A Short History of the Evolution of our HT/audio system

Pre History

I've always been a keen "hi fi" enthusiast, which is an affliction I inherited from my father. I grew up listening to LPs in the 70s across a wide variety of equipment as my father went through an "upgrade" phase.

Every few months or so, my Dad would get the urge to upgrade his hi-fi system and would pack Mum and us kids into the car to drive up to hundreds of kilometres looking for the perfect audio component to "upgrade" or "trade-up" to. Needless to say, all the hi-fi dealers around our area (and even outside) were on good terms with my Dad, and our living room sometimes resembled a hi-fi demonstration room in the process of being outfitted - with several varieties of audio equipment under evaluation, surrounded by empty boxes with foam packaging and user manuals.

We ended up with a very futuristic turntable (the Michell Hydraulic Reference, with matching tonearm) that looked a bit like this:

We also had a full Quad capable system (capable of decoding SQ, QS and CD-4). The cartridge was an Audio Technica with a genuine "Shibata" stylus for CD-4 decoding. I spent some of my formative teenage years learning all about vertical tracking alignment, anti-skating, and how to avoid inner groove distortion (very difficult when you have a stylus tracking at 1g as required for CD-4!).

As a poor university student, the best I could afford was listening to various models of Walkman. When CDs were first introduced to Australia in 1983, I was very interested - I saw the future, and liked it: no more surface noise, scratches, inner groove distortion, cross talk and general inconvenience of vinyl but without the poor high frequency response of cassette tapes, in a medium that offered "Perfect Sound Forever."

However, I couldn't really afford to buy a decent system, so I bought CDs and had a friend tape them for me onto cassettes. Even so, the improvement in sound was remarkable. Of course, as we all found out, CDs didn't really offer "perfect" sound after all. I've never been happy with high frequencies on CDs on the early players, particularly bells and cymbals which sound "wrong" and it's kind of embarassing how a cheap turntable playing LPs can sometimes sound "better" than an expensive CD player. However, the benefits outweighed the cons, and even today I prefer listening to digital over analogue.

My First System

I gradually accumulated these (in the mid 80s) by working part time during university and buying each component one at a time, agonizing over every purchasing decision and striving for the best "value for money" components.

Denon DCD-1000 CD player
CDC "el cheapo" turntable (I think I paid less than A$200 for it) with P-mount cartridge
Akai GX cassette deck with Dolby B, Dolby C and dbx
NAD 3240 integrated amplifier
Quadral 3-way speakers

This lasted me for many years, although the DCD-1000 was replaced in the late 80s with a DCD-1520. At the time, that was the most expensive component I've ever bought. It retailed for around A$1500 but I bought it at wholesale price from a friend working at AWA at the time. I bought it because Stereo Review (remember that magazine!) did a double blind listening test on the several CD players and this model won. At the time, this was the first 8x oversampling 20 bit CD player on the market. The player actually uses 18 bit Burr Brown DACs:

The NAD 3240 was a great sounding amp for the price. Although conservatively rated at 40 watts RMS, it could deliver up to 160 W @ 8 Ohms for transients, had a very good phono stage, and a nice "fat" sound. The Quadral speakers probably sound a bit coloured and boomy by today's standards, but I was very happy with the sound for many years.

Various upgrades over the 90s

The turntable got upgraded to a Pro-Ject 1.2 with an Ortofon cartridge. The amp went through different combinations (NAD 3240 was upgraded to a second hand NAD 3300, then to a Rotel pre amp plus NAD 2200 power amp). I bought a second hand Nakamichi 680ZX cassette deck (which I still use today!) to replace the Akai. Finally, I upgraded the speakers to a pair of ex-demo B&W DM603 floor-standers.

This configuration would last me until ...

The DVD "revolution"

Although DVDs were initially released to a test market in the US in 1997 (I remember "fondling" a copy of Blade Runner at a Virgin store in San Francisco and wondering whether I should purchase it), they weren't available in Australia till almost a year later.

Even then, I did not buy a DVD player (a Pioneer DV-626D) until late 1999 - my motto is "always wait for the second generation, or Version 1.1." Very soon, I became a videophile as well as an audiophile, and started collecting DVDs at an alarming rate (alarming to my bank account, that is).

At the time, I looked long and hard for a player that will play CD-R/CD-RW, had in-built Dolby Digital and dts processing (since I didn't own a surround processor/amplifier) and had decent sound. The Pioneer seemed to be the only player on the market that met my needs, plus Pioneer had a very good reputation making laser disc players.

The improvement in picture quality over VHS and TV broadcasts are similar to the improvement of digital sound over analogue. Of course, now we realise digital video has flaws too: slightly stuttery pans when the decoding processing circuitry is not "fast enough", plus MPEG compression artefacts such as pixelization, macro-blocking, Gibbs effect and posterization.

Owning a DVD player soon sparkled a massive interest in good quality video and multi-channel surround sound, neither of which I have been particularly interested in before.

Fairly soon, I've upgraded to a Denon AVR-3300 surround amplifier, and slowly built up a multi-channel speaker configuration by buying a pair of B&W DM601 speakers to be used for the surround channels. I listened to 4.0 set up for a while, then bought a CC6 centre channel. Interestingly, that resulted in a decrease in sound quality as the CC6 wasn't as good as my DM603 fronts.

Of course, after that the 51 cm Sony TV was just totally inadequate, especially for widescreen DVDs. By chance, I happened to catch a glimpse of the brand new plasma displays that have just hit the market - the first glimpse was in Hobart (of all places) during a vacation in Tasmania, watching the Fifth Element. The second was at the Sony Style shop at the Metreon in San Francisco, by coincidence also watching the Fifth Element (this seems to be a favourite DVD amongst the home theatre crowd for some strange reason!).

Of course, I fell in love with plasma, but there were sooo expensive ...

However, by chance I discovered the Sony VPL-VW10HT projector. This was the first "widescreen" LCD projector capable of displaying high definition TV - the panels have a resolution of 1366x768. For some strange reason, at one stage Australia was one of the cheapest places in the world to get one - based on the exchange rates at that time. So I rushed out and bought one.

At first we used a drop down roller 80" screen, due to space constraints. We were living in a tiny two bedroom apartment at that time, and friends who dropped in often commented on how impressive that we managed to fit all that equipment into our L-shaped living room!

It was around this time that I wrote to MichaelD at MichaelDVD asking him whether he was interested in accepting any more DVD reviewers on his website. I have always enjoyed reading the DVD reviews on that site, and consider them far superior to the other review sites. He asked me to submit a sample review for consideration, and the rest is history ...

In 2001, we finally moved from our tiny apartment (located right underneath the flight path of the North-South runway of Sydney Kingsford-Smith airport!) to a nice cosy (and quiet!) three-bedroom house. Although the house is relatively new (less than 10 years old), it has been built to a mock-Federation style, which means it combines the best of Federation styling (high ceilings, reasonably rectangular rooms) and modern architectural features (like a concrete slab foundation, which of course improves the sound!). It is no secret that we deliberately chose the house because of the suitability of using the living room (which can be fully enclosed and light blocked using curtains) as a home theatre.

For details of our current home theatre configuration and pictures, click on the following links:

Version 1.0 4 April 2004