Early Morning Listening -

Started the day with a hot cup of my favorite coffee, and side two of An Evening With Windham Hill.  This is one of my all time favorite live albums and the second side is stellar.  

Michael Hedges, William Ackerman and George Winston give outstanding performances.  The recording is outstanding, and playing this LP through my vintage all original 1972 Sansui 4000 will give you goosebumps every time.  The guitars sing and are lucid and wet.  

You can hear the wood resonate from Michael’s vintage Martin D-28 affectionately known as Barbra. George Winston has never sounded better and the piano notes ring on as if I were sitting second row center.

I am playing this using my 1974 Dual 1229 idler drive turntable, equipped with a glorious Grace 747 tonearm and a Nagaoka MP-11 Boron cartridge.  Today I have the cartridge fitted with an Nagaoka Conical stylus tracking at 2grams.  This is hands down my favorite turntable of all time, so many reasons for this that I will cover in a post about this grossly underrated turntable.  The music just jumps from the grooves, such pace-flow-power.  Wow! 

If you’ve been following my posts, you probably have surmised that I have settled on the Sansui 4000 as the most musical amplifier I have ever owned.  We are not even close yet to talking about them all, but this one has more magic that anything I’ve ever heard.  The ADVENT 201A cassette deck, don’t ever even think of troubling me another.  This deck is incredible sounding.  

For 7 inch quarter track playback, the Akai 4000DS with its amazing one-micron gap headstock just sounds wonderful all the time.  For 10.5 inch reels, it’s the Pioneer RT-1050 in half-track configuration that wins out.  We will get to the details soon and talk more about other pieces that I have enjoyed and some that I haven’t.  The bottom line is, listen… if it sounds right to you, and puts you at the performance then that’s what you should be listening to.  For me, it's all about the music! More to come!