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Dominic wrote:

I've run into that yucky place where words get in the way of ideas. The mastership is what i'm after.

Yes, it is the yucky place where words get in the way of ideas. I did not use “mastership” in term of skills or craftsmanship but rather in term of ownership and responsibility for results.

Dominic wrote:

My problem has always been the electronic side of it. I bet i could design a driver that would get me as far as a driver could, but i'm always swimming somewhere out of my confort zone with the electronics side of playback, capacitors for instance have little intuitive use to me.

I do not see a problem here. I have no skills on electronic side as well. You might learn eventually that in order to build audio you need to know how capacitors work. However, in order to making Sound it requires quite different skills. The narrow technical skills could be always obtained or facilitated from outside. However, it is your responsibility to navigate and to apply the skills to benefit your results.

Dominic wrote:

I started reading about the Melquiades from the link and started to build up the idea into some kind of cure-all.

Absolutely not! It is juts an amplifiers and it means not more then juts an amplifier.

Dominic wrote:

Not a productive mentality, but i'll get over it. I did end up with two questions though: -What on earth is geoff's playback like if he can suggest such effective little things off hand?

Hmmmm, I do not think he has any playback at all, and I’m not quite sure that he ever had any, at least in his home. He also did not suggested anything specific in context of Melquiades. Howebe, during that time he did provided quite useful simulative influence, some ideas that eventually were used in Milq very inspired by some Jeff’s ideas.

Dominic wrote:

-In parts, roughly what should i budget for a melq build?

Will all desire to spend MAXIMUM it is somewhere well under $1.5K per monoblock. It is possible to go more if you go for “different” more expansive transformer.

Dominic wrote:

-perhaps since you say Used in past many others amplifiers, preferably SE maybe i should go for a bottlehead amp to familiarize myself with like things?

Well, I would not claim that I used “many others SETs. I had “Old” ML2.0 as my first SET and then slowly I brought probably a dozen other SETs in my listening room. Frankly speaking, hearing in what shit other SETs get turned next to ML2.0 I very soon lost interest to waste my time (I’m very lezzy and I hate to lift those things). Still I head a lot more then a dozen of SETs at “remote” locations but not in my own listening room.

Regarding the Bottlehead. Although I went a few years ago to thier meetings and I was bored to death I think they should be fine in terms cost per transition ratio (sorry for IT slogan). I think if the Bottlehead community offers two stages only, 15W SET, with grounded cathodes, no feedback, relatively high biased, linear driver that can pump 100V AC and cosul “sound” good at the same time, and if they have expertise to properly evaluate the sound of that amplifier then I would look what they offer…

Dominic wrote:

-as i mentioned to start off this thread i'm essentially starting from scratch. I'm loathe to ask this question, but i will do as i must: what should i be looking for from a pre-amp (with relation to prospective matcing with melq.)?

I have no idea; there is nothing in Milq that would require anything special for preamp.

Dominic wrote:

But the main reason i started this thread was the realisation that what i really wanted was a solid basis for pushing my understanding of music.

I know where you going but I do not think that a playback is a direction to go in order to develop an understanding of music. I would suggest different avenues.  Play back is JUST playback and it takes time. Are you sure the you wiling to invest that time?

Dominic wrote:

I wanted a tool that i could conquer, at least given time, that would allow me to tailor according to my needs and understandings, the playback i got from whichever speaker implementation i had available to me. I figured, as i started to open this thread, that this could be something acheivable regardless of topology as long as the implementation was simple/smart enough.

Well, we hope thinking in terms of tool but end up counting the fucking decibels and measuring voltages. I know, you, and many others will disagree with me but I do not confuse audio objective and musical objective. Read my post about “Abstract Audio” and try to understand why I also do not feel any conflict between Audio and Music. Sure there is a large “melt” at curtain level between musicality and audio but I have my motivations do not talk about it. Also, audio as tool might be USED deferent. It might be a useful tool, it might be crutch and it might be a fifths wheel. Audio is like a gun. You might use it for horrible things - like shooting cops or bank empoiyes during an armed rubbery or it might be use for something nice - like shooting in their enemy heads those Bush’s republicans…

Dominic wrote:

Further I was asking if perhaps there were certain basic amplifiers that would allow my playback to eventually hit on at least those sonic points i listed, not that i'm certain they can all fall within the scope of the amplification section of a playback installation, they may still be things i'd like to get through my playback. And I had a sort of system architecture in mind that i tried to describe.

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=432

So, instead of listeing the mouths running by some Morons, me including, try to expose yours to different Audio experiences and see how you react to them. Then you might shape the necessary questions to yourself in more precise format.

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