Conrad Johnson Owners.com

One thing I noticed in peeking into a few rooms at AXPONA is that I see fewer VPI turntables. I'm honestly not a fan of something that looks like a "contraption" but then again, I have always liked the looks of those old Micro-Seiki DDX-1000s from the late 1970s. With VPI, I think Harry's ...

I have seen a VPI with sloppy build quality. My buddy owns one from about a dozen years ago, and the threading in the clamp that screwed onto the spindle was off--if you tried to screw it down, one side would touch the label and the other was off. It took some convincing before the dealer would corr...

Plenty of pictures! I'm taking one of the daily drivers since I have to stop at a few places work-related and possibly haul home a few large items we've looked at getting from Colorado. I still have to troubleshoot the microphone issue with the head unit or, if I can't, swap head units between cars ...

Interesting tidbits. Thanks for sharing. I'm surprised Emotiva is pulling back. Out of all the companies you mentioned, I figured they would be doing well with the most resources as well as business. Or maybe they don't need the advertising? They are more home theater than high end audio so perhaps...

RJ! 👋 I've had KT120s since I purchased it. I think the amp might have had the original factory tubes when I picked it up, as it did not sound very good (it sounded tired if that makes sense). Seeing how the KT120s were described (especially being more solid in bass), I decided on those. I haven't f...

Nice mod! I have a Premier 11 running KT120s and while I don't really want to cover up the tubes with the cage, a change in my rack might be necessary since I need a little more space. I'm thinking of using threaded circuit board standoffs (or a similar threaded collar), painted black, provided I fi...

A few rally friends are going (which I've met on prior rallies) so it'll be fun!

There's nothing like bonding with rally mates when you're helping them peel rally stickers off of a rental car that's due at the airport in less than an hour, in 30° weather...

I made another improvement in the vinyl rig a few weeks ago. I found a used Wayne's Audio periphery weight made for the SL1200/1210G turntable. Coupled with the Herbie's audio mat I am using, along with the center weight, it has made a noticeable difference in playback. I'm hearing more detail becau...

I just queued up "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" on my desktop system (uses KEF LS50s), and it sounds like a wet reed to me. Sort of a buzzing/rasping when the sax plays? Yeah...we had a lot of that as ten year olds, trying to learn the sax. 😁 (That was us, a roomful of kids slap-tonguing our way t...

Well, fellas, as long as nothing catastrophic happens, Monday I head west to the start of another Lemons Rally on Thursday. My usual path is to leave the Mitten State as early as possible and get to Lincoln, Nebraskey where I usually get dinner with a friend of mine. That's about 11+ hours of drivin...

I managed to attend but, given my schedule and Hyatt being greedy when I went to shorten my reservation (for what turned out to be an expensive, dumpy hotel room), I ended up staying over from Saturday afternoon to Sunday only. So, only two half days at the show, vs. the three days I used to do. I w...

The Roon Remote app is quite well featured. But unless there is a running and accessible Roon Core nearby, it’s useless. There is another app called Roon ARC. It is supposed to let you bring your library along with you on the go. I haven’t tried that yet, so I have no insights. Roon Remote is prett...

I don't have an issue with the angry spouse syndrome. If anything, everyone in the family is afraid to touch the system--I can't even convince them to simply use it! 😁 Theft, pawnshops, estate sales, resale shops...there's no telling where some of these pieces have been. And on moving day, my compon...

I think you are correct both ways. Roon Core can be a controller app (for example telling the streamer what to download from the streaming services), but as I understand it can also be native player. Say you have audio files on your Mac and you want to play those on an external DAC connected to you...

Roon clearly feels like an ethernet connection will deliver better quality than wifi. I'm not sure if I have ever heard the difference between wifi and ethernet streaming but I won't argue with them. There are two schools of thought on that. I used to run JRiver into my Oppo BDP105 via the network....

I've been running Roon from an Intel NUC--a palm-sized computer on which you can load Windows or Linux. I've gone with the former since licenses are cheap, and I know it'll work. I never could get Roon Server to run on Linux properly, and there are threads on their forum where others had the same is...

As an aside, I’ve always been curious about how some vintage pieces get so bunged up. I’ve seen casework with squeezed and broken fins, flattened corners and scratches indicative of gross mishandling. I have wondered about that myself. How could anyone spend so much on a component to treat it so po...

I had the same luck with C-J several years ago. I had asked if they had the rarer black faceplate for my preamp, and a couple years later, if they still had the gold faceplates for Premier 12s, as I had found a pair that were functionally good but the faceplates were in sad shape. Both times, I was ...

One article I had read was mentioning that Roon was really not much good unless you had a streaming service. I have to disagree, as I have ripped my entire collection to a server and Roon makes it simple to search for the artist, pick the album, and play it. The metadata Roon pulls in is often incor...

I have never been a fan of the Audio Research sound. It's always sounded sort of whitish/gray to my ears. I hate saying it, but I've never liked the McIntosh house sound. And to be honest, the last time I heard their huge monoblock amps driving the Martin Logan stats at an audio show, it was a hars...