In the summer of 2000, after completing my first year of university, I was sucked into the world of hifi. Shortly thereafter, of course, I discovered the wonders of home cinema! Since then I have dived head-first into this painfully expensive but oh-so-rewarding hobby and built up a system easily worth over £8000 ($14,000), and a DVD collection of over 180 titles. I love the sound of my hifi, and movies are a joy to behold. This page is a tribute to my hifi and home cinema setups, and my DVD collection.
[Note: for info on my CD collection, go HERE.]
CORE (STEREO) SYSTEM:
HOME CINEMA COMPONENTS:
BLURB:
[NOTE: this is badly out of date... I'll updated it eventually!]
Trust me when I say this system ROCKS! My most prized compnonents are the ATC Active 10 speakers, which are simply amazing. They're small, 10-litre sealed-box speakers (i.e. no bass reflex port, which is a big bonus in my small room) but they pack a serious whallop - the mid-bass drivers are massively constructed, heavy-duty bastards weighing in at over 3.5kg apiece (even though they're only 5" cones!)
They're active speakers with built in amplification - 250 watts per speaker, to be precise! And that's mostly Class A, at that! The active design allows the power amps to be tailored specifically to each drive unit, the tweeter getting a single 50-watt amp and the mid/bass driver getting a 200-watt monster. Furthermore, the boxes are extremely solid and well damped, weighing over 15kg each!
To say the least, these babies are dynamic as hell - with the volume cranked, it can get frightening! In movies, obviously, things like gunshots, explosions, helicopters and the like are earth-shattering, but also in music - at times it honestly sounds like there's a full orchestra crashing into action in my room, hehehe. Things like Beethoven's 5th, Holst's 'The Planets', and Orff's 'Carmina Burana' are stunning with the volume up, and more modern music like Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, and Weezer sound jaw-dropping!
But it's not just the huge dynamic range and sound pressure levels these guys pump out - you can get big-sounding speakers for much less. The thing is, the ATCs are truly hifi speakers, in that music sounds beautiful. Things like piano sonatas, the Bach cello suites, and live acoustic rock sound so realistic and beautiful, I don't know how to describe it. One of my favourite records is Eric Clapton's Unplugged set, and it sounds so unnervingly real with this system, that it almost feels like you're there.
Just to let you know, if you're thinking of buying a pair, you'll be looking at paying £1300 ($2000) or thereabouts! I got my original pair two years ago for £995, but two weeks afterwards they bumped up the price by £300!! Needless to say I was well chuffed! I got the centre separately around November last year.
Anyway, enough about the Active 10's. The Meridian is a fantastic CD player recently released to supplant the legendary 506.24, both by Meridian and myself (I used to have a 506.24 before I traded it up to the 507). It continues the Meridian traditions of neutrality, detail, subtlety, and authority, and comes dangerously close to Meridian's £2100 CD player, the 588. I don't see myself needing to upgrade it in the forseeable future, unless I take the plunge into DVD-Audio and get a 598.....
The Concept 4 sub is a BEAST of a subwoofer, weighing in at 54kg and being more than a half-metre cubed! It has a massive 12" ATC driver powered by a very serious 650-watt ATC power amp! Oh momma does it kick some ass! In music and movies it delivers all the deep bass you could ever want, and always at very low distortion levels - the bass is big when it's supposed to be, but tight and clean at all times. The Behringer Feedback Destroyer is used for its equalisation abilities - for £95 it makes for one hell of a 24-band digital fully-parametric EQ, and does a fantastic job of smoothing out the nasty peaks and troughs that my room adds to the frequency response of the sub. Indeed, the room plays a huge part in the overall sound of all sound systems, and the Behringer is an easy and inexpensive way of getting rid of a lot of the problems, at least with the sub.
The home cinema setup is great - unless you're watching on the BIG screen, it ain't really home cinema! :) Seriously, There's nothing like watching DVDs in 5.1 surround on an 8-foot screen to bring that cinema experience home. The Sanyo projector is one of the best budget projectors you can buy, with a native 16:9 960x540 resolution screen and 800:1 contrast ratio, it produces a brilliant widescreen image, and for less than the price of a decent 36" television (I got mine for £1200)!
The next step is to upgrade the processor - the budget Yamaha does the job alright, and it's good and impressive, but the ATCs really demand a high-end processor from the likes of Meridian, TAG McLaren, or (my preference thusfar) Lexicon. It won't be cheap (most likely £1500+), and I won't be able to afford it for a good long while, but it's something to work towards. Thing is, I'd kinda like to pay off my current debts before creating new ones! :)
One last note: just FYI, the total RMS wattage of this system is just over 1.6kW!!! :þ
TOP 10 DVDS FOR TESTING/SHOWING OFF:
TOP 10 DVDS, PERIOD:
[Note: If I had more Miyazaki DVDs, e.g. My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, they would all be up there, methinks.]
For a complete list of my DVD collection, including wishlist, check out my DVD Profiler page. DVD Profiler is a great piece of free software for cataloguing your DVD collection if, like me (and many others!) you start to accumulate more than a mere handful... :) Also, check out the DVD Profiler info for the UK region 2 releases of Memento and Mallrats - guess who's Contributor 2 on each of those! :)
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