Bartered and borrowed sounds...

Bartered and borrowed sounds...

Not too long ago I landed a really nice power amplifier in a barter arrangement. A really nice amplifier.

Then last week I won bids for a preamp and a tuner in two different auctions on ebay. They'll arrive sometime next week, so in anticipation of their arrival I bought the special cables I'll need to get everything connected. Since I don't have speakers that can handle all this power, and I haven't had time to make the speaker choice, I borrowed some PA Monitors from my brother. He dug into his kit bag and came up with a jury-rigged collection of cables and connectors so I could run those out of the amp until I can get what I want.

But that got me thinking: my little boom box has a headphone jack... could I use that as a preamp? This afternoon I borrowed a jury-rig Y-adaptor from Bruce, and tonight I put the borrowed speakers, the nice amp and the boom box all in line, turned it all on, and...


Of course the first selection was Elana James' Tschavola Swing.

It blew me away.

Then it was a little Paul Simon from the old Graceland LP.

Right now I'm listening to Palestrina. It sounds like I'm in a chapel.

And all this is with speakers that are designed for a PA system, and a boom box that is well, a boom box.

I forgot what a good system can sound like, and this one will just get better.

When I was 23 I would have thought I'd died and gone to heaven for a system like this. I confess that 30 years later I was initially a little ambivalent about it all. My boom box wasn't that bad, after all, and it seemed like a pain to put all the pieces together.

Until I heard it.

I'm not ambivalent any more.