I reach my 3/4-century birthday later this week, and most of my hi-fi equipment is approaching 40 years of age. It's been a long marriage between elderly partners but we still work well together.

I bought my first hi-fi system in 1974. This included a Leak Stereo 70 amplifier, a Philips touch-control turntable and big Celestion speakers. I added a Ferrograph Series 6 mono tape recorder and an Armstrong 624 tuner in 1976. I got on well with them but they went to new homes when the updating urge came.

My current system consists of a Sansui AU-919 amplifier, a Trio KD500 turntable with SME 3009 Series III arm fitted with an Audio-Technics Signet MKIIIE moving coil cartridge, and Spendor BC1 speakers, all bought in 1979/1980. There followed a Sansui SC1330 cassette player about a year later and a NAD 5420 CD player in about 2000. The cassette player gave frequent trouble and I scrapped it after trying to repair it for the last time. The CD player was sold late last year when I fell to the upgrade temptation and the new owner, who has now become a good friend, tells me he is loving it.

The Sansui AU-919 amplifier was totally restored by an undisputed expert in 2017 (related here: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/ind...au-919.751299/). It is now outstandingly good, far better than ever it was pre-restoration, as can be read about in the link I've given. I've never heard a system sound so good and I can't get enough of playing through it.

Early last year I bought a Cambridge CXN network player, followed by a Cambridge CXC CD transport. I spent months in research before I settled on them, and they are truly excellent. Because the CXN has the modern 'CD' level of output of around 2 volts, and the AU-919 inputs were designed for more like 145 mV (being from the pre-CD era), I fitted a pair of Rothwell Audio -20dB attenuators to the AU-919 tuner input (now the CXN input). These vastly improved the sound quality as well as allowing broadly mid-position use of the volume control rather than 'just off the stop'.

I'm now toying with replacing the Spendor BC1 speakers with modern Spendors, perhaps A6R, the new A7 or the D7. I'm really happy with the BC1s for 95% of the time, but I occasionally play music with lots of bass and treble at high volume and this is where it might do better. The 50W max speakers can be driven hard by the 100W/channel AU-919 amplifier as the amp exerts very strong control of the speaker units; they don't go berserk as they would with lower power amplifiers going into clipping. I tried them at high volume with a friend's Quad 404(?) amplifier in the 1980s and I had to switch off quickly as the woofers were going 'all over the place' rather than controllably back and forth.

Any comments and suggestions on a change from the BC1s would be welcome. I've already seen a couple of threads on this forum about their strengths and weaknesses, which is what led me to join, but there seems to be a lot of contradiction.

As for the music, my tastes are very wide-ranging but by far the greater part of my listening is to jazz. This ranges from Dixieland through to 'free jazz' but is usually somewhere between. Bill Frisell's 'East to West' album will give some idea of my preferences, with the track 'Pipe Down' always needing to be played as hard as I dare through those wonderful BC1 speakers! I also enjoy 'world' music such as Anouar Brahem's strangely-named album 'The Astounding Eyes of Rita'. My favourite track of all time is Art Pepper's rendition of 'Make a List, Make a Wish' on the 'Blues for the Fisherman' LP issued in 1980 by Mole Jazz.

I think that's enough for now!