TdC
Trem's hunky sex love muffin
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2003
- Messages
- 30,925
Worth it though? I guess if you have a good setup already, why not top it off with such a player. How much does these cost, and what does your setup look like?
The player I am auditioning is a Marantz SA KI Pearl 30th anniversary edition. (the full thing, not the lite). It's to replace a Musical Fidelity M3 CD that has "uprated internals". I got the upgrade from MF as the thing suddenly started to refuse to eject cd's and it took the dealer ages to source me a new drive. MF told the dealer to give me an upgrade, which they did.
The rest of my set is thus:
Power Amp :
Audio Research VT-60 (matched Electro Harmonix "hifi" tubes in the V slots, power tubes are new Sovtec). Amp was modified slightly by a company called Triple-M to take a larger fuse, accept an IEC power input and directly couple the 4 Ohm tap to new speaker binding posts.
Pre Amp:
Audio Research LS-7 (matched Electro Harmonix gold "hifi" tubes in the V1/2 positions, and Philips JAN tubes in the V3/4. Modified by a dude named Marcel who set it up to accept an IEC power input, and extensively modified the internals (caps, etc) to uprated components as well as cleaning everything up and checking for loose connections.
Speakers:
Elac BS-243 LE ribbon tweeter and a slightly larger mid/bass unit. I used to run these with a REL T5 sub bass unit, but with the addition of the VT-60 I no longer have to because the bass is well extended by the power amp. These Elacs have a tendency to sound a bit bright though, thanks to the awesome tweeter. I find that actually works kind of well with my tube amps so niceness. These speakers are actually on my list to upgrade in the future because I want to move to a soundstage that is deeper, if you will. On the audition list at the moment is primarilly the KEF LS-50 and the KEF R300.