January 19, 2012

  • Primare A33.2, Part 5

    20 years ago, I loved coming home to San Francisco.  My brother had the Hokubei Mainichi paper routes.  Down in the basement printing press, we'd meet with friend and fellow co-worker, Todd.  When looking at Pestilence's Testimony Of The Ancients, Todd said to another friend, "They're from the Netherlands, not Sweden!"

    Hey, Primare may be headquartered in Sweden, but their products are made elsewhere, probably China.

    The Primare A33.2's rear has mirror-imaged jacks.  It has only one set of binding posts.  Therefore, if you bi-wire, you must either get a bi-wire speaker cable, or try to double up at the binding posts.  But that will be next to impossible, as I'll get to in a moment.  The A33.2 has both RCA and XLR inputs.  However, you can only use one at a time.  A switch lets you choose.  The A33.2 also sports a "Remote Link," via which you can have the matching PRE30 preamp control on/off.

    The binding posts are plastic-encapsulated.  They are cheap knock-offs of WBTs.  If your speaker cables use spades, you're SOL.  The binding posts only have one opening, at 5:00, for spades.  Even if you can get the spades in there, the positioning will cause the speaker cable to hit whatever shelf or platform the A33.2 rests on.  As always, go with banana plugs.

    Testimony Of The Ancients is kind of like Pictures At An Exhibition, in that, after each song is a brief instrumental interlude.  This album brings me back to late 1991 and early 1992.  Those were death metal's brief heyday.  I don't recall which friend said that, musically, Testimony Of The Ancients "gave voice to zombies."  Prior to that, said he, zombies were simply something we shot at, destroyed, kicked ass, wiped out.