Being a musician and into vintage guitars and amplifiers, it is probably of no surprise that I'm interested in classic audio equipment for music playback in my home. I find a lot of the modern technology sounds too harsh and though it may accurately reproduce it's input source, it often seems to lose something in translation. I have always felt that music should sound the way I like it to sound and not necessarily have a sonically "flat" response. Having played double bass in a symphony orchestra, my perception of a proper mix and EQ may be a bit heavy, but if it makes me happy, then so be it. I listen to music for my own pleasure.

I remember going to the home of one of my friends from high school and him showing me his extensive home stereo system and how he was using the latest digital CD player (then a new product)through a vintage tube amplifier. We both had a chuckle over the disparity there, but here it is 20 years later and for a lot of audiophiles, it's a common pairing.

I'm more likely to bump the frequency curve up on the low end because of my bass background. So it should be of no surprise that the speakers I appreciate the most have significant low end capabilites. Speakers like McIntosh XR7s, JBL Olympus', and Altec Voice-of-the-Theaters. I often chuckle when friends tell me that I would be happy with just a good sub-woofer, but I disagree. Sub-woofers were designed to make up for speaker design defficiencies. Companies like Bose and other modern speaker designers use sub-woofers to compensate for their inability to design a speaker that has sufficient low-end capabilities. I've found numerous occasions when I was listening to friends' systems where I would sense the bottom end dropping out and after some thought came to the realization that there is probably some low frequency phasing issues that cause them to cancel each other out from time to time. Granted one way of fixing this would be to simply use a seperate sub-woofer for each channel, but being a purist I think that speaker should be adequately designed from the beginning! Just because you can't necessarily detect the direction from which low frequency sounds is coming, does NOT mean you can simply combine two channels together and not expect any issues!