15 years down the line

[SLS]

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.

[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.

[SLS]

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.

[SLS]

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.

[Gazjam]

Great Job Steven,
fantastic turntable.

[SLS]

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