My system - upgrade progress

[HighFidelityGuy]

Hi,

I decided that 2009 would be upgrade year seen as there were lots of good deals around and I wouldn't earn any interest if I kept my money in the bank anyway. So here's my progress so far:

As and when I get any new gear I'll try to take photos and post them here.

This is what my system looked like in Feb this year:



Speakers are Eltax LR6.5. I got them about 8 years ago from
Richer Sounds for £200. They've been good speakers and have seen several different amps and source units over the years.

At the bottom of the rack is my new Arcam AVR300 7.1 amp. I got this in Feb to replace my Yamaha AV amp. I've still not actually upgraded to surround sound yet, I'm concentrating on stereo for now.

The little black box near the top of the rack is my Beresford TC-7520 DAC. It has it's lid off in the photo as I've been experimenting with different opamps. Technically I got this in March but you get the idea.

My source is my media centre PC which is in the next room to the right of the rack. At this stage I'm using a Mark Grant digital coax between the PC and DAC. A Cambridge Audio Pacific interconnect between the DAC and amp and some Gale speaker cable I got at the same time as the speakers.

I was bi-amping the speakers using the front channel outputs and two of the unused rear outputs on the amp. This is a useful feature of this amp.

That's about all I can say about the system as it was at this point.

[HighFidelityGuy]

Upgrading my amp to the Arcam improved the sound of my system much more than I was expecting. The clarity improved a great deal, especially the mid-range. I also got punchier deeper bass. This got me excited about upgrading other parts of my system. So I started looking into changing my speakers.

After trying out several different models at my local dealer, I had my heart set on a pair of Monitor Audio RS8's as they ticked all my boxes and were in my sub £1000 price range. I was almost ready to order these but I decided to get some advice about what else was available by starting a post in this forum. I received some good advice and some offers of second hand speakers. Off the back of that I travelled down to London to see forum member John and listen to his Wharfedale Opus 3's. After an impressive demo I decided these awesome speakers were the right ones for me, so I bought them. They seemed to have a similar sound characteristic to the RS8's but with just more of everything, plus they were slightly cheaper.

So after squeezing them into my little car and driving home, I got them setup:



Everything else was left the same but the improvement in sound quality was huge. More clarity, a wider, higher and deeper stereo image and much deeper and punchier bass. Plus they look awesome, well I think so anyway. My wife took a bit of convincing but I think she's got used to them now.

That's it for now.

[Beechwoods]

Wow. They look fantastic! I never knew John had a set of those hidden away. You did well. I'll bet he was sad to see them go. But at least they have an appreciative audience now!

[HighFidelityGuy]

John was sad to see them go but I promised to give them a good home.
I'm really enjoying them and expect to carrying on enjoying them for many years to come.

Once I've had a tidy up I'll post a photo of my new amps and speaker cable that have really made the Wharfedales sing.

[HighFidelityGuy]

More things have changed.
I never got round to taking a photo since I got my new power amps but since then I've also had a major re-shuffle due to me finally getting a new TV. So I thought I better post an update and explain the changes I've made.

Here's how everything looks now (click to make bigger):



You can see the power amps on the floor next to each speaker.
They are Musical Fidelity 550K Superchargers. These are monoblock amps that can produce 500W each. They can either be connected between the speaker outputs of a smaller amp and the speakers, or can be used as conventional power amps using a line level input. I use them as standard power amps as I read that they sounded best when used like this. They have really helped to inject more dynamics and produce a bigger soundstage than using my AV amp on it's own. My AV amp now acts as a pre-amp for the main speakers but still powers the rears.

When I installed the power amps I also performed a small modification to my speakers to simplify the wiring. The speakers originally had tri-wire binding posts but as I wasn't going to be tri-amping them, I decided to re-wire the terminals internally so that all three sets of wires connected to the bottom binding posts. This allowed me to do away with annoying jumper cables that I feel just add more unnecessary connections for the signal to go through.

The speaker cable I'm currently using is NVA LS5 in a 1m length per side. I found this aided the amps in allowing more dynamics to come through along with greater detail over the cheap cable I was using before.

The most noticeable change is my new TV. I've gone from a 28" Philips flat screen 100Hz CRT to a Hitachi 37" UT37MX70 100Hz 1080p LCD. I got a fantastic deal on this at Richer Sounds for £450. I did want to get the 42" version which was £500 but they were out of stock everywhere. The reason for the low price is that this range doesn't have any internal TV tuner, only 1 HDMI input and that's about it. It's an ultra stripped down monitor. Saying that they still retail at significantly more than that everywhere else. They are Hitachi's top end ultra slim range. The lack of bells and whistles is not a problem to me as I use my PC as a media centre which acts like Sky Plus but with more features.

I was planning on getting a new TV stand at the same time but I recently changed my mind about which one I wanted and the one I want now is quite a bit more expensive, so I'm going to get that later in the year. To tide me over in the mean time I decided to just use my existing Hi-Fi rack. It's a bit tall for a TV stand in my opinion but it will do for now.

That's it for now.
The next toy to come will hopefully be my valve pre-amp once I've got it sorted out. After that it'll be the new TV stand/Hi-Fi stand, EQ/RTA, room treatment and cable upgrades etc.
It never ends.

[HighFidelityGuy]

I have already posted this in another thread but I thought it would be good to keep all my upgrade info together in this thread too:

A few days ago I noticed that NVA had a traded in 1M set of their Super Sound Pipe (SSP for short) interconnects for sale at half the usual price. I couldn't resist as I've been wondering what they were like foe months. Luckily I won the auction and they arrived today.
I installed them today between my lightly modified Beresford 7520 DAC and my AV amp which is currently acting as a pre-amp for my mono-blocks.

Despite the fact that they've only been installed for about 10 minutes the difference in quality over my old cables is amazing. My old cables were Cambridge Audio Pacific that I had to start using again after getting my mono-blocks. Between the AV amp and mono-blocks I have a 1M set of Mark Grant Canare cables.

The SSP are allowing much more detail and subtlety to come through. They also give a more airy sound which I think is due to greater separation between beats/notes that helps to make everything sound less cluttered. Vocals are also noticeably clearer and easy to understand.

Granted I am comparing £200 cables to £30 cables but the Pacific's were seen as being extremely good value in their day.

I seriously recommend that anyone who can, tries a set of these SSP's as they are brilliant and I'm sure they'll get better as they bed in. They should be run in already as they are 2nd hand but there are no signal direction markings on the cables, so I don't know if I have them connected the same way round as the original owner.

Here's a photo of the cables (click to make bigger):



The SSP's are the black braided cables on the left and the yellow cables are the old Cambridge audio Pacific. The Pacific's look more bling and shiny but their performance is very dull compared to the SSP's.
You get a bit of an idea from the photo of just how stiff the SSP's are. They took some careful shaping to get them connected up and they really do feel like pipes, not cables. Running them through the cable management hole in the shelf would have been even more tricky so I didn't bother as I'll only be disconnecting it all again when I get my new rack, which won't suffer from the same problems.

[John]

Hi Dave
Good to hear you are still loving those speakers they are really underrated and the bass bust sound awesome with those super chargers

[HighFidelityGuy]

Hi John, nice to hear from you again.
I'm really enjoying them and they're really starting to sing now that the rest of my system is coming up to scratch. The bass is awesome now and everything else is quickly catching up as I upgrade bits here and there. I think my main problem now is room acoustics, so I'll hopefully get round to improving that soon.

[John]

Yes that echos my experience of the Opus3 as the equipment gets better the speakers just allows more through
I would also think about the preamp Dave a dedicated pre should sound better

[HighFidelityGuy]

Yes that echos my experience of the Opus3 as the equipment gets better the speakers just allows more through
I would also think about the preamp Dave a dedicated pre should sound better

The pre-amp is something else I'm going to experiment with. I've bought a valve pre-amp off ebay that I'm going to have modified by Tube Distinctions to make it fit my requirements. That should allow me to have the stereo and AV stuff separate but still both able to run through the Opus 3's at the flick of a switch.

You can see the pre-amp HERE.

It's a bit of an experiment/learning experience to allow me to try out a pre-amp and play with some valve equipment, as I've never used valves before. If that doesn't work I'll sell it and get something higher end later in the year.