Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

damn… err, i repeat. damn…

I’ve just finished assembling a pair of modified Decware Radial 1 speakers. Cutting to the chase these sound absolutely stunning and come close to trumping my Infinity P-FR’s in almost every way.

As these original Radials came unassembled with upgraded speakers, Jensen capacitors, Audioquest Indigo internal wire, etc, I took the liberty of continuing the upgrade to 1.5′s by adding new bases, cones, passives etc. (thank you Zygi!). After fixing various issues with the veneer, I decided to turn my attention to seal the inside of the speakers with black hole pads that I obtained from speakercity a while back for a different project.

(If anyone is curious, you can do both speakers, top and bottom gaskets, etc. in 6 sheets. – highly recommended).

I sit here slack-jawed as I can’t believe the detail and range I’m hearing from these speakers. When I hear folks talk like this, I usually role my eyes and move on, but the imaging, depth and bass (yes, i said it… bass!) that is coming out of these speakers is absolutely astounding. I need to experiment a bit more with different resistors and weighting the passives, but I’m absolutely floored by what I’m hearing.

I have a crummy room for audio, but these speakers seem incredibly forgiving of this sin. And when I open my eyes I absolutely amazed at how such small speakers can produce such a large, accurate soundstage.

ok… enough of the rants, back to the music…

Over the weekend, in an end-of-the-year cleaning frenzy to free up some much needed space, I stumbled upon my old stash of laser supplies. 30-ish years ago my father and I built a helium neon laser for a grade school science project (in the 70′s I was really into lasers and holograms). After about 60 minutes of trying to get everything back in working order I came to the conclusion it just wasn’t going to happen. And while it felt good to sling solder again, I ultimately had to come to grips with letting most of my stash go. What I couldn’t part with however were the Hughes Helium-Neon laser tubes that made this project possible. After thinking a bit about how to store these for another 30 years, I decided to go a different route. As a christmas present to myself, I built a simple stand to proudly display these tubes. And while most people that see them offer an odd glance or two, to me they are a reminder of a simple truth that often times the best way to understand something is simply to build it.