January 31, 2008

• With the Bay Area's mild weather, the plum trees (this one lives on Laguna Street in SF's Japantown) bloom in January.
  
  Actually, the plum trees on Wicks Boulevard in San Leandro were blooming in late December.  But anyway, it was at this time 20 years ago, that we first heard David Lee Roth's Skyscraper.  Don't forget; those were the Drought Years.  It was sunny and beautiful, and DLR's "Just Like Paradise" made us forget about the drought, and just enjoy the sparkling weather.  That was my junior year in high school.  The first semester was already awesome, and with great tunes like "Just Like Paradise" coming out, I was very optimistic for the rest of the school year.

  In the mid-to-late 80s, I remember flipping through those extensive J&R Music World catalogs.  I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was a company called Ohm which made some interesting-looking speakers.  One such line had egg-shaped tweeters mounted on top of the box.  It was almost as if someone had forgotten the tweeter, and just, at the last moment, decided to stick one on top. 

  After people graduated from Bose, some of the popular choices they had were B&W, Celestion, DCM, Infinity, Mordaunt-Short, and Polk.  I think I was at Harmony A/V's store on Fillmore, when I saw a black robot.  But no, that wasn't a robot.  That was a multi-segmented B&W speaker!

  In the early 90s, I'd hear the B&W Matrix 804, when I was out auditioning Adcom electronics.  At the 1993 Stereophile show, I got to hear the Matrix 805 with Tara Labs cables.  In 1998 or so, B&W came out with the Nautilus series, which did away with the Matrix series' outboard bass filter.  The current 800 series, which came out in 2005, are all bi-wire models.  They come with this accessory pack, which includes bumpers, cleaning cloth, and bi-wire jumpers:
  
  A British company, B&W spell it "microfibre."  Don't you just hate those ass-backwards spellings?  But anyway, the jumper has bananas on one end, spades on the other:
  
  B&W do not indicate which direction signal should flow, because you determine that.  Aiden mistakenly thought that the jumpers were crayons, and was upset that they didn't draw:
  
  Because all of our speaker cables end in banana plugs, we need the jumper to be burned in from spade to banana:
  
  Yep, once again, because we have a Cable Cooker, we can even treat the little jumpers that come with B&W speakers.  That vast majority of B&W owners has not had access to a Cable Cooker.  If these people are still using the un-cooked jumpers that came with their B&Ws, they are not hearing what their speakers can do.  

  • 12:39 pm
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