ornoth

Although it didn’t start out that way, I guess this qualifies as a “memorabilia” post, given that it deals with stuff I’ve kept for the past 33 years…

Everyone has their own way of relating to significant purchases like a car, computer, television, camera, or stereo. Some people love buying new stuff when it’s on sale. Others pride themselves on getting a bargain by buying used. My M.O. has always been to buy the absolute best I can find, mostly irrespective of cost, then making it last as long as humanly possible… often long after newer, better things have made it obsolete. I take pride in having top-quality stuff and keeping it forever, and because of that I often form an emotional attachment to the objects I’ve acquired.

I can’t say that my first stereo was one of those things. It wasn’t very noteworthy, but it provided a lot of pleasure during my high school and college days.

But as I graduated college, got married, and moved into the workforce, digital audio arrived in the form of compact discs, and in 1992 my cheap high-school era stereo was decidedly worn out and in need of replacement. And my first job after college provided the necessary cash to splurge on something nice.

As fortune would have it, my then-spouse was working at a local electronics specialty store called Leiser and could get top-quality stereo components at cost. We wound up buying a hand-picked ensemble, spending around $1,500 on equipment that would have retailed for around $3,200 (which translates to about $7,000 in 2024 dollars).

I really loved that system, and was always proud to show it off. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but first let’s follow its history.

The majority of that system stayed with me following our divorce and my half-dozen subsequent moves, although I used it less and less over time, and the remaining components spent the last decade-plus stored away in their boxes…

Until recently. While noodling around YouTube I stumbled onto a tiny product that is essentially nothing more than a Bluetooth audio receiver with stereo outputs that could be hooked up directly to the auxiliary input of a traditional preamp. Such a device would allow Inna & I to stream any audio from our computers or smartphones directly through my audiophile rig. That was enough to spur me to finally dig up my beloved 33 year-old components and set them up for our enjoyment in 2025.

Of course, a couple of the old pieces are gone. The CD player that we received as a group wedding present from several university friends eventually self-destructed, and there wasn’t any point in keeping the old cassette tape player from my high school stereo. And I’d tossed my huge trunk-sized Infinity 7 Kappa speakers when the cones had dry rotted. I’d also discarded my old speaker cable and patch cords, but those were easy to replace.

But the most important three core pieces of my system were still there – my preamp, equalizer, and power amp – which needed little more than a thorough dusting. Lemme do a little show-and-tell about those, because I still hold a lot of affection for these three components.

Let’s start with my graphic equalizer. An EQ is useful to boost or cut specific frequency ranges in an audio signal. Got speakers that sound tinny? Use the sliders to boost bass and midtones. Don’t want to wake the baby on the other side of the house? You might quiet the bass a little while leaving everything else normal. Got a room where one speaker has to be placed in a back corner? Boost the left channel or reduce the right.

My 12-channel Denon DE70 graphic equalizer is a quality and useful piece of equipment. It’s always provided great service, and I find its lit bank of 24 faders visually appealing. It’s a bit unique in that the faders for the left and right channels are interleaved as paired green and yellow LEDS, rather than the more common setup that uses two physically separate banks of sliders. And there’s my little Bluetooth receiver perched at top left:

Next, the crown jewel: my power amplifier. A power amp has just one job: take a microwatt “line level” audio signal and boost it to the tens or hundreds of Watts necessary to drive one’s chosen loudspeakers. It’s the final device in the audio processing sequence, connecting to and controlling the output from your speakers.

My power amp was manufactured by Carver, which comes with a bit of backstory.

Bob Carver was a legendary audiophile engineer, especially known for his innovative and impressively powerful amplifiers. I was first introduced to his work in high school, when my friend Paul showed me his brother’s stereo, which included Carver’s M400 old-school vacuum tube power amp, a radical-looking 7-inch square black cube that could pump out 200 Watts per channel: a ridiculous amount of power for a home system at that time. It made quite an impression on me!

The Carver TFM-4.0 power amp that I bought in 1992 is one of Carver’s followup models, offering a ludicrous 375 Watts per channel. It’s a great amp by a great engineer, but because Carver only produced this model for one year, it’s a rare and collectable component even within Carver’s exclusive lineup. Like the M400 that Paul showed me back in 1981, its only display is six sets of LEDs to show the power level of the signal it’s sending to the speakers; and in all the years I’ve owned it, no matter how high I pumped up the volume, I’ve never been able to light any but the first, lowest power level LEDs. The thing is a 23-pound workhorse!

That just leaves my preamplifier, which is like the central conductor of a stereo system, orchestrating inputs from various sources (e.g. CD player, radio tuner, turntable, tape deck, microphone, and now even Bluetooth devices), sending a normalized signal out to the EQ and back, and then downstream to the power amp and speakers.

Like my EQ, my preamp is a decent piece of equipment. Being a CT-17 preamp/tuner made by Carver, it matches my power amp, but doesn’t have anywhere near the same cachet as his power amps. But the built-in radio receiver is a convenient combination.

Which brings me to the final, missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that kept me from setting up my stereo over the past decade-plus: the lack of speakers.

A good stereo is worthless without good speakers, and for a long time I wasn’t able to justify spending a lot of money on a set that would do justice to my other components. But I finally found a set of bookshelf speakers with positive reviews, that wasn’t too exorbitant, and which – if I bought them refurbished – would fit neatly within the credit card rewards bucks I was about to liquidate.

So let me introduce you to my one brand-new component: a set of Polk Audio R200 bookshelf loudspeakers. While I haven’t had them long enough to form a strong opinion of them (or bond with them), they seem to be doing a good job so far. They’re noteworthy in having a very flat response, which means considerably less tweaking of the frequency curve on the equalizer than I’m used to. I only wish I could move them a little farther from the wall, to better distribute the bass.

Although this didn’t start out as one of my official “memorabilia” posts, overall I’m delighted to have my old components back in service again. Despite being 33 years old, they still deliver great sound quality, and it’s really nice having a Bluetooth connection to stream music at will from any of Inna’s and my laptops and phones. I’m really glad I lugged this equipment around with me for all these years!

My meditation practice has been in maintenance mode since moving to Pittsburgh in 2015. But helping establish a new group and delivering my first dhamma talk has injected some energy.

The new group that’s starting up is organized by two women whose backgrounds include Thich Nhat Hanh, IMS, and Tara Brach. They sent out feelers looking for like-minded Vipassana practitioners, and got enough response to form a small practice group. Typically eight to ten people show up from a total pool of a couple dozen. I think we’d all like to see it grow into something more substantial, but that’ll take time and effort. And none of us are authorized dhamma teachers, so right now it feels very reminiscent of my old kalyana mitta (spiritual friends) group back in Boston.

CIMC meditation hall

A fair number of us—myself included—have long attended a Wednesday evening meditation group led by Rhonda Rosen. So far the two groups seem to be complementary, in that Rhonda focuses on Goenka’s guided meditations and Q&A about practice, while the new group seems more philosophical and a bit less secular.

At the first meeting, we talked about our individual goals for the group, and I think I summarized mine pretty effectively. What I am looking for is the opportunity to learn from other local meditators, the chance to invite distant dhamma teachers to visit Pittsburgh as guests and learn from them, the opportunity to share the learnings from my own practice with others, and to help build a venue where all of that can happen. And I emphasized that for me, the biggest thing I’ve missed since moving to Pittsburgh has been dhamma talks, where experienced teachers expound on the philosophical teachings of the Buddha.

Thereafter, we’ve met weekly for brief meditations—both sitting and walking—followed by some kind of dhamma talk and discussion.

As I said earlier, our biggest challenge is that none of us are teachers. So we’re sharing the responsibility of preparing material to present, whether it’s readings or recordings or original thoughts. Predictably, we began with the central tenets of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths. I was asked to lead an evening discussing the Second Noble Truth: the Origin/Source/Cause of Suffering.

Treating this as my first proper dhamma talk, I spent some time gathering notes, and found that although the subject was far-ranging, everything fell together nicely with obvious segues. I put together an outline and ran through it a couple times in my head. Ample client facilitation experience as a consultant, plus the sessions I’ve led in my old kalyana mitta group, all gave me confidence and kept any nerves at bay.

Unfortunately, I set myself a very ambitious task: explaining how the sequence of events in the Buddhist psychology of Dependent Origination give rise to the pain of desires that ultimately cannot be fulfilled, along the way touching on kamma, ignorance, the Three Characteristics of Existence, the Four Divine Messengers, the Five Recollections, and the Eight Worldly Winds (Buddhism is *all* about lists), then closing by revealing the often-unexplained link of why silent meditation is the chosen tool to reach the goal of alleviating suffering. It was pretty much the Grand Unified Theory of Buddhism According to Ornoth.

Although ambitious, I think the idea was really worthy; but with so much ground to cover, the execution wound up being a bit strained.

After the talk, the verbal feedback I received was all very positive. The two founders were both effusive in praise, as was one of the new practitioners who admitted an intellectual inclination. But two longtime practitioners and the three new practitioners were all silent during the Q&A, which tells me that my own impressions about overreaching myself were probably correct.

Specifically, I tried to plow through way too much material for a single dhamma talk. I didn’t need to go into quite so much detail, nor be so technical. The delivery wound up being a lot more intellectual than I had hoped, and I think I lost some of the attendees as a result. Although that probably happens at every dhamma talk to one extent or another. Still, I should tighten up my material and make more effort to keep people engaged in future talks.

Giving such a long talk—40 minutes plus a few minutes of Q&A—was surprisingly tiring. But I’m really proud of the ideas I presented, especially explaining the mechanics of how and why Buddhists use silent meditation to address the suffering we all experience.

Preparing and delivering my first dhamma talk was novel and fun. But more importantly, I found it deeply rewarding to share some of my insights in hopes that they might help others along the path—whether experienced practitioners or relative newcomers. It was very satisfying, despite my inexperience in a teaching role.

Of course, the one thing that cures inexperience is practice. So it’ll be interesting to see whether I will enjoy and grow in proficiency in that teaching role, and to what degree my knowledge and experience can be of meaningful value to others. I look forward to that exploration.

It wouldn’t be the most entertaining use of your time, but if you’re truly curious, I’ve shared a written transcript of the talk. And if you’re truly masochistic, here's the 44-minute audio MP3, although be forewarned that the audio quality is low.

The essential Boston experience. Come sit with me ’neath the old Brain Tree…

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