Georgia get together - Fall '07

Hi Folks,

Starting the long-range planning for my get together. It will be in the fall of ’07. The date is set for Saturday September 8th.

For those in GA (or neighboring states), my neighborhood is located in the Appalachian foothills and is quite spectacular in the fall.

Here’s a link to info on the place and general location so you can determine if it’s convenient or not.
http://www.bigcanoe.com/

As I’m located about 75 miles north of downtown Atlanta, it should be accessible to those in NC, Huntsville, AL, southern TN and western SC.

Actually, if you plan to drive over from out of state, the rentals are a good option for a weekend stay-over. Bring the spouse and enjoy the mountains.

For those in GA, It will be a haul, but then we’re used to driving a good bit here. If you’re in the northern metro area, it’s no big deal.

Given the long trips, I’m planning a full day starting at 11am for those who want to pop in early and head back on the road, but we’ll keep it going till 8pm.
We’ll have lunch and dinner (grilled on the deck) as well as munchies. While we will have some wine and non-alcoholic beverages, I do ask that you BYOB as I don’t know what everyone likes.
Plus, with curvy mountain roads around here, you probably want to moderate it anyway
You will love the steep switchbacks just prior to the house

Of course, the fun will be to listen and watch on one of the most unique ML systems around.

If I'm around that weekend, I'm there!

Count me in!

How would the drive be from Tampa, Florida?

rampage60 said:

How would the drive be from Tampa, Florida?

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George, a bit on the long side, 515miles, roughly 8 hrs according to Mapquest.

If you travel Friday and stay over in one of the rentals (or hotel along the way), it should be doable.

Cheers,

jtwrace said:

If I'm around that weekend, I'm there!

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Rich said:

Count me in!

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That's great guys, look forward to having you over.

Julie my wife & I would love to join you! :rocker: We would drive up on Friday and stay in a hotel near by. Leave sometime on Sunday.

George, that's excellent news.

You'll both love the area in the fall. It's truly is beautiful, and last year was spectacular with more colors in the forest at once than any artist could handle

BTW- My wife is an artist and the house is her private gallery of fiber-arts, sculptures, furniture, paintings, etc. etc. Pretty talented girl.
The home theater is the about the only room that is really ‘mine’
But she is helping to decorate it more before the meet. Some nice fiber-arts that double as sound absorbers are (and have been for the past year, sigh) in the works. This might be the push she needs to finish them

Date getting closer

Hi Everyone, the countdown is on for the 8th of September.

Please drop me a PM confirming if you can make it and what time of day your think you will be arriving. Include your email address so I can send you detailed directions and maps.

Just to whet your appetite on what's in store for those who come, please read what our own member, SleepySurf had to say about his recent visit to my place: http://67.19.167.226/~tdacquis/forum/showpost.php?p=53441&postcount=51

Cheers,

Two weeks to go folks! September 8 is just around the corner.

I have several confirmations, and expect a few more in the next two weeks.

Send me a PM with your email if you are coming.

It's going to be fun

JonFo said:

George, a bit on the long side, 515miles, roughly 8 hrs according to Mapquest.

Cheers,

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I've seen George's highly modified, supercharged Ford Lightning Truck. He could do the trip in 4 hours, no problem!!

Craig said:

I've seen George's highly modified, supercharged Ford Lightning Truck. He could do the trip in 4 hours, no problem!!

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He He, good one Craig.

I guess MapQuest needs a 'transportation device factor' to calibrate its estimates:

- Yugo = x 2.7
- Minivan w/kids = x 2.2
- Minivan = x 1.8
- > ten year old sedan = x 1.5
- Modern sedan = 1
- Sport Sedan = / 1.2
- Sports Car = / 1.5
- Supercharged Lightning = / 2

Craig said:

I've seen George's highly modified, supercharged Ford Lightning Truck. He could do the trip in 4 hours, no problem!!

Click to expand...

Will be taking the wife's Lightning instead. Her's a better ride for very long trips. So it may take 6 hours instead.

Well, the event happened yesterday and we all had a great time.

It was a small group, with just George (Rampage60) and Rich (Rich) and their wives making the trips from Florida and Alabama respectively.
So we had plenty of ‘sweet spot’ time for everyone and since they stayed over at rental condo’s here in Big Canoe, we did a whole daylong session at my place, staring at 10:30 am and wrapping up at 10:30pm.

George brought some cool XRCD’s which we spun and heard some awesome recordings. Great vocals and super-clean instrumentals. He also brought an SACD that was already on my demo rotation, the Jacques Lousier trio, best of play Bach on Telarc SACD. So we got several tracks from that as well.

Rich brought a pair of CD’s authored by a friend, which had really good engineering and some of the funniest lyrics I’ve heard in a while. Great stuff from Pat Huggins.

We rotated through a large number of SACD’s, redbook content (from CD’s ripped on my server and played back through the HTPC upsampled to 88.2).
We also did some HT demo’s playing some compilation discs of the usual suspects demo scenes.
Although I did remember this am that we did not run through the LFE demo, darn, that U-571 depth charge scene really shows of the Infinite Baffle

Later in the day we watched HD video content, including the infamous T-Rex scene in King Kong, and caught some more video content from cool musical animations on the Animusic 2 disc.

Then back to more music, mostly SACD and DVD-A’s, and I got to introduce Porcupine Tree to them (one of my favorites in High-Rez).

We wrapped up the evening after dinner with something relaxing, and watched two episodes of Planet Earth on HD-DVD.

Considering we had all day, we took breaks to stretch our legs, get some light (it’s dark in that HT room) and chat about stuff.

I really enjoyed visiting with both Rich and George, as we all have a lot in common besides our passion for ML’s, all being into computers and cars.

We all love our tech toys, and Rich showed my wife his new iPhone, and now she wants one bad, real bad
Oh, and so do I, but I already knew that (been waiting for a 3G version).

Visiting with the two couples was great and the time flew by, next thing we know, it was time to call it a day.

Rich, George, thanks so much for making the long trips and for the great time.

What a Great Time!

Thanks so much to Jonathan and his wife, Liz, for hosting a wonderful get together this weekend. Cindy and I had a great time and really enjoyed the trip. Jonathan lives in a beautiful resort community in North Georgia. Lots of woods, mountains, and wildlife. His home is nestled in the trees in a stunning setting.

Jonathan's theater room is absolutely phenomenal. The equipment setup is an engineer's dream. Jonathan has complete control over every aspect of every speaker in his system, and has rigorously measured and calibrated phase, time alignments, crossover settings, and every thing else you can think of until the system just sounds superb. He has two huge equipment racks full of gear, and probably more cabling than I have ever seen in my entire life. I feel sorry for him if he ever decides to re-cable his system. It would take months.

The centerpiece (literally) of his system is the custom SL3XC center channel with mid-bass line array and infinite baffle sub that Jonathan built himself. It sounds stunning and really anchored the soundstage for the monoliths. Having such a capable center channel makes a huge difference in the soundstage height and width. I have never experienced an ML system that sounded so good from anywhere in the room as Jonathan's did. There was just a wall of sound coming from the entire front wall of the theater and the soundstage and imaging held up pretty much no matter where you sat. Very impressive.

Not only is the gear in this theater to die for, but Jonathan and Liz have done a wonderful job decorating and treating the room acoustically. It is a really nice theater, very comfortable, and very artistically designed (Liz is a great artist, so this was no stretch).

Jonathan pleasured us with tons of great demo material, both audio and video. I loved the "Animusic" videos. Can't wait to purchase those for my own theater. Lots of great music. I had to make a list of things I liked and need to add to my collection. But the A/V was only a small part of what made this a great day.

Cindy and I truly enjoyed visiting again with Jonathan and Liz, who we met at the National Meet. They are such a joy to hang out with. We also were very happy to meet George (Rampage60) and his lovely wife, Julie, from Florida. George brought some great music for demoing and we all had a fun day together. The entire day was filled with great conversation about anything and everything. As if that weren't enough, Liz and Jonathan made sure our taste buds were as delighted as our eyes and ears. Lunch and dinner were both sumptuous.

On the one hand, I feel sorry that more people didn't make it to enjoy this experience; but on the other I was really happy to have such a small group and be able to really get to know each other. All I can say is that if you ever get a chance to visit Jonathan and Liz in North Georgia, don't pass it up. They are wonderful hosts.

Rich, thanks very much for kind thoughts, Liz and I likewise really enjoyed the day with both couples.
We looked forward to seeing you again after the national meet, so it was great to spend time with you and Cindy this weekend.

These meets are a great way to build friendships, to hear and learn about new music and to get honest, friendly feedback on one's system.

I look forward to our next meeting, wherever that might be.