Hi CliveClive wrote:Hi Steve,
I'm having an evening on my own tonight so loads of music is being played. I am mixing CD and LP, both are good but LP is mostly better, a lot depends on recordings. The sssh you dislike I find is more of an issue with CD but pretty much it's banished from my system. My deck is not a 401, it's a 301 on a twin tier Slatedeck with the Terminator arm and an ZYX R-100 cartridge. I also have a Kontra B and Pickering 7500. As I'm near Altrincham I may not be so far from you. If you are over this way maybe we could meet.
Clive
Thanks for the offer of an audition. Sometime around the end of October beginning November would suit me fine. I'll stick this in my diary and get back to you then if that's OK with you.
I think my experience with vinyl is typical of the sort of thing that went on during the mid 80s early 90s where suspended subchassis/belt driven decks from a Scottish manufacturer ruled the roost and impressionable young twenty-something men like myself, with more money than sense, got themselves sucked into the mystique/ male jewelry aspect of hi-fi, without realising that what they were actually getting themselves into was a carefully managed lock-in designed to extract as much money as possible from the wallets of the hapless individuals who fell for it.
My vinyl based system was nothing more than a money pit as far as I'm concerned.
"Bit rough at the top end sir? It's your turntable you see, not a stable enough platform and it's being shown up by the rest of the system. Ker-ching!"
Still a bit rough? well its the arm isn't it. Now your turntable is the best in the world you can't expect it to perform at its best with that arm Ker-ching!
"Still rough at the top at the end of a record? You're only using a £300 cartridge you see sir. They dont tend to have the super fine-line parabolic exponential hyperbolic diamond with boron cantilever, not for that price anyway."
"Whaddya mean your CD player sounds better?"
"Look pal If you're gonna mention digital in the same breath as this fine piece of mechanical engineering then you can get out of me shop right now!"
"Go on! sling yer ook sonny and don't come back until you've seen some sense"
A bit of artistic licence there of course but that's the gist of my experience with vinyl.
The Roksan Radius 5 with unipivot arm and Denon MC cart did get me much closer to analogue nirvana than did the 2 grands worth of other turntable and the JVC Direct drive TT with Ortofon Rondo Blue was even better, but after the cat destroyed my cartridge I simply decided enough was enough. I'd spent twenty years trying to get vinyl to sound how I imagined it should sound and decided life was simply too short to waste any more time on analogue.
As I said earlier the SB3 and the music server was a revelation and I've never looked back. Hi-fi, for me at any rate' has become more about the music, rather than the turntable and I can now play about with DACs amps and speakers to get closer to the artists I listen to.
I'm starting from good sound and getting improvements to that sound with each mod I make to the system, not starting from poor performance and spending mountains of cash trying to get a merely acceptable sound out of analogue.
I'm well aware of how much vinyl playback has improved over the last couple of decades, mostly because of enthusiasts like ourselves and one or two canny manufacturers throwing out the mantra of rigidity and low plinth mass and embracing unipivots and passive parallel tracking arms but TBH, I personally, can't be bothered with it anymore.
All IMHO of course and no doubt YMMV
Steve
