From 1970s quadraphonic to tubes 'n' horns --
that's a sea change
My path was really simple. I grew up with EICO vacuum tube amplifiers and Electrovoice loudspeakers. In the 1970s I followed the local herd (at Johns Hopkins) to Soundscape in Baltimore and bought the best sounding stuff I could afford. I (still) think that I did pretty well in my choices (Yamaha, Philips, Grado and Polk Audio) -- I still have all of that stuff, it still works well and it still sounds good. And Soundscape is still around, too, and still under the same family management. Lee Dorsey started Soundscape's progenitor in the 1940s, I think, and son John is
still the boss there, AFAIK.
In the late 1990s, I bought a pair of Cornwalls from a neighbor, who essentially threw in his electronics (McIntosh MC2100, C28, and a Sansui TU-717) for free. The pairing of those early ss Mac units and the Cornies was nigh-on unlistenable. This was the early days of the
populist Internet (so to speak), and I quickly learned/decided (using tools like Lycos, AltaVista, Webcrawler, and Dogpile, if you remember those
) that what I needed was a vacuum tube amplifier. Long story short: My wife got me a Decware "Zen" SE-84B amplifier (single-ended SV83 or EL84 good for about 2 wpc). I hooked it to the Cornies (then still in our basement), put on Sarah McLachlan's track
Angel -- and started, quite literally, to cry. In a good way.
Y'all know the rest.
