[jimtranr]

What follows may sound like heresy (not the Paul Klipsch incarnation), but feel free to chalk it up to the incoherent ramblings of a fixed-income retiree silver-haired septuagenarian who:

- Began the cruise into audio’s uncharted waters with the purchase of a Fisher 500-C at the Subic Bay Navy Exchange and mated it with a pair of University 312s in home-built bass reflex enclosures upon his return from an eventful—no, make that consequential—WestPac deployment.
- Sold high-end at San Jose’s Garland Audio in the late ‘70s, which had him dining and talking shop with Bill Johnson and Jim Winey, auditioning and discussing the fine points of the HQD with Mark Levinson at John Garland’s home, and having Bob Fulton visit the house, where he immediately proposed slitting big holes in the living-room carpet so the owner could run Bob’s Gold bridge-suspension—oops, I mean speaker—cable from an ARC D-76 to his Tympani 1Cs.
- Regrets unloading some of his audio gear—most notably an ARC SP-3A1 and a D-90—through the years.
- Had a decent-sounding semi-dedicated room that he had to give up in order to make way for other shared-living priorities and now has three systems, each of which is parked in a space that--due to layout, materials composition, furnishings, design asymmetries, and foot traffic patterns--spells “problematic.” (If you’ve seen my bedroom-system thread on the GIK forum, you know what I’m talking about.)

OK, with that utterly boring preface out of the way to provide a semblance of context, here are my thoughts on a dream system.

I’d give total consideration to that most important of all audio components—the room, the room, the room—and its relevant attributes: standing waves, reflections, and speaker boundary interference. If my wife were to win the Publishers Clearing House’s current promotion, I’d help her spend the prize by immediately adding a room of appropriate size, proportions, and layout to properly accommodate our current main system.

Yep, that’s my dream. Put the existing main system into a better room and thereby leverage to the max my existing investment. All I need.

Well, on second thought, there is another dream. But it’s totally out of my control. And no amount of money (well, short of maybe Bill Gates’, Michael Bloomberg’s, or Warren Buffet’s) can achieve it.

The dream? That all recording producers and engineers have the artistic and technical sensibilities of Richard Mohr and Lewis Layton, Kenneth Wilkinson, Keith Johnson, the Shawn Murphy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s latest recorded-live Brahms cycle, and Anne de Jong and Bert van der Wolf, who produced and engineered James Gaffigan’s recent outing with the Nederlands Radio Symphony Orchestra in Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. Here’s where it all starts, and ultimately what we pay all our hard-earned money for. If we're in it for the music, anyway.

Cheers...