Macca's Lash Up 2: Lash Harder

[petrat]

The hifi's fine. You're just using the wrong drugs, Martin

[Macca]

Or I'm using the right drugs but need to up my dosage?

When you dropped that guitar off to me you had a listen to my system, it was sounding pretty good at that point, I thought. Second time you came with the Technics, not so good.

[User211]

Original KSA50 with passive sterile, flat, really a bit unpleasant sounding. With ARC LS26, expansive, huge soundstage, pleasant sound. In fact soundstage a bit too huge. The transform when swapping between to the so immense it almost beggared belief.

You just need a valve pre with the right amount of "fruit" to make one work.

[Marco]

The Croft is quite orangey, with notes of pomegranate. Will that do?

Marco.

[User211]

The Croft is quite orangey, with notes of pomegranate. Will that do?

Marco.

What you mean no lemon zest and Kiwi? No peaches and cream? Not even a vague hint of banana?

No, no, no!

[petrat]

When you dropped that guitar off to me you had a listen to my system, it was sounding pretty good at that point, I thought. Second time you came with the Technics, not so good.

Agreed! Certainly the first time was more involving ... second time, it was easy to ignore the music and talk over it. I thought it was just the music choice, or possibly the Technics cd player, if we plumbed it in ... can't remember. Anyway, can't see how the pre can be the culprit, as it was working fine first time ... the whole system sounding lively and nicely balanced. I remember thinking it'd be difficult to better for the (very reasonable amount of) money you paid for the system.

Have you tried turning the volume up a quarter turn? I find that usually sorts things out

[Macca]

Agreed! Certainly the first time was more involving ... second time, it was easy to ignore the music and talk over it. I thought it was just the music choice, or possibly the Technics cd player, if we plumbed it in ... can't remember. Anyway, can't see how the pre can be the culprit, as it was working fine first time ... the whole system sounding lively and nicely balanced. I remember thinking it'd be difficult to better for the (very reasonable amount of) money you paid for the system.

Have you tried turning the volume up a quarter turn? I find that usually sorts things out

Second time was with the Technics, also with a different speaker cable. But the first time was, aside from speaker cable, identical to what I am now unhappy with. And I've tied putting the other speaker cables back in and no change. Swapping power amps brings it back to how it was. So this would seem to indicate that the only possible cause is a degradation in the performance of the Krell.

The only other explanation is that it is all in my mind, and the Krell was not up to much even when I first got it. You say no, it sounded pretty good first time; that's what I recall too. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains...

[struth]

have you tried an active yet

[Macca]

No, because that means dismantling the TV system. Going to wait and see what the deal is with Marco's pre-amp. I've heard that slotted into a number of systems and it always sounds superb, so if that doesn't cut it with the Krell then I know for certain.

[DSJR]

Best speaker cables for Krell at silly but not monstrous prices used to be VDH The Wind laid side by side (I checked, although lightly twisting for neatness needn't hurt). We also used capacitive Kimber 8TC once but that made the sound go 'tuneless HiFi' and ruined the lively lean tones of the KVA 250's we had on dem. I've no idea what it was, but we had some very thick copper stranded cables (each conductor was at least half an inch thick in a black jacket with spades at each end) and this stuff was amazing with the big amps we had. More recently, Transparent cables with their expensive magic boxes on were the dogs danglies for this kind of gear. needless to say, I once tried Chord odyssey with an FPB300 and it killed it, all splattery and ott in presentation. Once this was heard, it was there all the time with everything else, just not as obvious - the The Wind was so obviously clearer and better balanced it was silly and I'm sure I could tell blindfold even now.

I know some ARC preamps are supposed to be a good symbiotic match, but to me it's still using one colouration to enhance ot counterbalance another. The 50S isn't really in need of this kind of processing in my opinion, but maybe one of the 'simpler' ARC preamps would work really well.