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19 February 2000 |
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My career as audiophile started in late 70's with a vacuum tube radio as an amplifier and a jukebox as an analogue source. My first high-end system in the early 80's was B&W 801's and a Luxman solid state amp. Mid/late 80's I became more involved to high-end. I started to assist my friend who was running his own high-end audio business by importing and modifying Cello, Oracle, SME, Koetsu etc. For my personal use at that time, I had Infinity Betas, two Mark Levinson 23:s, one for each channel, ML no. 26 as an preamp and the Proceed CD.....I gradually achieved "incremental" improvements. I decided high-end shall become a bigger part of my life. I decided to run my own shop in 1990 partnering with a major high-end distributor in Finland, HifiGuru, distributors of highest high end brands in the country. HifiGuru is still owned by my good friends Heikki Sikanen and Leo Tarvainen. Since the beginning I retailed Krell, Magnepan, Infinity, Mark Levinson, Cello etc. 1996 was a turning point in my business which was still pretty much a hobby. Leo and Heikki brought first pair of the raved Dunlavy's SC-III's to to the country. Immediately we all realized what was the rave about. They however, decided to focus their own retailing to the electro- and magnetostatic speakers only. They asked me to take care of the dynamic speakers, especially this new promising brand - the DAL. So my own firm became major retailer of the DAL's. I was very happy for DAL's merits and even more happy to see how the local audiophile community started to embrace DAL's since the beginning. This boosted also demand of other quality components and have kept us very busy. We are still having Krell, Audio Research,
Clearaudio, Transparent, and more recently, Avalon and Spectron included
in our repertoire.
At the TL-Audio, our demo room dimensions are 6,7 x 6 x 2,5 meters, having a proper acoustic treatment. Currently I'm using Dunlavy SC-VI's to the demo and personal use accompanied with the Krell FPB-350Mc monoblocks, Wadia 25/20 transport/ DAC and Transparent Reference cables for speakers and interconnects. I have found sound of the current configuration utterly accurate and realistic in every aspect, but nature of the high-end is to find relentlessly constant improvement, and I'm afraid we have succeeded: The improvement potential to appears to
be found in three areas. Firstly, the digital source: We noticed a significant
improvement in delicacy and in details with the Krell KPS-25 CD -combined
player / preamplifier. Since Krell is not only a killer application with
it's performance but also with it's price, I'm looking very much forward
to the new high definition formats the SACD or DVD-A. Another question
arises, what's the potential of the upsamplers such as Bel Canto DAC-1
or dCs Delius etc. to stretch CD's limitations beyond we have used to.
Regarding musical taste, I prefer acoustic and electronic jazz and a very wide range of other genres, too. And we have a cat in the family, Milo, she used to warm up on top of my previous amp, AR VT-200. Krell is running too cold for the purpose. System's Components
Tapani's comments about his System: AA: "Tapani, how would you describe
your system's sound?"
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