided to do a bit of refreshing and upgrading. There is nothing wrong with my main home-office sound system, to be sure. It's where I do the vast bulk of my listening, and I require that it provide a first-rate sonic experience, which it does and then some. But my Bowers & Wilkins 803Ds are definitely power-hungry speakers and I haven't been convinced that my Luxman 505u integrated amplifier, at 100 watts per channel, really has the requisite grunt to handle transient peaks without clipping, even though I certainly don't play the system at higher volumes.

The itch took hold and so I knew that sooner or later I was going to be upping the ante with a separate power amplifier – a component that juices up the signal to the speakers but does nothing whatsoever otherwise; no volume knobs or whatnot. To use a power amplifier you also need a preamplifier, which is the jobber that provides you with the volume knob and source selectors and all that. For the time being, I decided to use my Luxman 505 integrated amp as the preamplifier, since it has a "preamp out" feature.

I decided to go for a pair of monoblock – i.e., single-channel – amplifiers, one for each channel. You can of course save space with a stereo power amp, but I figured as long as I was going to do this, there was no point in farting around. After a certain amount of shopping around, I chose the interestingly-named American company Schiit Audio, highly regarded for making top-quality stuff without cardiac occlusion-inducing prices. They don't sell in fancy boutique stores (direct sales model instead) and they don't put stuff into their products you probably don't need. And they make it all right here in good ol' Amurica. (The company's name exemplifies their robust sense of humor, since it actually comes from somebody saying "so what's all that shit that you're making?")

They name their products after characters from Norse mythology, so I bought myself a pair of their top-of-the-line Tyr monoblocks. They're old-school amps, built like tanks, with massive power transformers and big tranducer thingamabobs. Getting those suckers into audio rack took some doing given that they're 50 pounds or so apiece. A bit of huffing and puffing and I had them in the rack, connected, and ready to roll.

And immediately discovered that my formerly quiet-as-a-mouse sound system was now pestered with pops and crackles and buzzes. Obviously the new hookup, using the "preamp out" on the Luxman 505u, had coughed up what's known as a ground loop.

It took a while to find it, but it turns out that the culprit was the USB cable that comes out of my computer and travels to the digital-to-analog converter. A little isolation did the trick and the system settled back to its usual non-poppy, non-crackly, non-buzzy self.

The Tyr monoblocks have definitely provided the missing grunt, at double the rated output power of the Luxman integrated. I'm hearing more detail and better-defined bass. The soundstage is big and wide, depth is excellent. Me happy.

But I'm not yet quite cured of the upgrade bug. The power amplification stage of the Luxman 505u integrated amp isn't needed any more since I handed off the speaker amplification duties to the Tyr monoblocks. So I re-visited Schiit Audio's nifty web-based storefront and bought their best preamplifier, the Kara F. That's coming in a few days and once it's in place, and provided I'm pleased with it, I'll retire the Luxman, which has served me faithfully and well since I bought it as a sharply discounted floor model at Music Lovers Audio in San Francisco.

My upstairs walk-in closet in which I keep retired audio and computer equipment is getting pretty full. It's going to be time to sell some of my old stuff pretty soon. But not right away. You just never know when you might want to resuscitate something, as I did not long ago when I used a retired phono amp and a pair of powered speakers to set up a 78 RPM turntable station in a side bedroom.

And, yes, I know how geeky it sounds to have a 78 RPM turntable station in a side bedroom. But no $20K power cords.