The adventures and misadventures of a budget-minded audiophile in his search for audio nirvana. There will be entries for what I have, what I like, new music, new components, thoughts, musings and so forth. I am trying to build an incredibly diverse audio system that handles multiple formats from yesterday as well as today, while keeping in mind the eventual goal is to be able to eat and have an audio system when I retire.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Take a stereo on vacation?
Yes, I take a stereo and a radio on my vacations. I alter what I take based on who I am traveling with and where I am going. I find that having music available to be played at a decent, good sounding volume level is a necessity when traveling. I was able to get a couple days of listening in on both of my summer vacations this year. I get a bit tired of only having the music they play on the radio in northern Michigan and need a variety! I also take one of my Zenith Trans Oceanic radios, either the 3000-1 or the 7000 series radios. I like the reception from both of them as I can pick up AM and SW from all over the place!
When I go up north to the cabin I take my small flea-watt amp and a pair of Polk mini-monitors to listen to. Placement of the speakers is a bit of a pain in the butt. I choose the Polk's as they are front ported and can be placed up against a wall, if necessary. I use my laptop with a music streamer DAC to play the music. I find the sound pretty good for such a smallish setup. The 2.5 Watts of the tube amp play the Polk's to a pretty decent sound level. The sound is pretty good too!
When I travel with my best friend to play video games and listen to music up north in a house we rent. I take my Sherwood 70WPC integrated amplifier and my pair of Paradigm Mini Monitor V.5s with a pair of stands. I also bring my laptop and the music streamer, of course. I find the sound pretty satisfying and it goes quite loud.
I have relegated the Sherwood to duty in my garage system, so I cannot bring it this year. What I am going to do this year on guy's weekend is take the Paradigm's, a pair of stands, my Hafler pre-amp and my Parasound HCA-800II power amp. I still plan to bring the laptop, but I want to be able to choose other sources like when I take the Sherwood. I don't want to be switching cables all over the place, so I will take a couple decent cables to connect media players to the pre-amp and play different types of music than what I have on my laptop. I expect the sound to be vastly improved as the Parasound is a very clean sounding amp, it is newer and it has 100WPC. I certainly won't be able to turn it up all the way with the Paradigms, but with their decent efficiency they should go quite loud and sound very clean!
What do I listen to when I travel? I try and switch it up a bit, so I listen to some old Jazz, Rock, Soul, Funk, R&B, and Oldies. I have some old radio shows that I have recorded over the years and they are fun to listen to as I have digitized them. I have also digitized some of my old Cassette tapes that I made years and years ago. I did this to basically be able to listen to them for years to come as cassette lifespan varies from brand to brand of tape. I have music recorded on old El-cheapo tape, but mostly I have the old Memorex tapes then I upgraded to using Maxell High-bias tapes , some TDK's and Sony's along with some Scotch and Denon tapes that I started using when I realized that they would last longer. Quite a bit of my tape collection is over 30 years old and they still play. I bought a Nakamichi CR-1A tape deck a few years back to allow me to record from these old tapes. I still had the first tape deck I purchased until a couple years ago, but it wasn't even that good when I bought it. I plan to digitize my tape collection over the next few years. That will take a while as I have hundreds of tapes.
Why do I take a stereo on vacation? Pure enjoyment! I have found that I am less stressed out when I get some listening time every couple days. Otherwise I get crabby and I am in a hurry to get home. Listening to music is one of my favorite things in this world! Thank you to all who make music, without it life would certainly suck a whole lot more!
Keep Listening!
Jeff
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