Audio Aficionado to invade Atlanta next weekend (trip report)

[SCAudiophile]

Originally Posted by SCAudiophile

Sorry to miss this great event...travel schedule for work firmed up and I am flying internationally starting out early Saturday morning thru the begining of 1st week of March...[emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]

Strike that!!! Wound up driving down last night and back again very late prior to leaving the house at 6am for travel to Milan/Istanbul this week for work.

It was a great time and wonderful to see all of you and experience Buck's great system and amazingly beautiful room and hospitality!!!

[audioguy3107]

Man, this has been one helluva weekend, guys are leaving this afternoon so I’ll be able to post some pictures etc.... Check back!

- Buck

[Masterlu]

[audioguy3107]

Well, it hasn’t been that bad, but there has been much food, wine and liquor consumed. I had to clean all the glasses and wine bottles out of the room this morning . We were going strong until about 1:15 AM.

- Buck

[SCAudiophile]

Originally Posted by Masterlu

There's no vinyl or discs or gear in this picture...you know this cannot be the scene of the crime!

[audioguy3107]

I'll start the trip report off with Friday morning, Rob and Tim were the first to arrive, unfortunately Tim had something come up last minute and wasn't able to make it.....real bummer, hopefully we'll be able to do it again sometime. I picked Rob up at the airport and had a few hours to kill before the rest of the gang arrived. We rode over to the Little Five Points area and invaded Criminal Records first.



Awesome records store that I took Steve too back in November....we killed some time there and headed a few doors down to the Vortex Atlanta, famous for their burgers. Yes, you have to walk through a big skull to get in.....21 and up even during the day.



After the Vortex we had about an hour and a half before Marc, Steve and Ed arrived so we went over the the Delta Air Lines museum a few minutes away from the terminals. I've only been over there once for an event, really cool place, they have some airline history as well as some retired planes from their fleet.



The famous Spirit of Delta Boeing 767:



They also have the last 747-400 in their fleet, retired just a few years ago. It still amazed Rob and I how big these things were....875,000 pounds max takeoff weight. Amazing...They have little mini museum inside. Here's Rob walking out on the wing of the 747




One of the most impressive things of course was the Boeing official audiophile wire management.....Rob pointed it out and we both had a laugh comparing it to some of Ivan's pictures .....maybe Ivan consulted on the benefits of proper wire management. I mean just look at that! Beautiful!!



Next post will be arriving at home on Friday evening.

[Masterlu]

^^^

[audioguy3107]

Rob and I picked up the rest of the stragglers from the airport around 2:30......Traffic was predictably horrendous on Friday afternoon, so we didn't get back to the house until later that afternoon. We got settled and before we had dinner we had the quick tour and checked out the audio room. Had a nice surprise as well......Mark (SCAudiophile) called us and was able to move some things around and join us for dinner and drinks on Friday evening.


Marc, Rob and Steve discussing the horrors of Atlanta traffic :





Ed here is unboxing an Audioquest Diamond ethenet cable he sent me to demo with the DJM Gigafoil ethernet filter that I was waiting to set up when they got here.....more on that later.




Mark enjoying some Redbook CD through the dCS Rossini DAC:

[audioguy3107]

My wonderful wifey took care of all of us with dinner that evening, salads, cheese and meats and Italian from a restaurant:




Here's the crew: from left to right, Rob from Rhode Island (RobC33), me (audioguy3107), Marc from Seattle (2fastdriving), Ed from Seattle (Fortheloveofmusic), Mark from Greenville, SC (SCAudiophile) and Steve from Altus, OK (SL1800). Jim also from Atlanta (WeirdCuba) (not in the picture) met us all on Saturday night for the trip to Hifi Buys and dinner.

[audioguy3107]

So Saturday morning was interesting, our plan was to compare the straight signal from the router to the dCS Rossini to the DJM Gigafoil ethernet filter. We fiddled with it for close to an hour and a half and could NOT get it to work. The DAC would not see and type of network signal with the Gigafoil inserted in the chain. We had additional difficulty getting the Rossini back online afterwards but Steve eventually got it working. The general consensus is that my ethernet cable may have a short so I'm going to try and re-terminate and see if that fixes the problem. Anyway, I'll have a go at that this week sometime.

The second thing was that we were, for lack of better words, stood up by one of the dealers here in Atlanta (that I made an APPOINTMENT for BTW )....look, I'm not going to come on here and flame these people because honestly they're not worth the trouble, but The Audio Co. should be the poster child for what's wrong with this hobby. If anyone is interested in what happened, PM me and I'll tell you what happened. It was mind blowing.

So what better way to spend lunch? Marc wanted to see what all the hype was surrounding the Popeye's chicken sandwich that people are brawling all over the country for, so that's where we headed.



What can I say? They're good!


From there we took my wife lunch at her office, wanted to show the guys her new dental office that we finished back in December. Now as many of you know, Ed is very knowledgeable and interested in all things power here on AA.......so what did he do? He immediately decided to check out the circuit board panel and grounding. I believe he gave us a clean bill of health and didn't electrocute anyone.