15 years down the line

I realised it's about 15 years since I got into getting a decent stereo, now even got a decent room and a decent electricity supply. I started out with a Linn DS system, been through Quad, Harbeth and now have a curious mix of contraptions most of which I'd not heard of 5 or 10 years ago.

Used to spend far more on actually going to music - and lots of dance, ballet and opera - got to 200+ shows per year before Covid-19, but our spurs have since cooled.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...bc1247a8_b.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...7d5fbd34_b.jpg

What do you reckon to the Sabrinas? You've certainly got the amp to drive them with!

From the top:

First had a Clearaudio turntable, then in about 2014 bought a Claro Dual. Still have it, it's for sale.

A couple of years ago decided to do a 301, since I saw one in the Design Museum on Butler's Wharf many years ago. Was OK with any colour, as long as it was grey Hammertone.

I bought the donor machine from Emporium hifi. Sent it up to Ray Clark at CTC. The plinth was made by Carl Ellis and the veneer was finished by my mate Paul (20 coats of lacquer).

Reed 3P and Groovemaster III from Hugo Cass at Ammonite, currently fitted with an Ikeda 9TS (from Yodobashi Tokyo) and an Origin Live Aladdin from Southhampton.

Mat, stablister and Auva feet from Stack Audio.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Macca

What do you reckon to the Sabrinas? You've certainly got the amp to drive them with!

---

I previously had a Luxman 509X that I bought from Dave. It did seem to struggle a bit with the Sabrina impedance. It was also the wrong colour. The Gryphon 300 is a whole new level of sound, and the first 5-6w are Class A. The 509X is a touch on the warm side. The 300 has a wonderfully transparent sound. I bought the Sabrina in 2020 - the wife chose them. They are extremely coherent. I listen to a very wide range of music and they don't really have any weaknesses. Very natural midrange, great imaging and soundstage, enough bass for a good stand-up bass (listen to a lot of jazz) and piano works well.

The Sabrina like low capacitance cables - using Atlas Equator 3.5 in a 5m pair.

Some interesting kit - much of which is new to me. Nonetheless I'm sure it all sounds excellent. :)

It might be helpful if you could itemise each item of equipment and say what it does.



Like you, I don't go to anywhere near like the number of live performances that I used to. :(

was going to in good time, but:

Mofi Master Phono
Innuos Pulsar
Aqua Formula xHD rev. 2 DAC
Puritan PM156 conditioner
LDA Quartz t/t power supply
Gryphon Diablo 300 integrated amplifier
Stack LAN Regenerator
NeoTech and Vinyl Passion silver cables

Some nice kit there Steve. I have heard a good deal of the items you have but not altogether! I expect the Gryphon amp is rather good, was looking at their integrated amps myself. I like the Innuos Pulsar but I compared it against the new Zenith NG recently and the NG was a good deal better,

Had a 301 myself many years ago and never really sorted it properly like yours! Then again there were not the same amount of specialist people around to get it to a higher standard back then nearly 35 years ago.


Great system you have there and I bet it sounds excellent through the Sabrina’s

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Some nice kit there Steve. I have heard a good deal of the items you have but not altogether! I expect the Gryphon amp is rather good, was looking at their integrated amps myself. I like the Innuos Pulsar but I compared it against the new Zenith NG recently and the NG was a good deal better,

Had a 301 myself many years ago and never really sorted it properly like yours! Then again there were not the same amount of specialist people around to get it to a higher standard back then nearly 35 years ago.


Great system you have there and I bet it sounds excellent through the Sabrina’s

---

The 301 does sound tremendously good. It was a bit of a leap of faith, with the benefit of the 11kg brass platter and the LDA power supply ensuring speed stability. Plus it looks nice compared to the black thing I had before. The veneer is the same as used through the ground floor of our house and on the rack shelving.

I went through some fairly budget phono stages (Vertere, EAR Phonobox, Whest Two.2 Discrete) and for some years had an RCM Sensor2 Mk2. I then went for the Mofi unit. It's a brilliant concept, isolating the power supply, phono circuits, and cabling (AC, DC and signalling) with an extremely short signal path. It can connect up to three inputs. One is fully balanced with a transimpedance (current) circuit. All the settings can be controlled from the remote, with an automatic temporary mute.

I had a Zen Mk3 and only upgraded to Pulsar 2 years ago. The NG has a new processor, but is three times the price and still no fibre input. The Stream 3 seems a sideways move.

I have a VLAN in use through a Ubiquiti managed switch and controller. Data comes down fibre. File storage is networked and I have the option of networked upsampling using HQ Player. This might benefit 16/44 or 16/48 files (my CD rips) because the DAC is NOS without anti-alias filtering, but I can't say I've had an issue with any of those files. Most of them can now be streamed at 24/96 or 24/192 these days.

https://www.hifinews.com/images/124mofi.1.jpg

Meanwhile the wife is at Covent Garden watching a La Traviata full rehearsal, says it's utterly magical.

She seems to have forgotten I took her to see it for her 25th birthday in December 1994 (with Angela Georghiu and Roberto Alagna under Sir Georg Solti), it was magical then, probably still is.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SLS

The 301 does sound tremendously good. It was a bit of a leap of faith, with the benefit of the 11kg brass platter and the LDA power supply ensuring speed stability. Plus it looks nice compared to the black thing I had before. The veneer is the same as used through the ground floor of our house and on the rack shelving.

I went through some fairly budget phono stages (Vertere, EAR Phonobox, Whest Two.2 Discrete) and for some years had an RCM Sensor2 Mk2. I then went for the Mofi unit. It's a brilliant concept, isolating the power supply, phono circuits, and cabling (AC, DC and signalling) with an extremely short signal path. It can connect up to three inputs. One is fully balanced with a transimpedance (current) circuit. All the settings can be controlled from the remote, with an automatic temporary mute.

I had a Zen Mk3 and only upgraded to Pulsar 2 years ago. The NG has a new processor, but is three times the price and still no fibre input. The Stream 3 seems a sideways move.

I have a VLAN in use through a Ubiquiti managed switch and controller. Data comes down fibre. File storage is networked and I have the option of networked upsampling using HQ Player. This might benefit 16/44 or 16/48 files (my CD rips) because the DAC is NOS without anti-alias filtering, but I can't say I've had an issue with any of those files. Most of them can now be streamed at 24/96 or 24/192 these days.

https://www.hifinews.com/images/124mofi.1.jpg

---

The Mofi phono looks a nice piece of kit and I like the technical details and design but certainly not cheap. There again the Innuos Zenith NG is not cheap either unless you compare it to the Nazare which I heard the other week. One outstanding aspect of the Zenith NG is its remarkably ability to remove a fair number of layers from streamed recordings giving you a very transparent sound. I was gobsmacked. You don't know what is obscuring the sound until its taken away!

The 301 is a great mechanical beast and should I come across one oneway at a fair price I may consider one again however sonically I am not sure it would sound much better than my VPI turntable?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jimbo

The Mofi phono looks a nice piece of kit and I like the technical details and design but certainly not cheap. There again the Innuos Zenith NG is not cheap either unless you compare it to the Nazare which I heard the other week. One outstanding aspect of the Zenith NG is its remarkably ability to remove a fair number of layers from streamed recordings giving you a very transparent sound. I was gobsmacked. You don't know what is obscuring the sound until its taken away!

The 301 is a great mechanical beast and should I come across one oneway at a fair price I may consider one again however sonically I am not sure it would sound much better than my VPI turntable?

---

I was gobsmacked by the transparency of the dCS Vivaldi when I first heard it in 2013. I've heard lots of dCS, but over time they leave me with a feeling of disengagement. I don't get excited by chip-based DACs. I have the internal Gryphon Diablo 300 DAC and used it for the last 6 months before getting the Aqua Formula. It's got an ESS3016 chip and is perfectly OK, but had me spinning records most of the time. I bought a Holo May L2 on eBay in 2022 and whist it has extraordinary transparency with a noise floor down at -170dB, ultimately it did not warm the cockles of my heart, and it does demand fiddling around with HQ Player. So it went on eBay. The Aqua Formula xHD Rev.2 does warm the cockles of my heart. In theory it shouldn't work, but it does.

Innuos told me that the NG range was the Stream range that got out of control, so they went with it and then did Stream. I've never demo'd streamers. From 2010 I used Naim's n-Serve hosted on a device made by Ava Media, an Auralic Aries, Innuos Zen Mk3 and now Pulsar using Sense. The Ava blew up, my son has the Aries and I traded the Mk3. So fairly painless and not overly expensive. I have Roon, operating in up to 11 zones, but native Sense sounds better on the main hifi. I'm not sure I want to demo a £15,000 streamer!

The 301 aesthetics are a big thing to me, because it's in a nice room, but it does sound very good. I think the tonearms cost as much or more than the 301 itself. After a while I stopped counting. The Reed 3P is a lovely thing, wonderfully designed. I had in mind a Supatrac, but it's a bit of an ugly ducking and setting it up is more than I could contemplate.

At the end of the day, I wanted something vaguely natural-sounding and fun to listen to (although not all music is fun, some is not even music). If I want real, I pop in the car or get on the tube and go to Covent Garden or Wigmore Hall. Rather than preferring digital or analogue, these two source systems seem to be fairly well matched.

The Holo May L3 KTE (in Nos mode) doesn’t apologise for itself, zero requirement for HQ Player in this boys opinion :)

Tried it and as digital upsamplers go it’s the best?
But to me was more of an “We’ll not sure.. it’s definitely different?” rather than an absolute ‘better thing’

Considering the extra cost with a beefy PC/Mac required to run it at higher sampling rates, I filtered it out.
Played around with upsampling for years now, and I’ve never got it to sound better than the original unsullied File.

YMMV of course.

Love your Turntable by the way!
Labour of love.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gazjam

The Holo May L3 KTE (in Nos mode) doesn’t apologise for itself, zero requirement for HQ Player in this boys opinion :)

Tried it and as digital upsamplers go it’s the best?
But to me was more of an “We’ll not sure.. it’s definitely different?” rather than an absolute ‘better thing’

Considering the extra cost with a beefy PC/Mac required to run it at higher sampling rates, I filtered it out.
Played around with upsampling for years now, and I’ve never got it to sound better than the original unsullied File.

YMMV of course.

Love your Turntable by the way!
Labour of love.

---

I use Mac Mini's for work and had an M1 and then an M2 Pro going spare to run Roon and HQ Player. Headless in a cupboard. Both were fine for DSD256 with a light modulator. I've never been convinced by onboard upsampling/conversion.

The DAC I'm using is NOS and I've not got round to trying some PCM upsampling. It's a PCM-based DAC and converts DSD to PCM as well. The only reason to do so is to avoid 16/44, given the lack of any digital filters.

The turntable was very easy, to be honest. A well trodden path. I had to wait 3 months for the plinth to be made and then it took my mate Paul 4 or 5 weeks to do the lacquer, and he did the shelves for the rack at the same time. Lacquer requires a proper licensed spray booth, and takes ages, so most people just slap on some varnish. The rack was made by another local chap for £400. It's light and very rigid. The sort of thing someone with a grinder and a welder could do in their garage.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...c624f192_w.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...a5e78492_w.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...45360ca1_w.jpg

Incidentally, the original cast 301 screws down from on top, whereas the machined CTC 301 is fixed with screws from underneath into screw receptacles machined under the plate. As I had it flush mounted, it allowed me to add 2mm sorbothane strip where the masking tape is in the recess, which adds some decoupling from the tonearms.

Great Job Steven,
fantastic turntable.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gazjam

Great Job Steven,
fantastic turntable.

---

Honestly, it was not a difficult thing and I would recommend it based on performance alone, but 100% with the brass platter and upgraded bearing (£1,450).

There were phone calls and a few decisions, but I drove up to Yorkshire one morning and collected the unit and plinth, the lacquer was done by my mate Paul 20 minutes away and once that was done it took an afternoon to mount both tonearms and get the thing playing.

I did a drawing for the stand and sent it to the fabricator. He'd previously done something similar for a drinks cabinet. It's 650mm x 450mm x 1050mm. He dropped it round to Paul who made the shelves. The slate on top is 10mm and was ordered online from a kitchen worktop company in Wales and arrived a week later by Parcel Force.

Ray Clark at CTC told me there is demand for him to sell completed units. He has another bigger business and seems to do this because he enjoys it. He used to do the servicing and renovations for Terry at Loricraft when he had the Garrard license. He has a beautiful workshop/listening room and has the whole process fine tuned.

Ray's brother Alan makes the beautiful Alchris speakers. https://alchrisaudio.co.uk