Newsletter Issue #1054 — A High-End Audio Attempt on the Cheap
May 14th, 2024Before I get going with this review, I need to explain where I came from when it comes to home audio history. Back in the 1960s, my brother gave me an automatic turntable (make that a record changer), and one speaker. I made it the second speaker for a stereo system cobbled together from my vintage VM tape recorder. Chintzy, yes, but it worked well enough for my modest needs.
In fact it was the system I used to listen to one of the greatest albums of all time, The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” It seems only yesterday when my wife and I opened a small package containing the album, and give it a spin. At the time, I was actually the morning disk jockey at a country radio station in Tuscumbia, AL. But we didn’t listen to the record at the radio studio; instead, I used my own paltry audio system. Clearly audio quality was not much better than that of a portable radios, but I relied on it for over a decade.
I didn’t have the budget buy a proper audio setup until half a decade later, when I got a loan to finance a stereo setup that consisted of a Dual turntable, Dynaco build-it-yourself electronics and EPI speakers. Among audio components, it had decent quality audio. But the Dynaco amp, the ST-120, had a penchant for blowing out, thus taking out the tweeter on one of the speakers. After a few years, I found a repair shop willing to take the time to figure out the problem. In passing, they told me it was a design problem that they hobbled together a fix for.
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