Your greatest high end audio purchase!!!

Like you and many others, I began this quest in the early 80s with a receiver and decent speakers. Many amplifiers and speakers later, the hobby eventually led me to working with Merlin International speakers, and then a speaker business of my own.

After 4 or 5 years in business, and numerous speaker designs and builds later that were mostly value oriented, I made something more along the lines of a "best effort" speaker using Focal kevlar woofer and midbass drivers in a transmission line, and Seas tweeters with top shelf crossover components (including Convergent capacitors). I tweaked that design until I loved it ~ 1995. I thought they were really good then, but had no idea that I’d feel even more strongly about them 30+ years later. They’ve improved with every system upgrade and tweak I’ve made. After bi-amping the system with SS on the woofers, and tube monoblocks up top, all I want to do is listen now. 😎

Hopefully these links will work:

Upgrading my preamp, power amp, DAC, all gave me great improvement.

The one item which gave me the largest smiling OMG face was when I upgraded my speakers from  the Yamaha NS-1000 to the NS-2000.

I have two and I can't decide which was/is more influential. The first, which I no longer have but it lasted for over 30 years, was an Audio Research SP 10II back in the days when vinyl ruled. The second is my Silverline Bolero speakers acquired over 10 years ago. They have everything I need in a speaker, tone (especially), clarity, and looks as well. They have been in production now for at least 12 years and you rarely see them for sale so I think others must agree with me. :-) Getting a bit spendy though.

Can’t single out any one but here are the biggest winners for me, all current:

1) Ohm Walsh Speakers

2) KEF meta speakers

3) Roon

4) Cambridge Audio Evo 150

5) Room Equalization Wizard (REW) freeware (used with Roon DSP)

6) dbpoweramp for ripping CDs and Picard freeware to help with autotagging

7) Linn Axis turntable with Denon dl103R cartridge.

8) Audacity freeware to master analog vinyl converted to digital. This enables me to do my own digital mastering when converting vinyl to digital to then add to my digital music library and access via Roon.

9) Humminguru Ultrasonic record cleaner to get records spiffy clean before playing and typically also converting to digital.

Search my posts over the years and you should find I’ve elaborated on each of these at some point.

I hate to repeat from a recent post… but.

In 1978 I committed to a really great system and after reading popular stereo magazines (Stereo Review ((not a good source)) I bought the top rated Onkyo tape deck. It performed well, I thought. To get the very best out of it I had a technician align the heads for maximum performance. That destroyed the sound.. several iterations… never sounded good again.

I was in a high end store sharing my woes with a sales person and he said, “here, take this home and try it.” It was a first generation Nakamichi, wood around the outside, upright.. seven years old, weighed a ton. I was skeptical. I took it home, it was unbelievable. Comparing it to the original, in perfect working order Onkyo, the Onkyo sounded like a small plastic transistor radio vs real high fi equipment. It was a revelation, showed me what set apart audiophile (other than astronomical cost) from the rest and set me on my audiophile path for the next fifty years.