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The Occasional Part-Time Audiophile is a new thing. Another experiment. And while it may be new to us, it’s not exactly new. The history of our hobby is as much a story of the writers, and the magazines that wrote for as it is of the companies, and designers that have also come, and gone.

John DeVore makes loudspeakers. I’m hoping you know that, prior to hitting this page, but on the off-chance this fact has escaped notice, consider this as notice served.

OK folks, this one is an ongoing saga here in the world of Part-Time Audiophile. Like a boomerang (or certain Millennial offspring) the subject of this review just keeps coming back again and again. Why? Well that’s an easy one: it’s different each time!

I come from a do-it-yourself type family. To the best of my knowledge, this handy trait started out with both of my grandfathers and got handed down from there. One was a country boy who liked to build stuff for his own use just for the fun of it. He used to build wooden boats for both work and pleasure, well, just because.

As an agnostic progressive, I’ve learned to keep my own counsel when herfing with strangers or casual acquaintances. I don’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes about knuckle-dragging cigar smokers, but I also don’t want to get my butt kicked in the back alley of a cigar lounge for suggesting that La La Land and Moonlight are far superior to the latest Jack Reacher film.

Sometimes just reading the news here at PTA gets me into trouble. Like last March, when I happened upon a blurb about Zu Audio’s Dirty Weekend event, where a stripped down version of the company’s popular budget floorstander, the Omen, is offered at a ridiculously low price to entice folks interested in the Zu speaker line through the door.

When the McIntosh MP1100 phono preamplifier arrived at my doorstep, I was as excited as when I saw the first McIntosh product at 12 years old. I admit, I am a McIntosh fan boy, perhaps not blindly starry -eyed enough to buy the $1,800 USD McIntosh wall clock, but I have a long enough family history with McIntosh to prove my street cred.

Smiles greeted me from a number of manufacturer representatives as I headed into HiFi Centre for the second, and final day of the inaugural Vancouver Audio Festival.

There were a number of spectacular, cost-no-object components drawing stereo fans at the Los Angeles Audio Show, but the room I had the hardest time getting into featured a $350 USD rig.

This is the second part of a three-part series on living with a computer-based audio system from an analog diehard’s perspective, and how it has changed the way my family, and I listen to music compared to a previously vinyl-only household.

PS Audio very kindly provided me a P10 Power Plant Regenerator for review back in March, and after having the unit in my reference system for last few months, I have to say that I’m deeply impressed with it’s capabilities.

What we have from the outside is, as I mentioned, a pair of fairly conventional-looking narrow-baffle towers. Each speaker stands 39 inches in height (not including its spiked outriggers) and measures just under eight inches in width. The overall footprint is quite reasonable, with a depth of 10.75 inches, so these shouldn’t be too hard to place in a room of normal dimensions.

Fostex has a long history in the audio business. The company was founded in 1973, but its parent company Foster Electric Co., Ltd was formed way back in 1949. The company was originally a mass producer of OEM speaker and transducer products, but broke into pro and hi-fi facing mini monitors in 1978 with the Fostex 6301B and then into the growing category of home recording with a line of multitrack recording devices in ‘81.

The $25,000 USD gold, and Ferrari-red, solid-state integrated amplifier from Switzerland exuded raw sex appeal as it sat in my listening room oozing quality. With it’s staggeringly addictive color scheme (a point of opinion, and contention I know), muscular casework and that rubbery, nubby-feeling volume Pleasure Control for tactile feedback, the darTZeel CTH-8550 could be a bit much for some people at times, but oh baby was it posh.

How many Simolians do you have to part with these days to get good sound? I mean, really? Is it even possible, or just a frustrating pipe dream?

That seems to have been Topic A in 2016, continuing hot on the heels of the previous year and probably going all the way back to Thomas Edison wrapping a sheet of tin foil around a grooved metal cylinder.