Hi both
I hope you're well
I'm sorry about the radio silence. It took a while to get it sorted in the end
Anyway I did contact John Sampson, who was a bit mystified. He got me to turn it on again quickly while we chatted on the phone, there was more flame and smoke and we agreed turn it off for good..! Mad
I wanted to get it fixed whatever, but he was going to be on holiday for a bit. I obviously needed to check whether anything wrong with the CD, so I took the amp over to him and he suggested bringing the CD player - he kindly tested that on his bench and it was all clean. So that was one battle I didn't have to fight
He made some suggestions about what might have caused it, and i did some tests with other gear when i got back to check, but it wasn't any of those. To be honest I think it was probably a combination of maybe 17 year old unit and cable shenanigans. It's a big amp, and the custom cabinet has just about enough depth with RCA plugs in, but it's tight. So I changed all speaker plugs and upgraded RCA leads to right angled, as well as the IEC cable. So everything has plenty of space now
And we chatted through servicing vs JS upgrade; you may not be surprised to learn I went for that. It's pretty much rebuilt, looks and sounds great, and so many components are now higher quality. Still burning it in, as I haven't had much listening time since then, so I think it will continue getting better. But one key characteristic both my wife and noticed immediately and ever since is the incredible transparency and detail. Quite often a track will start and we think we haven't heard it before, only to discover it's a favourite
Or we hear brand new stuff in the middle of tracks
Well worth it and I feel confident that my beloved amp is now set up for many years' reliable & enjoyable listening, and in fact to perform much closer to its full potential.
One more thing is that he doesn't just copy & paste his solutions/upgrades. He likes to talk to each customer before taking on a job like that to get a sense of them and their priorities, and fine-tunes things accordingly
Thanks so much for your help with this one, and sorry again for the delay in responding. Best wishes to you both