Jon L

Hey, you should consider yourself damn lucky you only have to deal with it on holidays. I mean, you could be stuck with someone like that daily, such as your spouse/S.O.

You know, every time I hear about the SP Blackhole, I get depressed and frustrated. And I don't even have anything stuck in the Blackhole personally. I need some more cheer for the Holidays, so people, please refrain from mentioning the Blackhole. For the children, the children, I beg you.

Ori knows what he's doing. It's just that what he considers "neutral" and great sound may not coincide with many others. My own tastes don't completely agree with Ori's, either, but I"ll say this much. You can buy the brand new Oritek DAC for around $459, stock Zhaolu included, and certain things it does is world-class, especially midrange purity, timber, and resolution. What new DAC in that price can you say *that* about?

A bit OT, but has anyone actually compared ES-1 and Aristaeus? KGSS is a fine amp, but frankly not in the similar league as ES-1, so it's not surprising Aristaeus outperforms KGSS, but the *real* question in my mind is ES-1 vs. Aristaeus..

Accuphase 75 (not 75V) is a very, VERY old player from Accuphase before their digital Golden Age. What's worse, it resampled all the digital signal to 48kHz before sending it to the DAC. The player to audition around this period is the 65V IMO. Audio Research CD7 is quite a bit of achievement for AR b/c it sounds so unremarkable and doesn't put its own character (much) into the music, especially for a tubed player. However, many would find it "boring" sounding. I believe it to be a reference piece myself. Then again, it's probably true the Arcam coincides perfectly with your tastes, which is a powerful thing..

Boy, you shouldn't hold back so much I've listened to VD Revelations, and while not my cup of tea, they do have their virtues. It's impossible for them to sound lean or threadbare, which will serve many systems out there. They sound like the thick solid core cables that they are..

While I would agree you'd have a better time listening to vinyl for most "popular" albums put out in the last few decades, let's not forget there are plenty of bad-sounding vinyl albums out there. It's not redbook's fault that the deaf-ass, incompetent studio engineers go crazy with ridiculous EQ and dynamic compression when making a CD. When done right, I will take 24/96, 24/192 PCM all over vinyl any time, any day. Maybe even redbook on its good day.

Hehe, you can imagine my dismay when I rewired my K340 with the Jena Wire. Sounded like I changed my amp to a bad EL34 amp with small-ass PS

Well, there is a bit more to Jena Wire, including "6N" copper, use of "unflourinated teflon" dielectric, which they claim is big deal. The whole cryo thing is a personal taste thing. Having said that, I have a bunch of this Jena wire and have made DIY interconnects and recabled headphones, and basically I don't like it much. I much prefer the much cheaper Vampire continuous-cast magnet wire from Percy. Solid core and stiff, but a 3-wire braid of this stuff sounds excellent.

Keep saving your monies for bigga and bedda DAC's. We all know you won't be satisfied until you get into EMM/top Esoterics/APL, etc. The CEC DAC basically uses the same "discrete output stage" in that small plastic module as used in the AQVox DAC and Citipulse DAC. And you have already owned the Lite DAC60 type, which is really the same thing as Monarchy in question, with addition of another tube stage for "preamp" and a "SS output," which is most likely signal taken off just before the tube stage, then gone through an op-amp.

Hmm. Those aluminum caps are Russian surplus teflon caps in the "FT" series (not the K7x series most use). These go for around $4/each on Agon. I also see some Solen caps. I suppose one could argue the amp has been voiced with these caps, or take a chance and change'em all to V Cap Teflons and see what happens OT. Is there a reason why the column is so narrow that I have to use the left-right slider to view the full pic"

Man, this is too painful to watch unfold. Let me help you out a bit and suggest that you do a search here under "Edition 9" before posting any more about them

Welcome to the K1000 club. That oldie Bryston is actually a pretty good SS amp and should give you good service. The FIRST thing to do is to build yourself a better adapter cable. You don't need to buy those $$$ name-brand ones. Just make one with some Neutrik 4-pin XLR and 4 runs of Vampire continuous-cast copper "magnet wire."

Of all the Grado's he owns, the only one I want is HP1000 The GS1000... Oh my, I honestly don't know what happened there at Grado. I vastly prefer even RS-1 to it..

Well, all I can say is don't rush out and buy a pair until you really get to the bottom of its sound. It's true Qualia sounds great with electronica, but acoustic music kind of sounds not very natural and life-like IMO...

Your situation is pretty much my situation, down to thousands of CD's stored away and copied onto my hard drive. Alex at APL absolutely loves to trash USB audio, but when he finally comes out with his "proprietary connection" he's been talking about for a long time, it might be worth a shot, though at a $$$$ price. I'm also one one of those poeple who like the stock DV/SA 60 sound. Yeah, they don't sound like tubed CDP's, but so what? I would pick one up in a second if ANY Esoteric CDP's had a decent digital input, but none does. I guess I should be happy my PC/Lynx 2B digital out sounds as good as it does. I'd be curious how Lynx digital output compares to RME. Whatever, I'm happy enough with the sound I have now, and that's all that counts.

Now that you mention it, I'm 76.2% sure I need some Dulcolax STAT; otherwise, we're gonna have some brown-colored headband Senn HE60 at the FS section pretty soon... Of course, I do hope you didn't put estranged words in my mouth since all I'm talking about is the exact same DAC section in a given CDP from its transport vs. its spdif input.

Unfortunately, 99.999% of the time a CD played on a one box CDP is going to sound better than same CDP via digital input, just by the simple fact you're adding on several more (poor) connectors, digital cable, and most of all spdif connection. This is a dilemma for me as well since I'm PC audio guy. The only way to beat the odds is to do some kind of proprietary connection akin to i-Link, async HDMI/firewire, I2S, possibly the new async USB from Wavelength, maybe even the new Chinese TGLink. The TGLink is an interesting development since they make soundcards with TGLink output, but I can't seem to find any actual users of the interface \

I previously didnt' think so. 45 SET at 1.75-2 wpc definitely is not enough. I believe the reason Paramour does well with K1000 is its topology more than the 2A3 power rating. The C4S constant current loading and parafeed output are supposed to increase bass power and PRAT as well as increased clarity, both of which seem to help satisfy the ears without keep having to turn up the volume b/c you can't hear the details. I dont' know what kind of music you consider "dynamic," but I listen to pretty much every genre, including classical pieces with wide dynamic range to death metal with no dynamic range but with constant loudness. All fine here...

http://www.bottlehead.com/et/adobespc/paramourII/paramourII.htm Before spending some serious $$$ on "brand-name" SET's, especially 300B, I would seriously look into the unassuming Bottlehead Paramour MkII 2A3 SET monoblocks. They've got a good thing going with constant current source driver stage and parafeed output stage. I have the older MkI and have been listening day and night to it via HE60 and K1000, and I can't believe how good this amp is. The MkII Kit is only $679. So far all I did was to drop in some cheaper Auricaps into coupling cap position, which made a great thing even greater. The only other cap in the path is the Parafeed cap, and I think with just 2 caps upgraded to better caps, this thing is just a huge bargain stone cold killer. So, if you are the type who finds most 300B SET just too colored and/or overpriced (God knows 300B tube itself is just nuts-expensive), a good 2A3 SET may just be up your alley

Man, I feel sorry for you. I'm only looking for 0.047uF and 0.1uF caps, and even these are too expensive, but 1 uF? Foggitaboutit.

I assume you're talking about SCR/Solen caps, but which caps do you prefer? I'm looking for some coupling caps myself, but heck are they expensive (V Cap TFT, Sonicap Platinum, Relcap TFT, SCR TFT, Mundorf silver/oil, Audio Note PIO, etc)!

Aren't you the Nautilus/Levinson guy? I don't think MPX Slam leans towards that direction at all. I'm thinking something like Grado HP1 (or 2) with a nice Dynahi amp would be right up your alley. If (and when) HP1/2 is impossible to find with reasonable prices, Senn HD600 with balanced cable into something like Dynamight (balanced dynahi) or Headamp GS-X would also be in the kindred spirit...

That's just priceless

Hehe, the major problem with toslink is not the "fiber" per se, but the nasty cheap-arse toslink transceiver and receiver modules most companies use, not to mention the ridiculously under-engineered toslink connectors. The fact Toslink actually sounds as decent as it does despite it all is quite astounding to me personally