Adcom or Creek?

Hi Joe,

If you want the most bang for the buck, Adcom is a great place to start. Until recently, their unmoded gear has been a bit less than impressive, items like the GCD-750, GFP-750, and the 5802 amp have changed that. These too need mods to really smoke, but they are pretty good out of the box, which older gear was not. The thing is that Adcom generally uses a solid design, though I hear they have had issues with manufactures not following those designs, etc. Anyway, even most of the ones they had issues with, because of their sound design in general, can be moded to sound pretty fantastic. For more specific information I would contact Stan Warren, co-founder of PS Audio, later he founded Superphon, and now he has SuperMods.

Stan Warren
Supermods
2375 W. 21ST Ave.
Eugene, OR 97405

(541) 344-3696

He has no answering machine, and ususally is available in the evenings. I have worked with him and he is fast, reliable, and a great guy. He does Adcom mods all the time and can adivse you more properly as far as what gear to buy, so you can mod it to rival some of the super gear out there.

Best Regards,

Lou

Hi Josh,

It all depends upon funds. If funds are tight, I would never recommend tubes. You can get a nice old Perreaux SM-2 preamp for a few dollars, replace the 2 modular bridge rectifiers with Freds, the other diodes in the power supply with low noise UF4007 diodes, and all the caps, other than the 12 big PS caps, with Black Gate caps, I guarantee you a killer preamp with a great little phono stage. You can use Nichicon's audiophile grade caps in the power supply to save a couple more bucks. It will not be as great as the best, but it certainly will be better than a lot of highly touted gear.

If you want to spend a little more and get a remote, the GFP-750 with Black Gate caps, and soft recovery low noise diodes would be the way to go. As for Adcom being grainy, I have hated Adcom gear most of my life, nevertheless, Stan Warren can make it sound pretty awesome.

Hi Josh,

I would not bother with the Art DI/O. I tried one and Boulder Cable did all they could do to it, but it was pretty unimpressive. One of the late 80 Sony ES top of the line single CDP's will give you better sound, but if you are going that far, just save your pennies and buy a GCD-750, change out the modular bridges for fred based bridges, and the 1N400? diodes for UF4007's. Replace the 1000uF, was it 50V O/P caps with Black Gates. If this is just too much, then get an Adcom 700 DAC and mod it. The GCD-750 would, IMO, be the equal of most, if not any, Stereophile class "A" rated CDPs.

Lou

Hi Miles,

Depends, upon system resolution, etc. I am not sure what you mean about extra cost though. I am going to assume that you mean over the cost of a DI/O, You can have my DI/O it is garbage! The voltage regulator went in it, and it is such junk that I am not even going to repair and sell it, I think I would be doing someone a disservice.... The GCD-750 is very good stock, but moded through my Acoustat Spectra 3300's it was on par with my Bidat, which is one of the best DACs ever made IMO. I do need to test it with cone speakers to be sure, the Acoustats can be partial to some odd gear.... :-)

Best Regards,

Lou

Thanks Sean,

I am not sure what a GFP-750 is capable of, but a well moded SM-2 is pretty hard to beat.

Lou