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I was born in 1947 in a small town called Springs some 60km East of Johannesburg. I have had a varied career ranging from physics research in the manufacture of synthetic diamonds to owning and running a radiator core manufacturing plant and with retirement in mind, I now own a printing business that my son manages.
This may all seem a bit diverse but needs must as my wife's hobby of horses has been the driving force in how to pay for it all! One of the benefits of her hobby is staying on a small holding with lots of room and the nearest neighbours hundreds of meters away! I hold a Radio Amateur licence but have not used it for many years.

HiFi has been one of my hobbies for around 50 years – long enough for me to giggle at the appellation audiophile. No offence intended to the very serious, but high fidelity is still the name of the game. Over the years I have gone through various amps, turntables, cartridges, tape decks and since they were foisted on us, CD players. As to speakers I am almost a virgin, having lived with Goodman Axioms for 40 years and only discovering the Tannoy Dual Concentric relatively lately. Never having owned a speaker smaller than a 12” in a big cabinet made the transition to 15” Tannoys in even larger boxes the next logical step. Averroes defined logic as "the tool for distinguishing between the true and the false" and I am sticking to that as it suits my brand of false reality. Being male, bigger is always better, except when it clashes with Triode Theory.

I once visited the South African Broadcasting Corporation Transmitting Station at Bloemendal, Gauteng where the first stage driver in the audio chain was one channel of a Leak point one amp (built by Siemens) into a 40kW second stage driver into the final 250kW audio to modulate the 550kW RF stage. Two points from this last – 1. The Leak output could be boosted to 250kW and remain relatively undistorted and 2. Bigger is Better!  and also explains some of my thinking insofar as speaker systems are concerned as the music I listen to is almost all classical and heavily biased towards organ. DIY is part of the hobby as short of being a chequebook Audiophool this is the only way to do it.

Although I never really studied music, I have played Tuba in a Brass Band and had some tuition on the organ. Over the years I have done a good deal of music reproduction for amateur theatre also recording of both shows and concerts. After having a pipe organ with 2,500 pipes installed in my music room I, learned to tune the thing!

Equipment:

Speakers	Tannoy 15” Dual Concentric drivers Horn Loaded. 2 per cabinet. Ribbon units, treble, mids and super tweeters. Sub Woofer. 4 X 18" in 6 meter tube.
Amplifier	Parallel 300B Single Ended ±12 watts TacT\Lyngdorff 2175SADI 200 watts
CD	Jolida CD100 Valve output
Turntable	EMT 948, Jolida valve phono stage
Cartridge	Mantis MC or Audio Technica MM
Tape	Otari 5050 reel to reel
Streaming	Squeezebox Touch + hard drive. No PC
Cables	All DIY, various configuration. Speaker heavy zip cord (4 mm2)
Record cleaning	DIY Ultrasonic
CD collection	3,000 approx.
LP collection	1,000 approx.

I want a sound that is as representative as possible of the original and that is what I strive for. Music to my mind consists of a number of components. Pitch, timbre, attack, dynamics, rhythm and melody. A good hifi should be able to reproduce all of these things. How well the system does this, defines the overall success of the effort.

There are things that the audiophile finds important also such as the sound stage, front to back and side to side placement of the instruments and also information on the acoustics of the venue but these should be of lesser importance. However, more and more, these attributes have become the prime. I believe the most important component in the chain are the loud speakers. High efficiency, good dynamics and the sort of mid range  that comes with the likes of Tannoy, Kilpschorn and Altec are my ideal. Next in line is the source and finally the amplifier.

© Copyright 2013 Chris Templer - chris@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

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