LUCINDA"S HOME STUDIO

Good question as I was a bit of a stereo geek as a kid-which was just a by product me being a music geek-I just always wanted to hear the music sound as good as it possibly could. It’s disappointed me that in the Ipod generation that that has been lost- especially now with technology also making huge advances on the recording side, I think generally speaking recordings now sound tremendously better than they did even 10 years ago. I hadn’t realised how big of a leap had been made until I was listening recently to some records from the mid-late 90’s and was surprised at how small they seemed.
Anyway I guess I should just answer the question. We have two main stereos -one in the house and one up in my office. which is separate from the house. The house stereo consists of an Arcam receiver bi-amped with a power amp called UltrAmp. The speakers are B&W’s – NS-9’s I believe. The cd player is a Pioneer Elite 300 disc changer that i bought about 12 years ago-it was top of the line back then and sound really great for a changer. I should add that this is Lucinda’s favorite piece -as she loves to do her “mixes”– loading a bunch of different things and just letting run all day. She changes it every so often to give it a different flavor. One thing is for sure she does love music. Now if I could just get her to put the cds back in the cases when she changes her mix…. I do have an old 1987 Bang & Olufsen turntable hooked up also but the preamp for it is shot so haven’t been using it.
Up in the office I have a Rotel power amp matched with the preamp from the UltrAmp set, with a Rotel cd player and smaller B&W’s (NS-1’s) and Rega turntable that I bought as a display model, which was a mistake as the top won’t stay up when you want to changes lp’s- you think I would’ve been able to figure that out before I got it home. I guess that was a bad day because I got talked into the two Rotel pieces even though I had never really liked them much because I thought they are too clean sounding. And they are- but it still sounds good. A couple of other footnotes -the UltrAmp set was made only for a short time by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs- they were the first real label that licensed recordings and put them out with super hi-quality sound- a friend of mine worked there and gave me the set- this was probably 15 years and they still sound great. The Arcam and B&W’s were originally part of a surround sound system that I had in my house in Mpls, but when I moved to LA it was a bit of overkill in a small apt., so I just used pieces as a regular stereo. And when we bought the house I just split it into two systems.
See what happens when you ask a former stereo geek about his equipment.