Hi everyone, it's been a a few years since I posted to this thread, and I wanted to pass along an update about my Profil 77 speakers. As I said in an earlier post, I love great audio, but I'm also very cost conscious—yet what I've seen over the years is that with just a little bit of effort that absolutely doesn't have to be a contradiction. Also, I'm very far from being an expert in things technological. I've read about ohms and amps countless times and I still couldn't explain a thing about it. You folks are amazing how you know and understand all this stuff.
OK, so for a long time I've been thinking about bi-wiring my speakers. I read the various online forums, some of which said it's worthwhile, others of which said it's a waste of money, but in the end I thought, perhaps naively, "heck, these speakers have the capability to be bi-wired, so the manufacturer must have at least some sense that it could make some kind of difference, and after all it's not as though the manufacturer would profit from my buying extra cable—so one day I should try this." That day came a few months ago when I got an unexpected little windfall of a few hundred dollars. I tucked the cash away in a drawer for future use. Then I purchased rather inexpensive cables of precisely the same length and type as the ones I already had (Transparent), and I set them aside for the proper moment to install (you can see that I'm very slow and deliberate about this stuff). Time passed ...
As the world was going crazy on the morning of November 4, I woke up at 5 a.m. and decided that the perfect, happiest place I could possibly be at that moment would be in the narrow crawl space of my basement threading cable between joists—and that was so very true! Drill, drill, drill, thread, thread, thread, tap, tap, tap—presto!
I was super excited to see how they sounded, but just out of interest I first played a record with just the tweeters—and oh, the disappointment! "These tweeters are blown! I can barely hear a thing from them!" How did that happen? "Or is there something with the cross-over?" Oh, the sense of tragedy! "What a mistake to have learned this—ignorance was bliss, and now I've made it worse. I almost wish I had never begun!" As I gazed despondently at the speakers and contemplated bringing them in for repair and wondered why hadn't I noticed the blown tweeters years ago, I had another thought—wait, wait, wait, maybe the tweeter tone is so high and soft that I wouldn't necessarily notice much sound from them depending on the record I'm playing (I was playing some suites for cello), or maybe even in general. I found a recording online of a very high-pitched single tone (I forget the frequency, but it was high). I hooked up my laptop to the system. Played it—and it came through loud and clear as a bell! Whew! Hurrah!
Then came the moment of truth. I put on Credence Clearwater Revival, Cosmo's Factory, and WOWZA! WOWZA! Yes! Yes! Absolutely, a completely noticeable difference in the mid-range. I put on all kinds of records, and while I don't think the difference in noticeable with all of them, with some I'm absolutely amazed. The speakers have simply never sounded better, and I am very, very happy.
I'll attach a few pictures of my stereo closet, which I reorganized recently as part of a big renovation project in which I sanded and refinished the den with tung oil (I'll attach a picture of that, too—you can just see the stereo closet door slightly ajar on the right). I took the opportunity to raise the shelves in the closet, which gave me more room to store records and cassettes and a bit more space to separate the amp from the other equipment (the picture with the NAD amp on the closet floor is from before the renovation, the one with it on the first shelf is from after). A couple of years ago I had a local repair shop clean my Hafler pre-amp, and that made a big difference for sure. I disconnected that tuner, which I got at a garage sale for one dollar, because it had some kind of ground issue. And most of those new records came from a friend—"duplicates for you!" Now that's a buddy!
