Reviewer's Bio

A. Colin Flood
The Value Of Vintage

  A South Florida technical writer by trade, with champagne tastes on a beer budget, A. Colin Flood is disheartened with both chintzy and extravagant audio offerings. He looks for the most "bang" for his meager bucks. Flood is not associated or affiliated, in any form or fashion, with any firm of any kind, in the home theater or high fidelity industry, except Enjoy the Music.com.

Reference Music
While Flood dances to classic rock when out on the town, he is a smooth jazz lover at home. He auditions equipment with Pandora.com stream, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, Cassandra Wilson, Norah Jones, Jack Johnson and orchestral music from Test CDs (see Enjoy the Music.com reviews).

The listening room defines the sound of home movie and music reproduction systems. Flood’s listening room is 12.5 by 18 feet long. One corner of the front wall is open with desk (dining) area and hallway. The other front corner has sliding glass door. Therefore, his classic Klipsch corner horns have false half walls (solid core doors cut in half) behind them. Front and back walls are concrete block. Floor is wood laminate on slab. Back wall bisected by staircase with enclosed steps. Eight white Realtraps panels reduce slap echo and modes. A Behringer digital EQ could reduce peaks, but Flood rarely uses it.

Doing double movie and music duty is Oppo 981HD multimedia player. Pre-amplifier is Dynaco Series II classic PAS-3 tube pre-amplifier. Both units rest on clear Gingko Audio Cloud 10 isolation platform. The PAS-3 drives dual passive amplifiers. A pair of custom Bottlehead Paramour 2A3 monoblocks, rated at a mere 3.5 watts, drives the mid and high-range horns of Khorns. Bass cables are thick gray Coincident Technologies' CST-1 rattlesnakes, while generic copper serves the top-end. Interconnects are the incredible Dact Dual Connects and Monster Silver.

Classic Horns
Flood is one of the few reviewers to use Big Ole Horns and low-powered tube amplifiers consistently as his 2.1 reference system. His four feet high, 167-pound, 1989 Klipsch corner horns are some of the largest home loudspeakers available! The Khorn is a three-way, fully horn loaded, diamond-shaped loudspeaker, which fits snugly into room corners. The 15" woofers in the folded bins, roll bass off the false walls, creating smooth response down to 25 Hz.

Khorns are fantastically efficient at 104-dB, per watt/meter! This makes them incredibly easy-to-drive and very dynamic (see Stereos, As They Relate to Indoor Sport). The Khorn’s nominal impedance is eight, ranging from four to 30 Ohms. Despite their gargantuan size, the spousal/wife acceptance factor (WAF) is very high. Khorn’s have smooth response, sensitivity, out-the-way footprint and enormous dynamics. The Big Ole Horns and tasty tube amplifier combination remains one of the best sounding and most practical combinations available today, especially when backed by solid-state muscle.

Back-up speakers are Altec Lansing Model Ones. They weigh 31 pounds, with 8 Ohm Acoustic 8" mid-bass woofer and 4" silver dome tweeter, for 50 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response.

Solid-State Bass
Using passive dual amplification, Flood powers his bass bins with a vintage, class A Pioneer M-22. The 48-pound monster has two black 33,000 uF capacitors the size of Foster lager cans. At clipping (1% THD+noise), maximum power delivery is 60 watts into 8 ohms (26.8dBW). MSRP in 1979 was $790 (over $2K in 2010 dollars). For solid-state reference, Flood alternates between a vintage Harmon-Kardon 330B receiver and Red Wine's Clari T battery-powered amplifier.

Subwoofer
ACI Titan is 12" downward-firing woofer with 250-watt, Class AB amplifier. The Titan has dual crossover controls that are continuously variable from 35 to 250 Hz, with total of 24-dB/octave slope. The 70 pound sub fills below 63 Hz, down to 20 Hz.