HiFi Journeys
Description
My audiophile journey started when I was a teenager: LPs and cassettes, drums and organs, and dingy basements where I tinkered on Fridays nights trying to get the perfect mix tape recorded from vinyl with my Uncle Charlie and close friends. Back then, recording live to your tape deck was peak performance. Heck, you would even find yourself recording the radio when a DJ might drop some gems from their personal collection - Napster and Spotify weren't thing.
Queuing up vinyl and using an analog mixer to assemble the greatest segues ever heard of - the art the mix is somewhat dead but we all remember those tapes - we knew exactly which song came next. Since I love tinkering, my love for music grew into experimenting with sound. Constructing sound absorbers, measuring room responses with calibrated mics, and experimenting in high-fidelity speaker systems has been a long past-time of mine. I maintain a digital archive of 500,000 lossless and lossy audio files ranging from MP3, DFF/DSD, FLAC, AAC and I'm enjoying MQA decoding recently to my Auralic Vega DAC. Things have come a long way from ripping our own CDs or archiving rare vinyl.
Notable projects:
- Experimental archival of vinyl without analog RIAA equalization (using AEA Big ribbon mic preamplifier)
- Constructed ceiling and wall absorbers using locally sourced Saudi Rockwool - room response greatly improved with treatment
- Started a vacuum tube testing and selling business using the world most accurate sold-state tube tester, Amplitrex, to fund new purchases