Product and Tech Discussion

Spring Cleaning For Your Stereo System

“In the Spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… Audio Gear!?!”

May Tennyson forgive my blatant bastardization of his poetic masterpiece, but its true: as Winter turns to Spring, flowers begin to bloom, animals awaken from hibernation and guys start prepping their toys for the warm months. All across America, lawnmowers are gassed and lubed, boats are lowered into lakes and rivers, hot rods are tuned and detailed until they shine like mirrors; in other words, it’s time for Spring Cleaning and your Stereo System is the best place to start! Tweaking your system means being a “Do it yourselfer” and, like car guys, you should derive pleasure from maintaining, improving and hot-rodding your gear. There’s a special satisfaction that comes from Sweat Equity and this is particularly true in the case of system optimization.

Although many connoisseurs assume a Stereo System requires little or nothing in the way of maintenance, nothing could be further from the truth. Mechanical vibrations and electrical impulses loosen nuts and bolts, while dust, dirt and pollutants contaminate every connection in your system. Records, cartridges, laser pickups, etc are equally vulnerable. Since these changes occur gradually, you might not notice the degradation in performance on a day-to-day basis but trust us: once you’re given your system a serious “Spring Cleaning,” you’ll hear everything you’ve been missing. And remember: THIS IS FUN!!! Enjoy spending some “Quality Time” with your system…

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Lyngdorf MP-60

The next best thing has just arrived at Nuts About Hi-Fi. We are excited to announce a new product into our ever growing line of products. The Lyngdorf MP-60 Audio/Video Processor.

Peter Lyngdorf, along with Steinway & Sons, has created a stellar audio/video processor that not only looks good, but sounds amazing too. There are many features in the MP-60 that make it get past the problems that most audio/video processors possess. Normally with a surround sound system, music is just held back. This requires having a separate stereo processor in conjunction with the surround sound to get the benefits of both. With Lyngdorf you get the best of both in one unit. The full balanced output design with only XLR connections ensures the best signal to your external amplifiers. Room Perfect then goes through and mics everything to its purest resolution. We have done many high end processors, but nothing sounds quite as good as a Lyngdorf MP-60. We all want one for ourselves and we think you will too.

Roon – The Music Player for Music Lovers

From milk crates for LPs to leather binders for CDs, there has always been the question of how to best organize your music. The first problem with large music collections is how to store them. For over a decade, we have offered our great customer with Sooloos systems for just this reason. Sooloos allowed us to take someone’s CD collection and store it digitally in a pure lossless format. Once loaded onto the Sooloos server, they could comb through your collection to their heart’s content. Sooloos unfortunately was built for a different world from today. When first released, you needed a touch screen monitor to operate it.

Sooloos updated to 2.0 software when people no longer wanted a bulky monitor to go with their music player. Sooloos 2.0 allowed users to install an app on their iPhone or iPad. Both of these apps were much needed improvements, but still limited. This is where Roon comes in. Roon is what I like to call, “Sooloos 3.0”. Roon was actually created by the same people that created Sooloos. But Roon is built to use just about any device. You can control it with any smartphone, tablet, or computer. All of which have beautiful interfaces that let you easily explore and rediscover your music.

We can seamlessly take any Sooloos system and upgrade it to a Roon system to enjoy this new music experience. Come stop by the store, or give us a call. We think you’ll enjoy Roon as much as we do.

Below are screen shots from the Roon interface showing some of the spectacular features it has for organizing and exploring your music library:

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Nordost on Point

We just received a new fun toy form our cabling company Nordost. The QRT QPoint Resonance Sychronizer is a little device that you place below or above your sound equipment. A problem with sound equipment is that the circuits in components create noise when they operate. This noise can be heard through your speakers. The QPoint emits a small electromagnetic pulse frequency to make these circuit components work with each other instead of fighting each other. Making all of the electronics work at the same frequency gets rid of unwanted noise. This lowers the noise floor and brings out more detail of your existing sound equipment. If you can’t place the QPoint underneath your component, they provide a pad to place it on top of your component to prevent scratching. There are two modes that the QPoint can be set to depending on your personal taste. The QPoint works great with preamplifiers, phono stages, CD players, DACs, and amplifiers. Come by and check out the latest innovation from Nordost.

State-of-the-Art Intelligent Motorized Shades

We have recently partnered with a new and innovative company: POWERSHADES.

This company offers both indoor and outdoor shade solutions unique to the industry. The shade control systems are very flexible offering several options including voice commands. You can even add small solar panels behind the shades that will trickle charge the lithium batteries that power the operation.

The quality is exceptional and their pricing compared to their competitors is very reasonable.

Recently our staff went through their training. So we are now ready to help you dim your media rooms and potentially improve your room’s acoustics at the same time.