B's Vintage Setup

One sunday afternoon, blog master, Kenneth, Uncle Chew and myself, visited a friend with some vintage gears(for the purpose of this write up,only the gears in used were mentioned) that we were not familiar with. The setup was placed in the spacious living hall of the house, which was just about in many of opinions to be generally suitable for speakers of that size. However, I thought this could be flexible and one has to listen to be very sure, though general opinions point towards empirical experiences and proven practical knowledge that big speakers should be placed in large rooms. The speakers, a model of infinity series the Q2, from the late seventies period, and a sound typical of that time.The speakers appeared to be in the first instance different from modern day design. First the number of tweeters that were on each speakers, 3 pieces of ribbon tweeters, front firing to the listeners and 1 more firing from the back of each speaker! Arranged in a vertical array with each piece individually angled inwards to the middle between the speakers, seemingly able to cater for several choices of listening positions along a dividing line between the speakers. Besides the ribbon tweeters there were 2 more dome tweeters also firing front to the listeners and common beliefs has it that the dome tweeters would work over a lower frequency range from those of the ribbon tweeters and probably into the midrange too, as indication has it, there is a single midrange driver that could have complimented the tweeter arrangement design. A bigger woofer cone type 15 inch driver, one each to each speaker cabinets, completed the arrangement of drivers and tweeters combination. The cabinets in it's original form and aged over the many years of different ownerships, dark wood coloured and probably some wood polish or wood oil may bring back the good look to the wood veneer. A back firing port covered with a speaker cloth indicates that the speaker placement could make for careful choices and may influence how the speakers may sound with different placements. We did some test listens as the visit was a fact finding visit which the owner kindly accomodated. We listened to a jazz sampler courtesy of Interglobal music and the 'Dream of Opera' CD which I may have mentioned in the write up of visits to other music lover's music room. Not to confuse readers about how the music sounded, my personal choice of descriptions will not be provided here, as different persons in their music or hifi journey conceived good sounding presentations to be utterly different from each other. So the opening drum sound of track 6 of the Dream of Opera cd will have different meanings to different persons. So to some a drum sound is just a drum sound, to some others who may have moved on to be able to perceived the skin of the drum and how that skin vibrate and how the subsequent resonating low hz would sound like, and to some others it may be again with some ever more slight differences, and again there will be some who have not reached this level and may not be able to perceived the sonics or otherwise too subtle to be perceived yet or that the perceptions of low frequencies may be a very personal choice, and how low the low bass one wants may dictate the choice of listening materials. We have a choice of amplifications between a preamp unit plus the Odyssey power amp and a vintage Yamaha integrated amplifier CA2010. Both of which we tried, and both sounded just as good. However we unanimously preferred the vintage speakers with the vintage amplifier as the colourations (called it distortion, ifyo u like it) add to the flavour of the music for that afternoon's listening session. It would probably have been different at another listening sessions with some other listening materials. As we listened to some vocals besides some jazz and some chinese music. We even tried listening at different listening positions, middle of the hall and all the way to the back wall, which we thought the presentations of which to be different, depending on personal choices. That afternoon we looked for a 'comfortable' music presentation and a listening session that we can call 'enjoyable' and not a loudness test, and hence look into rearranging the speaker placement(the owner asked us to do the placement for him anyway) and looked at the choices of listening spots. We did found one but it wasn't what the owner would call his ideal choice. So we worked out something he could like and suggested he listen for a while to see if he will like it and could listen over a long listen session.