It sounds better than the cd, he said.

[Gmanuk101]

I was in my homeland and paid a visit to my good friend and fellow AoS member RichB on Friday night.

Armed with an armful of records and a technics 1210mk2 which has just had fitted some VanDamme phono and grand cable.

At first RichB had his Arcam as a power amp feeding the great miniT 2020, the sound at first was very forward and bright. however after an hour or so it became just amazing.

He ditched the mini T and fed the Arcam direct from his USB powered phono stage (RichB will tell you what it is as I can't remember).

The deck got even better this way, so approx 3 hours in we put on Pink Floyd's Echos.

And I quite "this sounds amazing, miles better than my cd version and I've got the remastered edition as well"

Que me throwing my arms in the air and saying "vinyl, vinyl, vinyl"

Techy with nagaoka mp100 (12 hours use) , Van damme cable, Sumiko headshell.

Up yours CD :ner:

[MartinT]

Well, I don't feel as strongly about it as you since my SACD/CD player does a very nice job, thank you. However, ultimately my Technics turntable does outperform CD in the areas of insight, presentation and sheer 'you are there' realism. So yes, vinyl rules :)

[RobbieGong]

There really is just something about vinyl especially on a well sorted deck :D

[Haselsh1]

Hmmm... I've been thinking about a nice costly Nagaoka cartridge to replace my aging Ortofon OM30 Super but at the moment simply can't decide which way to go as the Ortofon is the best I've heard at this price for the last ten years. I'll give it the rest of this year and then decide in time for christmas when my passion for hi-fi will be re-aroused during the dark nights and heavy atmospheres of winter.

[RichB]

Yes I had to hand it to the fettled techie, it made short work of an old and far from good copy of Meddle... The occasional skip aside, which was the fault of the old vinyl, it was much more involving and raw sounding than the more recent Floyd remasters on CD. The scary 'strangled seaguls' bit in the middle then the eventual 'return to shore' of echoes has never sounded more jubilant. My band has some work to do in order to recreate this live.

It may have been the cheap wine we were putting away but i thought i could literally hear the sound of the newly installed van damm buring in throughout the course of the evening, it just got better and better. We also compared it to my SL1800 with Nagaoka MP 11 and the 1210 knocked it out of the park for bass and sheer confidence of its presentation. In summary, a nice deck you have there Gman. Look forward to another bake off soon. (btw my Rega's can do bass eh? :ner:)

Just a point of clarification, initially we were using my Arcam Solo as pre and the mini t as a power amp but found it was running out of steam with the techie as a source and the Behringer U-Phono USB stage (a better phono stage would probably have fettled this). This never happens with digital sources by the way. When we switched back to the Arcams own 50w amp we had big smiles on our faces, i was relieved to think it hadnt been outclassed by the dimuntive £60 wonder but it more than held its own and will quite happily spend its days driving my mission 760se in the second system. (Expect to see an old Pioneer A400 in need of some TLC on the private exhibitions page in coming days!)

Get some pics ups Gman!