Ive been on here and the Wam a while but never got around to posting much about my system, anyway I thought I would do so, so here goes.
I was a keen musician at school and thought about going to music college. Giving up this idea I was keen to have a decent system to reproduce music at home.
This started as the usual Richer Sound system (Technics CD/Marantz PM66SE/MS 10i) which was pretty enjoyable, though compromised by my room at the time.
Not sure why, but I progressed (!?) to a Naim pre/power around 2000 and some PMC GB1s.
I never was happy with this and eventually I was in a position to do something about it. I bought a XTC Pre/Art Audio Quintet, and suddenly everything came alive. This sounded great but in limited way. So now I wanted more...Living Voice IBX R2s came next...in hindsight not a great choice (for me) most probably down to the shape of the room/proximity of the side walls.
I felt/was told that it couldn’t be the speakers and started the journey.
Some small changes coincided with a move to a different room where the side walls were much further away and things did improve but by now I had heard better. Also I had started playing for a local amateur orchestra which had reignited my interest in classical music.
Listening to the LSO perform Rachmaninov Symphonic dances at the Barbican, brought it home. I had been changing my musical taste/programme to suit my set up and in reality my system did a poor job of playing anything with real scale.
By now I had got to know some people in the industry and had listened to a fair bit more kit.
I thought it could be the lack of pre amplifier. This lead to the purchase of a Puresound L300 which helped but didn’t really solve the problem.
Next I decided that it must be the Power Amplifier. So I auditioned several including Canary, Border patrol etc.
The Canary 300b PP were the closest to right but the ones I borrowed had a noisy transformer and a couple of conversations convinced me that I didn't want to sort this out.
In fact I was talking to an amplifier manufacturer explaining that I couldn't get the scale/dynamics and realism that I wanted and that I didn’t know where to go...Tannoys he said they would be a step in the right direction for you…
Reply With Quote