![]() In the end, what I discovered was that it was the journey I was having fun with. well, normal, the drive to get better speakers bubbled up. When I brought home better front-end components, the upgrade was the inspiration to listen to every CD that I owned over and over again. When my speakers got better, I needed more powerful or more resolute electronics. Overall, my mid-1990s college system was improving quickly, as I used most of my non-CD spending money to pay for audio and groceries (in that order, most likely), but what I found that I was doing was cycling back and forth between East Coast and West Coast philosophy. Gone was the distortion, as well as the driver issues, so my next commission checks went back into my front end, which included a Theta Compact Disc transport and ultimately a Gen-V DAC, which was pretty hot shit back in that era. I had the power to make my speakers do what they were designed to do, even if that wasn’t very much bass either. I bought into an Acurus stereo preamp and a very powerful Aragon 4004 power amp, which at the time were made in Anaheim, and everything changed for the better. ![]() The Naim ultimately got sold in on on the early Internet. But there was a problem: an 8-watt European integrated amp couldn’t hope to power these wildly inefficient loudspeakers. I replaced them with gorgeous THIEL CS 1.5 speakers finished in Bird’s Eye Maple wood that looked simply fantastic. It didn’t take long for the Celestion speakers to go, as they simply had no bass. Having my own bedroom and parking space was fantastically luxurious, as was having enough room to load back up on IKEA furniture and setting up a proper audiophile system, complete with a 27-inch CRT television and, even more exotic, a first-generation DirecTV satellite dish installed on the roof with a coax cable run inside of a drain spout and cut into a window in our apartment. It was a mere 15 minutes from school, but far from the non-college-town that South Central Los Angeles was in 1994. It took me exactly two semesters to move out of the dorm complexes at USC and into a pretty darn nice apartment with a roommate in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, which is near where Rick Caruso’s Grove shopping mall is located now. The ultra-rigid Naim speaker cables got in the way of my gnarly PC laptop (I was so glad to get rid of that nightmare along with its dot-matrix printer), which was needed to actually do my studies in the mid-1990s. I learned quickly that setting up an audiophile system in dorm room half the size of a prison cell was pretty close to impossible on a physical level. The system began with by a well-hyped Rotel 855 Compact Disc player, an Audio Alchemy DAC, and a super-esoteric-at-the-time Naim NAIT 8-watt integrated amp from the U.K. I started out on the East Coast side of the argument as a kid, as I actually downsized from floorstanding Polk speakers into tiny bookshelf Celestion 3 speakers that I won in a sales contest when selling AV gear in high school. The JBLs of the world seem to lean more on the notion that can have all of the fancy front end components you want, but if your speakers don’t have any bass or can’t play at a compelling volume level, then your system might just suck. In some ways, you could consider this the “East Coast argument,” if only by contrast with the high-flying West Coast position. Scottish audio company, Linn, has historically made the argument that your system can only sound as good as your source (thus you should invest in one of their timeless, but expensive, LP-12 turntables). The argument over which is most important in your audiophile system–your source component(s) or your speakers–is an age-old debate with strong proponents on both sides. SHARES Twitter 290 Facebook Email Print LinkedIn Pinterest SMS WhatsApp
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