Meeting Minutes January 21/22 2005

Thanks to Doc for throwing his doors open for the April meeting of the NEWAS.

It was great to see a good turnout of membranes and even better to see a couple of new faces (Chris and AL).

As has become the norm for these events, the Roozer got hopelessly lost and arrived with the Squidboy somewhat later than anticipated. On arrival, Chris, who spun an interesting recording of Jools Holland (and friends), was enjoying the sweet sounds of Doc’s system. The Jools Holland CD was followed by a good recording of Chrisie Hynde singing a Bruce Springsteen composition which sounded pretty darn good.

I heard some familiar Clannad tracks, which I believe Al brought along with him and a good variety of eclectic music over the course of the day.

Doc has been tweaking his system and room relentlessly since I was last there and the obvious effort that has gone into this process has yielded very positive results. I particularly liked the mezzanine that he’s constructed to raise the small couch behind the main listening seat a few inches off the floor. This provides an additional two listening spots that do not deliver quite the same sonics as the primary seat, but are pretty darn close.

Doc has a good deal of time invested into acoustic treatments, and these can be seen in strategic places around the room, cleverly blended into the scenery wherever possible. The room sounds marginally more dampened than when I last heard it, but not excessively so. The room handles bass very well, and it’s surprising to hear what the MG12’s are capable of doing in the bass department.

Later in the day Squiddy and I were treated to some multi-channel sounds courtesy of a Peter Gabriel concert DVD followed by James Taylor and the Blue Guys.

It’s testament to the flexibility of Doc’s system that he can switch quickly between hi-end 2 channel audio and a quality surround-sound setup, without any apparent sonic compromise to either arrangement.

It was interesting to hear a couple tracks played via the Hard Drive on Doc’s Yamaha unit, through a digital cable into his CJ DAC. Switching the digital cable from his basic Transparent (I think) to the RSAD Digital cable made an obvious improvement. The HD playback seemed to offer good performance, though we weren’t able to do any side by side comparisons with his Sonic Frontiers Transport.

It was great to see John (Phoenix) later in the day too. John is as nice a guy as one could hope to meet and has an interesting and unique perspective on many aspects of life. As always I enjoyed the conversational part of the meeting, it’s great to have the opportunity to get to know some of the guys better.

Thanks again to Doc for hosting us, and for providing a great spread! – also thanks to Squidboy for the wonderful cheesecake creation and to various people for bringing beer!

Hopefully we can do something again fairly soon.