I haven’t done a serious change in the chain for sometime now. Either I’ve become complacent or just gave into the fact that my ears aren’t as nicely tuned as they may once have been. Occasionally, audio nervosa will get the better of me and prompt me to change a DAC or one of the preamps I like to play with (preamps are my favorite component to facilitate audible difference), however this year I’ve gone over the top (in terms of change) and I’m kind of happy I did. I recently changed up my DAC to a Schiit Yggdrasil LIM (certainly not the best DAC I’ve ever had, but really kind of magical in an inexplicable way) now followed by the amp and preamps. I had a fairly ’old’ Conrad Johnson M2300A, an absolutely lovely and powerful poweramp that really does no wrong. It adapted beautifully with whatever I put with it over the course of the last five or six years. Sometimes it shocked me how good, for instance, the bass was when adding say, the Schiit Yggdrasil LIM or a Krell HRC. Listening to 50’s and 60s Jazz that’s mostly what I listen to or some of the mostly deep track 60s/70s/80s rock albums, it never occurred to me how deep and tight the bass could go in my system. It was something like adding a subwoofer. In any event, it was a beautiful amp with a little magic and lots of headroom (400wpc into my Audio Physic Virgo 2’s) , tons of air, pretty good holography and lovely timbre. Very responsive to whatever I put in it. Now, I’ve added monoblocks, PS Audio M700 Stellar monoblocks. In terms of ’headroom’, I think I’m at 700wpc into 4ohms. I wanted to play with some class D stuff and if I’m being truthful, they’re leaner and less tight on the bottom end than the CJ. Nonetheless, I’m still going through the music and getting to know these monoblocks. Way more impressive, and seriously super satisfyingly, the Doge 8 Clarity with 1966 Siemens German ECC81’s. I was using the stock tubes just to hear what they sounded like when it first came in, it wasn’t impressive and I doubted what I did. I switched to the Siemens and this is possibly the greatest preamp I’ve ever had in my system- and I’ve had a lot of good preamps since the mid 90s. And in our world of mostly questionable audio hyperbole, this preamp is absolutely as good as all the hyperbole you’ve read about it. I love everything about the sound, with these tubes and it’s really simply incredible and I don’t say that about anything. I haven’t tried the phono section yet, which is a great bonus to the Doge 8 Clarity because my old Technics SL1800 can use a slight tune-up before I start seriously spinning vinyl again, but that gives me every reason to do a tune-up.
It’s rare that I spin CDs these days because I’ve uploaded quite a few terabytes of CD music to a hard drive (started this years ago) and that’s what I listen to, but I’m now inspired to insert a better CD transport than the Rotel changer I’ve been working with for the last 20 or so years. Bottom line, just sharing and I’m happy to report I’m enjoying my stereo immensely for the first time in a while. Enough to make me spend a little more money f’ing up ’the happy place’ I’ve stumbled upon.
isn’t that what we do?
