Hello from Surbiton
Hello everyone. I have just registered and here is a bit about my hi-Fi journey.
It started when I was 15 around 1990 and a hifi shop opened up in Dawley, Shropshire. It wasn't there long, but long enough for me to get the bug. As soon as I had the money I bought my first separates system of a marantz cd60se, marantz pm40se and mission 701 speakers. If I recall it was a package deal around £500 or so at the time. A denon tu260l tuner and demon drm500 quickly followed with some target speaker stands.
A lot of the 80's and 90's rock/metal music was poorly mastered on a lot of CD's so I started collecting records and bought a dual 505/4 and then upgraded the cart to a goldring 1012gx. That table really has a lot of guts for rock music but was not the last word in refinement, so I sold it to a friend and bought a Heybrook tt2 with linn basik plus and k9. What a difference! I then looked for other upgrades to the rest of my sustem to try and keep up with th heybrook. I bout a qed digit dac- made no real difference and then a Cambridge audio dac which did make a difference Jimmy Hughes reviewed it and made a transformer for it where he said it improved it 10 times, he made one for me and wow it did make for a holographic image, but was a bit hard sounding. Speakers changed a couple of times Tdl studio 2, mission 753 and kef 104's which I tried briefly before returning - great sound but not a rocking speaker.
In the mid 1990's I bought a nac32.5/ 110/snaps changed the 110 for a 140 these amps are superb very energetic and revealing. However, in early 2,000's I bought a full Cyrus set up at a bargain price, dad cd transport, dac, pre, 2 mono Powers and a psxr each all on a hark rack driving Proc studio 140's. A lovely system but the cd front end was a little weak so I bought a dpa enlightenment drive and Rennaisonce dac. A real beautiful piece of equipment with built in jitter lock system. Really smooth and detailed and tamed the slightly bright nature of the proac's. However the system was a beast in the living room and after a couple of years had to go.
I went to the Bristol hifi show around 10 years ago looking for a solution. AVI adm9's were it. All in one speakers, amps and dac which sounded remarkably well sorted, being smaller imaged better than the Cyrus set up and if anything were a little more balanced (although not as revealing). Recently I upgraded these with the newer dm10 model - wow what an upgrade - much more revealing than any system I have had to date but still highly musical. These are driven by a rpi3 and iqaudio digi+ which must be the ultimate hifi bargain and recently I have dusted off the old heybrook tt2, upgraded the k9 with a jilco shibata stylus and it is sounding very sweet indeed.
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