dgarretson
Responses from dgarretson
| Marantz SA7S1 owners - stock or modded Mrtennis, if you're shooting for purity & silkiness, consider the Reference Audio Mods/Audio Consulting Silver Rock step-up transformer output stage, but installed without the optional op amp buffer section. The SS buffer section adds pace, dy... | |
| VH Audio Vcaps I'm about 50 hrs. into 6.1uf Clarity MR in tweeters of my Merlins, which is an advance over stock Hovland Musicap. More detail & air, better layering, wider & deeper soundstage, quieter background, & less strident. | |
| VH Audio Vcaps Yes, the Audio Circle thread touches almost everything, including sometimes overlooked Russian teflon/PIO/silver mica, Aura, Penta Labs, a close comparison between Mundorf SIO & Silver/Gold, and interesting experiments with bypass caps. The on... | |
| Saw My Morning Jacket a few nights ago Any opinions on the quality of their live album Okonos? Though I have not heard their latest studio album, IMO "Its Still Lives" is great & has a pleasing trippy psychelia missing from their subsequent work. | |
| All Things Must Pass As Time magazine remarked back in the day about "All Things Must Pass," Harrison was "The Heaviest Beatle of Them All." The bookends of this album and his parting gift of "Brainwashed" are his best and most soulful work. | |
| Tube preamp noise A simple way to isolate from rack noise or foot-falls is to float the component on a partially inflated inner tube made for a child's bike. | |
| Tube preamp noise I don't think I've ever had a 6SN7 (or many other types) that are not microphonic to one degree or another. Unless the problem is severe it doesn't indicate that the tube is not performing well in other respects or that the tube will fail prematur... | |
| Top resistors The Russian NOS 6N8S I tried are rare & expensive mil spec stamped 1578 with metal base. I believe they date to 1955. | |
| New Rowland Criterion 2-chassis battery pre Guido,IME monolithic op amps can sound great on batteries-- perhaps surpassing tubes-- but if that preamp has anything short of magnificent bass control & dynamic authority, you can likely blame choice of NiMH batteries. | |
| New Rowland Criterion 2-chassis battery pre The proof is in the listening, but generally speaking series-connected NiMH batteries are a poor choice for SOTA. They have up to several ohms of impedance, as compared to several milliohms for large SLA batteries. You can hear these differences, ... | |
| marantz 11s2 sacd player modifications Kyle at Reference Audio Mods has worked extensively on the SA11 & substitutes a buffered output stage based on silver coupling transformers. No tubes, but very smooth & resolving. | |
| VH Audio Vcaps Reb,I agree with your rating of REL TFT several steps down from V-Cap TFT. I was surprised to hear freshly installed V-Caps immediately surpass well broken-in REL TFT in my preamp. I've not yet tried Russian FT-series teflon caps in coupling posit... | |
| VH Audio Vcaps Sns, While some complain that V-Cap TFT sounds awful without long break-in, I agree with you that this point is overstated. IME TFT surpasses most everything else almost immediately, and then progresses though a long break-in cycle to relax, open ... | |
| Best Zeppelin LP recordings... There has recently been quite a flow of Zep and Who 200g Classic releases. Any insights into the sonics of these? Apart from sonics, has Classic resolved the extensive QA problems it was having with surface noise? At $31 a pop I'm not taking any m... | |
| Upgrade for users of 1/2" mylar belt Doug,Are you suggesting that cogging effects may be greater with 1/2" tape than with the thread drive I'm currently using, owing to improved grip of tape? I had considered this possibility when earlier converting VPI from soft rubber belt to threa... |