The bake off has been an intimate affair with myself, Bigman80, Mixc and his partner in attendance.

A good selection of kit to swap and change about, all of it bar one item including at least one valve (valves rule of course).

The general set-up



Already various bits and pieces littering the floor and foot rest


The whole event was vinyl only with the Lenco GL75 with ZYX R-100 as source and my dual mono hybrid power amp as grunt provider.

We started by listening to the KIN preamp in MM mode with the Denon AU 320 SUT which had been my 'reference' system before the latest circuit modifications to improve the performance of the JFET MC input.

A switch was made to the Vivant phono stage which has had the JFET modifications, in place of the phono stage in the KIN. The additional image depth and greater clarity was immediately apparent .




Bigman80 had brought over his spare pair of Telefunken valves, prior to me replacing them, so they were substituted into the power amp with another worthwhile increase in SQ. This is getting to be a good habit.
The Mazda valves that were in previously decided to hide themselves behind the clock as I think they realised they were outclassed:




Up to now we had been using the Quad 57's to shift the air, my own Neat Motive SX2's were substituted for a while to provide a different flavour. For a modern design I like them, excellent top end and good overall performance for a relatively compact floorstander.
As Oliver had brought over his Pioneer's, at my request, they were plumbed in next.




One has to say that considering that these are from the early 70's they are stunning performers. I could live with a pair of these as my main speakers if I hadn't got any others.

Next up was a switch to Oliver's Jolida phono stage, the first point noted was how low the volume control needed to be set, the Jolida has shed-loads of gain.




An extremely transparent phono stage with the bonus of a valve buffer (with a small gain) on the output. Highly recommended if you can pick up one at a good price. Also highly recommended to fit the best valves you can, in this case more Telefunkens
Very little to give away but I thought the Vivant (with latest mods) gave greater clarity.

Some kit now starting to crowd for attention, even though some had already tasted the limelight:




Mick's very early Croft prototype phono stage and solid state head amp were now connected up:




The Croft was sporting a remote transformer in another box and the head amp was battery powered and featured nine, yes 9 paralleled transistors on each channel input. To be told both of these were 20+ years old was proof positive that modern kit is certainly not necessarily better because it is modern or new.

The head amp was exceedingly quiet and transparent and the early Croft did it's usual magic (valves after all). I think the EQ on this early unit was more to my taste than later ones I have head as it was really really good. Full marks for picking these up when you did Mick






Next up was what I think Oliver was waiting for, to compare the TVC to the Alps pot/valve buffer arrangement in the KIN line stage.
So the ELEKTRA TVC was connected directly from the Vivant phono stage running into the Dual mono power amplifier:




It was good, no ...... very good. A bit of denial/ teasing on my behalf, but it did offer greater impact and sparkle.
See the postscript for what happened afterwards.

I did have a problem with no output from one channel but I think that was due to poor contact, probably on one of the lesser quality sockets on the power amp. Checking with a multimeter showed the leads to be OK.





When substituting Oliver's super duper leads on input and output it appears I broke one . Oh dear

More random kit littering the floor:





So a cracking day tarting about with interesting kit, most enjoyable

Postscript.

After the TVC/KIN comparison I have now fitted a Tesla PCC88 to the line stage with another little jump in performance.
Can't beat a quality valve doing its job well.