My cousin is looking for some vintage equipment to go with an old Marantz tube amp that belonged to his dad (and I wouldn't mind getting more into some of the older Altec-Lansing speakers, as well as the old SAE components I've got squirreled away in storage). Anybody have any recs for a good interwebz forum for that sort of stuff?

 

Try Audiogon forums. It's one of the best/oldest sites for buying and selling high end consumer audio, and I'd guess the forum is decent.

Audiogon Discussion of High end audio

 

I hate forums that don't use vBulletin or some equivalent.

 

You want old---you get old

 

Audiogon was awesome and is now merely 'okay'. Still the best for used equipment but the layout/UI functionality went to ****.

-Zach

 

I love that they have an entire subforum devoted to flame wars about why such-and-such ultra-expensive cable sounds better than something else (particularly when carrying a digital signal), and how people who claim otherwise simply don't have a sufficiently expensive system (or sufficiently nuanced hearing) to tell the difference.

Just saw one thread discussing the proper break-in procedure for a new set of speaker cables.

Classic stuff...

 

Ooh that reminds me, need to invest in some ceramic cable risers...

 

Speaking of retarded **** audiophiles think...

 

They're all out of their ******* minds.

 

The above just connects the woofer section and tweeter section together so that the user can use a single (pair) wire to connect to the amp.

Manufacturers allow you to wire them to separate amps - "bi-amping" it's called, which has advantages even if the crossovers are in the speakers rather than using "active crossovers" which sit before the amps in the signal chain. (common in car audio)

Bi-amping has the potential to reduce intermodulation distortion especially when the bass channel clips. The distortion products are high frequency and if the tweeter is on a separate amp it doesn't reproduce them.

Even without clipping, when playing loud and the woofer reaches close to its excursion limits its impedance goes non-linear (impedance changes). This interacts with the amp+wire's output impedance (ironically, worse with vaunted tube amps), again creating higher frequency harmonic distortion products (more in the midrange in this case, less in the high frequencies, as compared to clipping). If the midrange and/or tweeter is on a separate channel, it won't be there to reproduce them.

Bi-wiring (to a single amp), can measurably do the same thing, if wires are long and skinny, and to a smaller extent. Thick wire and most modern solid-state amps will negate the effect.

 

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/

They have a good vintage section and good "for sale" section.