When not working or underwater I love music, both recorded and live. We hang out in local venues as well as travel to see live shows and festivals. We also have a pretty big collection of recorded music as well as heavy use of Spotify and TIDAL. My personal tastes range from Baroque classical to Scandinavian melodic death metal, although the latter tends to have more representation in t-shirt choice than the former. I am not a musician, this is easily determined by my current hobby – modular synthesizers and sound design.

The following are a few recent shows; the Rammstein show was New Years eve, on the beach, to a small 4,000 person crowd.

Show When Where
Los Lobos Jan 2019 Seattle, Triple Door
Rammstein 2018/2019 Puerto Vallarta, MX
Children of Bodom Nov 2018 Seattle, El Corazon
MC50 Oct 2018 Seattle, Showbox Downtown
Great British Alt. Weekend Oct 2018 Skegness, UK
Trombone Shorty, and more Sep 2018 Seattle, Woodland Park Zoo
The Mavericks & Los Lobos Sep 2018 Seattle, St. Michelle
Helloween Sep 2018 Las Vegas, House of Blues
Iron Maiden & Sabaton Jul 2018 Madrid, ES

After years of wishing I could afford to build a great audio setup, I started with a beautiful Linn Sondek LP12 (with help from Definitive Audio in Bellevue, WA), which has grown over time into the home system below.

As well as the fixed systems below I have a pair of Shure SE846 in-ear monitors, with Dragonfly Red for travel.

Primary Home System

This system is setup to be seen as well as heard, it has it’s own room shared with all the CD and vinyl content. Built around the LP12 and the Akurate DSM it drives a pair of Aktiv 5140s effortlessly. Using Quadraspire SVT racks for the sources and the amp stack (black columns and cherry shelves) looks amazing with the cherry speakers and floor.

The walls are covered with a lot of our show posters and other band art. Finally, to relax I love the Modway Remark mid-century modern love seat and chair although it was bought mainly for the price.

The Listening Room

Seeing the three amps and the two crossovers stacked together is very cool.

The Amp Stack

Secondary Home System

Built around my first pair of really good speakers, the amazing Linn Keilidhs, this setup has a streamer for convenience and a nice trio of amps to drive the now-Aktiv speakers. The speaker cables are run through the wall to have only the speakers visible in the living room.

  • Source
  • Amplifiers
    • 3 x Linn LK140 power amps (aktiv), Linn black RCA interconnects
    • Panamax M3500-PM conditioner
  • Output

All of the above in a NavePoint Performance 22U enclosure, along with the NAS and living room A/V equipment, in a closet using AC Infinity temperature controlled cooling fans.

Home NAS

Although it’s stored in the A/V closet it’s network accessible by all systems.

  • QNAP TVS-671 NAS
    • Running both Roon Core and Linn Kazoo Server
    • 1 x 256Gb SSD for Roon catalog
    • 4 x 8Tb Seagate IronWolf drives for RAID storage
    • 1 x 8Tb Seagate IronWolf drives for Roon backup

Home Office

An all digital setup to use my MacBook Pro as the source.

Sennheiser Head Phones

Work Office System

Yes, my office at work has a system in it. Well, I spend more time at my desk than I can generally commit to sitting in the listening room at home, so why not have good sound? While I use headphones at home I don’t want to sit for that length of time at work with cans on – hence speakers. Primarily it’s using the DAC driven by my work MacBook Pro, but the clearaudio turntable is great when I want to chill and read/review work.

I recently swapped out an older pair of Linn Tukan bookshelf speakers for the beautiful Sonus Faber Venere 2.0 and they have an amazing sound presence! I may be a SF convert going forward.

At Work

  • Sources
  • Amplifier
  • Speakers
  • Cabinet
    • Salamander Designs Corsica 323 with in-cabinet refrigerator, vented shelves, active cooling back and factory installed locks. All power cables are routed down the right hand side including the outlet cable, and all signal cables down the left with the speaker and USB cable coming in through a port on the back.

Also, check out Audiogon and Hawthorne Stereo – local to Seattle – for deals on used equipment.

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