Time for a little LP organization

I have been thinking over the past couple years that I need to go through my record collection and figure out what I have.  I need to determine what needs to be replaced, what I no longer like, need or want and clean it out.

The time is today when I start listening to most every single record in my collection without a quality rating first off.  I will determine the quality and if I am going to keep it by listening to the record in its' entirety, both sides.  I will then rate it and determine if I want to keep it, or rip a good song or two and sell it on Discogs, give it to Salvation Army or offer it up to friends that I know that still have turntables.  If it has a high quality rating and I like the record, it will stay.  Seems pretty simple!

I have started with the Oldies box.  These are the records that I have in my collection the longest.  I started collecting albums when I was about 16, and at the time I liked oldies, British invasion and psychedelic songs of the 1960s.  That is what a good portion of my collection consisted of when I was a kid.  I have listened to two LPs this morning, Paul Revere and the Raiders - Just Like Us, and Van Morrison - Moondance.  Both great albums, however I find that the 'Raiders LP is in terrible condition, so this copy will go to the thrift store and I will be searching for a new, clean version in either Stereo or Mono. This copy was stereo, but I think the mono records of the early 1960s were what the records were mixed to and re-channeled and re-mixed to become stereo.

I have tons of records in my collection.  I have three oldies boxes with approximately 70 records in each.  To make it easier to determine what I have done and what records I have looked at I am taking notes on my listening, dating and scoring the condition of the record.  If the record is in bad shape, I have a section of my notebook dedicated to records that I need to re-purchase and the LP will be put aside in a special bin. When I originally purchased most of these records, I used a visual grading method, which did not always result in clean sounding records.  This process of listening to most of my records will take quite a long time to accomplish, possibly a couple years.   I have decided there are certain records that I have already rated for quality that are must-keep records, so I may not listen to those except for pleasure listening during this project.

I have decided that certain types of records are out of scope for this project. First, box sets are not going to be included, nor will my 78-RPM collection.  Most of my box-sets are in excellent condition, most appear to have been played once and put on a shelf for the next 20 years.  Also not up for consideration will be my historic, comedy, patriotic and old-time-radio LP collections.  My daughter's records, my Disney records, anything unusual or sealed will remain in the collection too. 

I have been cleaning up and digitizing my CD collection for quite some time now and have sold off quite a few of the ones that I no longer listen to.  I have digitized the rest and have quite a musical library.  I have stored the original CDs in appropriate CD storage boxes that I have acquired at Bags Unlimited. 

I do not collect for the value of the records.  There are quite a few in my collection with messed up sleeves and that is fine with me.  Just as long as there is a nice, clean record in there somewhere.  Collectors would think I am nuts for how my collection is full of these awesome LPs in crappy sleeves.  I have to like a record to keep it, which is why it is time to go through the collection and weed-out those records that I have purchased as an experiment, or to try and find something different out there.  I have dozens of those in my collection; therefore it is time to take a listen and see if I really need to keep all my albums.  I expect to find that I have kept quite a few records that are OK, but I am not crazy about, these will be gone. 

Bottom line is I want a collection of hardly anything in it that is in any but excellent condition and sounds great when played.  Since I have started collecting records as an adult, and over the last 10 years or so I have gravitated toward the VG+, NM-, NM and sealed records for my collection of LPs.  As for 78s I try to acquire Es, which are in excellent condition.  If I like the record, and the quality is poor, I will add to my list the title and watch for it whenever I am scouting for records.  If I find a VG+ or NM copy I will re-acquire it, clean it and add it back into my collection.  I will also be looking for first pressings to replace even my quality records.

I also expect to be getting rid of approximately ten percent of my collection through the changing of my tastes over the years.  There are quite a few albums that I have passed by over and over in the box and may have not played since I was a kid.  Those will be gone!  This seems like quite a bit of work to undertake, and it is.  I expect to enjoy the process quite a bit.  I am sure I will find LPs that I can no longer tolerate in my collection too.  This will take a long time but if I am consistent I should be able to get rid of a couple hundred LPs.  Probably replace a hundred or so in the process as well.

I hope you can get some listening time in and remember to enjoy the music, not just collect the records, which is what I want to remedy.

Peace Out and keep listening,

Jeff

An awesome decision by my parents, ca 1979

A very long time ago my parents made a very wise decision. Instead of purchasing a car when I had just received my drivers license, they bought me a stereo instead. During that time those all-in-one stereos with the cassette deck, record player, 8-track and tuner were very popular, (I just dated myself). They broke with the trend and decided instead to purchase separates. A Pioneer receiver, an SX-450 if anyone cares, a BSR turntable and a set of Kenwood 2-way speakers. They bought it at Tech HiFi, which has since gone out of business. I have the original receipt hanging on my wall. It was a great system, sounded great, but more importantly that modest little system ignited a passion for music that I have to this day.

I have never been without a stereo since that day and pray to never be without one. I listen to music quite a bit and get great pleasure from it and profound stress relief. The original stereo - long gone, but I have a nice system that I have built over the past few years that sounds quite nice. I celebrate August 29th each year to this day and call my Mom and say thanks!

Thanks Mom, Thanks Dad!

A fictitious rating system I developed

Jeff's Beer Speaker Rating System:

1 Beer - Weak - did these come out of a kids toy?

2 Beer - OK - these would sound OK at a party.

3 Beer - Good - these would sound good just about anywhere, not great, but a good speaker at a good price, not revealing or articulate, but rocks the house down and handles music very nicely.

4 Beer - Solid - these would play very well with great recordings and a perfect room, quite a few of these are reasonably priced speakers, can be revealing and articulate, but usually a great sounding speaker and a good value to own.

5 Beer - Sweet - these would play articulate, revealing and sweet sounding music, source type is nearly irrelevant, nearly perfect sound with nearly any music or source, a nice speaker to have if you can afford it.

6 Beer - OMG - these would knock your socks off, sound amazing, redefine your idea of what a perfect speaker can sound like, it's almost like you are in the room with the performers, the speaker to have if you can afford it.

Spin Clean Record washing system MKII - First Impressions

Good day everyone, I finally did it.  I finally broke down and purchased a record cleaning machine.  I have wanted for years to be able to clean my vinyl properly.  I used various pretty effective methods for keeping my records clean, but I wanted to know how much better it could be after a proper cleaning is done.

I broke down and bought the Spin-Clean record washing system - MK II.  It was at first smaller than I expected.  I took a look at the construction and it is pretty nice.  I was able to determine what all the notches were for and so forth without having to look at the manual, so the design is pretty straightforward.

I purchased the bonus pack with the system because I have a lot of records to clean.  The bonus pack came with extra pads, and extra lint free towels to dry the records with.  I was glad that I purchased the extra towels when I got into cleaning the records. Also included is a 32 oz bottle of the cleaner along with the 4oz bottle that comes with the standard kit.  I will be glad I bought the bonus pack in no time.

When I took a look through the manual I read that it would be best if the towels were prewashed before using them for the first time.  So, I got them in the wash following the directions and got them dried before I started cleaning records.  I took some time to go through the manual while I was waiting for the laundry to complete.

 I realized a short time later that I had forgotten to pick up some distilled water for the cleaner.  The directions say that you can use tap water if you do not have distilled water to use.  With all the junk in tap water, I decided to go the pure route and drove to the store and purchased a couple gallons of distilled water. 

So, I filled it up with distilled water to the designated level and poured the cleaning solution where the instructions told me to do so and I got out some record boxes and decided to clean what I wanted to listen to for the next couple days.

Now it was time to do some cleaning as I pulled the cleaned and dried towels from the dryer.  I had read a couple blogs about getting the labels wet when using the spin-clean.  Before I started I read through the manual so I did not run into any issues.  However, I kept in mind what I read and never stopped moving the record once the cleaning had started, that way run-off would not drip onto the label.  I was successful in keeping water off the labels, but I had to develop a system that would not use up all my towels on the first couple records.  Use a junk record to test your process before you start cleaning the good ones. I cleaned two from the junk pile just in case I had issues.

The instructions say you can clean 20 - 50 records with one bath.  I was able to clean 30 albums and I could have cleaned more, you should keep an eye on how dirty the water gets.  I stopped at 30 records as that is all I wanted to do at one time. The water was not terribly dirty, but I had enough records for the listening tests I planned.

I air dried the records for about 20 minutes after wiping them down until mostly dry before playing or putting them in sleeves.  I started with a piano record that was on the disposal pile to see how it sounded.  I was overall pretty impressed as surface noise was very low.  There was still some, but my assumption is that the record was worn, as I have very few records that I purchased new, and it is possible that it was well-loved in the past and played over and over again.

I then played something I am pretty familiar with to see if I noticed any differences.  I put on ELO Discovery LP.  I used a crappy VG version of the LP that I had on my disposal pile.  I put it on the table and it played very respectively.  I will not say that it eliminated noise or anything like that, but I was pretty impressed with the overall sound quality coming from that somewhat scratched up record.  The noise was significantly low, and the pops and clicks were there from the scratches, but it still sounded pretty darn good!

My records were pretty clean overall, but the water got pretty dirty so the device is quite effective at getting dirt out of the grooves.  One piece of advice that I used was to clean the record with a brush before getting it into the bath.  Loose stuff that you can remove before it goes in the machine will aid you in keeping the water cleaner for more records.

My strongest recommendation if you purchase this product is to read the instruction manual and follow the instructions.  If you ruin your brushes you may do damage to your records, so please follow the instructions.

If you have LPs, and you are on a budget, this machine is for you!  Grab some extra towels to put the records on while you dry them and go for it!  I have seen machines for $600 that make allot of noise and cost allot of money, but don't do any finer job of cleaning a record than the Spin-Clean.  This little machine at less than $150 is a bargain in my opinion.  I tend to take care of stuff so I expect this to last for many years.  I would recommend the bonus kit which has the extra pads, the larger bottle of cleaner solution and the extra towels.  I am still going to pick up an additional set of the rollers and more towels before very long.  I got mine at Jerry Raskin's Needle Doctor - www.needledoctor.com


Seriously Sweet and Effective record cleaning!

Peace Out!

Jeff

Associated Equipment
Technics SL-B3 turntable
Denon DL-110 MC cartridge
McIntosh C-27 Preamp
McIntosh MC250 Amp
PSB Image T-6 Speakers

A short observation on compressed popular music

I sat down and started listening to some awesome FLAC music after I had moved my speakers to a better location which gave me much better imaging of my music.  It was awesome, the sound was great the image was very wide and the instruments seemed to hang in the air.  Until I played some pop music that I have in my collection to see how that sounded.  The image went away completely and it was basically the same loud sound coming from each of my speakers, YUCK!  It is my opinion that compressed recorded music which is designed to only be played loudly, is totally missing imaging.  It sounded flat, like I was listening to a board with music coming out of it.  After I heard this, I checked my system to make sure that everything was in order.  It was.

So, I put on some Dire Straits from a ripped CD, and it sounded awesome, it had imaging that sounded much wider than where the speakers were placed.  So my thoughts on this are, if you like your music to sound incredible (not just loud), venture outside of the popular music available on the Internet, to some of the more musical artists that care about the listening quality of the music they produce, not just how cool it sounds and loud it goes.  Proper imaging adds a third dimension to your listening as instruments and vocalists seem to hang in the air.  Compressed music is nearly totally missing this. 

If you are in doubt as to what music you might like that has incredible sonics, check with that most valued and thought to be outdated - a person at a local record/cd/music store.  Stop buying on the Internet if you are trying to expand your musical horizons, talk to people, but what you are looking for to make your system pop would be recordings in the genre of music you like with excellent sonics.  Go and buy some Cd's or records and check out something different. Listen to the entire darn thing instead of just the popular songs, you may find something awesome.

It's all about the music!

Enough for now,

Enjoy!

Jeff

McIntosh Preamp hopes re-railed by a McIntosh C27

I finally saved up enough to try again to upgrade my aging and failing Yamaha C-70 preamp.  The last time I attempted this, if you read my posts, a McIntosh preamp was destroyed by UPS.  It took three months to work it out and I had a very helpful seller!  The C-70 has been giving me trouble for about the last year.  One of the controls kept dropping one of the channels until it was actuated a few times.  You would think this would be cleared up by using it over and over, it was not.  I hate sitting there listening to music and have a channel drop in volume.  So it had to be replaced, I will try to find a good home for it who is knowledgeable in how to repair such things.  I finally managed to have opportunity and funding intersect and was able to purchase another McIntosh preamp.

Yesterday I took delivery of a 1977-1983 McIntosh C27 Preamp.  It was in awesome condition and I purchased it from a repair facility in the Carolina's.  I took a chance with the seller as they had Zero feedback.  I was pleasantly surprised when the boxes arrived and were not damaged.  The packing job done by them was excellent!  The item was just as pictured, which was clean with no damage and very little of the bubbling paint under the glass.  Like I have said before, I don't play the looks of an item, I play the item, so I am usually OK with a bit of cosmetic issues on the equipment I own. I left the seller very positive feedback and sent him a message thanking him for his efforts to get it to me undamaged.

This preamp seems to be legendary in a couple respects.  It was released right about the time the C32 was in production.  The C32 at that time was the baddest-ass preamp you could purchase, IMHO.  It had equalizers, filters, and a bunch of controls to shape the sound in any way you could imagine except reverb.  Interesting that a C27 would be released at the same time as a C32, since it seems to be released out of sequence.  What I have gathered so far is the C27 is a new technology product for McIntosh at that time and had the "new" controls which would become standard from that point on.  These controls are supposed to give excellent fidelity while lasting much longer than the "old" controls would, which is a pretty long time when I consider my MC250 amp is almost 50 years old!  Instead of putting all those equalizer and filter functions and so forth on this product, it is closer to a purist product.  The variable loudness control is interesting and can be defeated when set to flat, but what it does is enhance the lower frequencies at lower volumes to make up for apparent sound loss at lower volumes.  The C27 is more of a pure Preamp, people seem to love this particular model does as it not come up for sale very often, as a matter of fact this was the first one that I had saw on eBay for sale since I started looking.  Once I did some research, and asked a knowledgeable friend, saw the condition and who was selling it, I figured I could not go wrong.  I was right! 
This preamp has a ton of inputs, two phono inputs, (which was the most important factor for me), two aux, two sets of tape deck connections and a tuner input.  It also outputs to two separate amps in stereo and one in mono too, which I love!  (I am thinking of getting my hands on a mono tube amp and running a very efficient set or a single speaker on to simulate the old mono days). The controls feel awesome and very high quality, very precise, no noise and something you would expect on a very expensive product.  No wonder these things last forever and hold their value!  I paid about what it cost new to buy it restored to factory specs.

I think the speaker connectors are a bit on the strange side, but I can understand.  Quite a few amplifiers of the time only have connections for one set of speakers.  What this preamp does is allow you to connect the output from your single set of speaker connections to the inputs in the C27 and then connect up to two sets of speakers to the preamp, allowing the flexibility of playing and controlling an additional or different set of speakers and the headphone jack from the preamp, (the headphone jack is not active unless you have an amplifier's speaker outputs connected to the speaker inputs on the C27).  Very cool idea for the time, but today I think it is unneeded.  I am probably not going to bother hooking it up, although I have an idea or two on how to use that flexibility to play my Christmas party music without too much grief. 

So far the way it works is very nice and I was able to figure most things out pretty quickly.  I spent some enjoyable evening time reading the owners manual before it arrived so I would be familiar with how the controls worked and the features of this preamp.

I had the Yamaha preamp unhooked and the McIntosh hooked up and running in just a few minutes.  I have the cabinet and it is in awesome condition, but I decided to leave the cabinet in the packing box to protect it and run the preamp in the rack without the cabinet to save space and to increase cooling efficiency as it is in tight quarters.  I isolated it from the cabinet with some home-made vibration control feet that I mention in another blog post.  Overall, I was just happy not to hear noisy controls or strange noises.  When I did some late night listening, the glow of the tubes from my Musical Paradise MP301 MK3 tube amp along with the green glow lettering from the McIntosh had a hypnotic effect on me as I sat there listening to jazz at 130 in the morning.

This morning I am using my McIntosh C27 with my McIntosh MC250 amp and the combination sounds excellent!

I was thinking how I am the budget audiophile and this piece cost quite a bit, and how does that fit with the Budget Audiophile Philosophy?  Well, first off, I had to save for nearly a year for a chance to upgrade. Also, when I look at the fact that this may well be my last preamp, then the overall cost for the next 25 years becomes negligible in my opinion.  It is the value of the item sometimes and not the sheer cost that determine the overall budget fitting properties of a purchase.  This is a long-term investment in equipment that does not go down in value. So, if I ever have to sell it, I am pretty confident that I will receive at least what I paid for it. VALUE!


I will be reviewing this more in the future as I do some critical listening.  I just wanted to post that I finally got my preamp upgraded to something flexible enough to remove a few items from the signal path that I had connected prior to this becoming my main preamp on my main system.

My main system now consists of:
Yamaha RxV-2700 home theater receiver
Musical Paradise MP301 Mk3 7WPC Tube Amp
McIntosh MC250 50WPC Stereo Solid-State Amp
McIntosh C27 Stereo Premplifier
Two Turntables - Technics, JVC
Two working Reel to Reel decks - Pioneer, Teac
Nakamichi Cassette Tape Deck
Klipsch KLF-20 three-way speakers
PSB T6 Three-way speakers
Boston Acoustics T930 - Three-way speakers
Paradign Mini Monitor V.5 - Two-way speakers
Computer running JRiver media software through a Schiit DAC connected to the preamp

Stay safe and get some listening time in!

Jeff

Tube Mania - Musical Paradise MP-301 MK3 Tube Amplifier Review

I just acquired a new tube amp.  It is a Musical Paradise MP301-MK3.  It sounds great, you may be surprised like I was how great 6.5 watts of tube power sounds!  If you have read any of my posts, I love variety.  This amp is right up my alley!

This amp takes tubes.  Two different sets, one set is for power and the other is the pre-amplification tubes.  Both type of tubes can make a difference in how the music sounds.  The maker of this amp has made it quite flexible with both sets of tubes.  Lots of variety!

This little amp takes four tubes, like I said a pair of power tubes and a set of preamp tubes.  Here is a list of the power tubes that it accepts:

6P3P, 6L6, KT66, 5881, EL34, 6CA7, KT77, KT88, 6550

Here is a list of the pre-amp tubes that it accepts:

6SJ7, 5693, 6SK7, 6SD7, 6J8P, 6*8

WOW!

So far I have indulged myself and purchased a few sets of tubes.  I have his this amp less than two weeks and I am on my third trade of tubes.  Why?  I am trying to eliminate the tubes that suck from my growing stockpile of tubes.  I have purchased a set of RCA preamp tubes from the early 1960s.  As much as I would love to use a glass-tube in this application, the RCA 6SK7 tube is rated very high and quite inexpensive! However they are metal tubes and black and not as cool looking as a glass tube with the heater showing.  I was able to get my first set for $7!  They were matched!  I was very hopeful, and when they arrived I changed out the stock Chinese tubes that came with the amp.  I am listening right now to those RCA metal tubes.  The system sounds very good!

So far I have purchased a matched set of Mullard EL34 tubes, three matched sets of the RCA 6SK7s that I mentioned above, a matched Quad (Which is four tubes with the same electrical ratings when tested) of these Russian 6L6 tubes for a really good price, a matched quad of ITT 6SJ7GT tubes, a matched pair of Tung Sol 5881s, a set of Sovietek 6550s.  I find that I liked the RCA so much that I found and purchased two more matched sets.  

So far I have about 40 hours of running time on this amp and from what I hear it will sound even better going forward.  Moving around the tubes has been enjoyable as I get to sit and do some intense listening to see what I feel about the sound of each set of tubes that I install.  

I found these el-cheapo Russian 6L6 power tubes for $15 for four of them, all new and matched!  I was pretty surprised at the price and that shipping was not jacked up to make up for the low price.  Nope, shipping was reasonable, 14-day return policy too.  How could I go wrong with a deal like that?  I got them Friday and put them in place of the Mullard EL34s I was running in it.  They sound mighty respectable with no burn-in time.  I am hoping to find them a good enough sounding tube that I will get another matched quad of these tubes for day to day driving.  Special days I will do some tube swapping. I checked for background noise and these tubes had not raised the noise floor.  I can hear the amp when nothing is running with a very faint hiss.  I am working on eliminating this.

I had a big problem with hum when I first got this amp and set it up.  I was able to get it under control using a method a friend advise I try.  I do not recommend this at home unless you or someone you know is knowledgeable about such things.  I removed the grounding pin from the computer cord that I use to connect this to power and added a three-plug to two-plug adapter.  I started with it in the normal configuration and I still heard the hum, but when I powered it down and turned the plug over and essentially plugged it in upside down the hum was totally gone, replaced with a very faint hiss type sound.  This I can live with until I can reduce it further, but now is the area with diminishing returns occur.  The effort to eliminate that little bit of hiss will cost quite a bit of time, and I have actually made it worse messing with things in the past.

Well, I wanted a variety and I wanted to tinker, woohoo!

I will post a review at some point in the future.  

Keep on Listening!


Jeff


Here is a link to what I now own and am loving so far!  

http://www.musicalparadise.ca/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=59&product_id=54

Update 1/25/15:
This little amp is awesome.  I am running some EL34s in it right now and listening to it in the background.  Excellent build quality, I have had it for a couple years now and have had zero issues with it.  I think that I like the power and sound of the KT88 tubes in it.  I like 5881s, and the EL34s too!  Really worth the money, in my opinion.

Update 12/11/15:
Nightly driver amp, runs nice, trouble-free.  I am running some Tung-Sol 5881s in it now, along with some metal RCA preamp tubes.  It sounds excellent, very reliable and I have used it for probably a few thousand hours easily by now.  I run it every night as my bedroom system, so it gets 6 - 8 hours a night of use.  Still highly recommended!  My only wish is that it could be bridged mono and I could pair a couple up as a stereo system, it would be awesome!