Hi Everyone!

[Bialykot]

Hi - I'm Mark from the central belt in Scotland - near Edinburgh. I've been into hifi since I bought my first tube amp at an auction when I was 13 and built my own speakers as I could not afford any at that time. They were hopeless, but coupled with a cheap BSR turntable and Shure M55E cartridge (remember them?) I was hooked! More auction purchases (Rogers amps, BBC LS3/5As) got me on the right track and when I graduated from Uni I worked at a University Acoustics lab for a while testing hifi components for manufacturers such as KEF and Ariston. The latter sold me their RDS110SL turntable (think Linn competitor) at trade price which I still have with a Mission 774 John Bicht designed arm plus Dynavector Ruby Karat (re-tipped) pickup ... magic! Also use Meridian 588/502/557 balanced system fed into B&W 805 Nautilus speakers (with some AV stuff thrown in for surround sound movies when the mood takes me). I'm in the midst of moving to a computerised setup (lossless files) maybe on the new Meridian gear but we shall see. Enjoy reading the forums here - but I'll start contributing to posts now, I guess.

[Alex_UK]

Welcome Mark! Sounds like you've got a great system there, what's your tipple, as it were - i.e. music preferences?

Plenty of people on here into computer audio, so get posting any questions and I'm sure you'll get loads of good advice.

Have fun!

[Jonboy]

Hi Mark, welcome and all that, sounds like you have a lot of knowledge there.

I am now using Stotify for ease through a Standac:)

[Beechwoods]

Welcome Mark, glad to have you onboard the good ship AOS!

[Spectral Morn]

Hi Mark

Thank you for your post. Welcome to AOS. Have fun and enjoy yourself.


Regards D S D L

[Bialykot]

Thanks guys. Music interests are mostly entrenched in 70s rock (when recordings were much less compressed that these days) plus jazz, blues, classical, vocal and solo instrument. Never really got into rap or today's club music! Having worked in an acoustics lab at Uni was great - i get to borrow all sorts of kit - from KEF and Quad speakers, Radford amps, Stax headphones etc... Was in my early 20s at the time and though I couldn't afford this it gave me a great insight into what true hifi could achieve if done properly, There were lots of strange but interesting 'remedies' and improvements that people used to try (eg clamping devices for records on turntables, sticky platters, special oil for bearings in turntables an so on. I used to get to test these scientifically (paid for by the manufacturers) and if there were any differences in the results before and after, the manufacturers used them for press releases to justify how good their products were. In reality, no one could hear any real difference in sound, but we all convinced oursleves that we could! One manufacturer of a glass platter (I still have this somewhere) was so excited that we could detect a slight change in the sound decay of the deck when it was wrapped by a ball bearing or whatever, that tghey increased sales by some 30% at that time. Again, in reality, we were talking about microseconds and nothing significant - but they were fascinating times. I think the next 5 years will be hugely interesting - hifi as we know it converging with consumer computing and studio sound. Fascinating times ahead.

[John]

I think you will enjoy it here Mark
Yes agree the next 5 years will be interesting