An Early Birthday Present

[Cressy Snr]

It's my 67th birthday in about 4 weeks. Yesterday, I pulled the trigger on an Audio Technica AT-LPW50PB belt driven turntable from Richer Sounds. It arrived this morning and I spent half an hour putting it together:

IMG_0596.jpeg (110.7 KiB) Viewed 6575 times

IMG_0595.jpeg (86.96 KiB) Viewed 6575 times

Image.jpeg (42.32 KiB) Viewed 6575 times

For what it cost, it's excellent and sounds very good.
It has a carbon fibre tonearm wand, servo DC motor and comes with a special version of the AT-VM95E MM cartridge (it has a black stylus body, that’s all) which means that it's a simple matter to upgrade the cartridge performance by fitting a stylus from higher up the VM range. It works a treat with the headphone amp, with a nice silky smooth presentation.
I'm currently running it through my MoFi external phono stage. It does have a built-in phono stage, but I haven't tried it yet. Can't see it being as good as the MoFi, but I'll have a go later.

[Cressy Snr]

Well, I tried out the built-in phono stage and it's as good as the external phono stage.
Maybe I'm easily pleased in my old age, but I can't find anything to complain about sound wise from the internal phono stage. It's sweet, clean, detailed and dynamic. Also there are now two less boxes on my desk.
The turntable just plays records without fuss.

[steve s]

Looks great Steve.. Good birthday present

[Paul Barker]

I had to go down to Sam’s flat to baby sit Roxy frightened of fireworks.

He has a Samsung music centre. I put the Patoral symphone on the deck.

I thought why am I bothering. Imaging soundstage life like great orchestral sound.

Solid state done well is very good.Amsung engineers must have been good, especially making high quality sound from small speakers.

Im going to give him a pair of speaker stands.

Happy birthday

[Cressy Snr]

Aye looks like the TT was a good buy.
I've been on a downsizing thing since around September, when I bought the Q Acoustics speakers and the Denon CD/Tuner/Amplifier.
I've also gone away from expensive speaker cables. I'm currently using 1mm, 2 core 5A electric flex for the speakers in the downstairs system and I'm damned if I can hear any degradation in sound.

IMG_0589.jpeg (61 KiB) Viewed 6259 times

I'm listening to more music than ever, even though, on paper, I've downgraded the system. Makes me wonder why I bothered with all the amp building and buggering about.

[Daniel Quinn]

To arrive at were you are at , you need to have travelled the entirety of your past .

[Ant]

I really need to downsize all the stuff i have, i wouldnt mind just to keep a couple of tts, get an integrated amp of some sort and some fairly large standmounts or small floorstanders. When we move ill have to make a decision when i have it all in one place to look at whats actually there.
Something like that new mission 778x amp would cut the boxes by half, not bad money at about 600 quid, nice and small. No need for dacs, phono stages, pre/power, just plug and play. Bin off all the complexity, might make me actually use the system again.

Will see.

[shane]

For the very same reason of proliferation of small boxes, I got rid of my KEL84 about five years ago and replaced it with a Quad Vena2 Play which, to all intents and purposes, is the same machine as the Mission in a Quad shaped box. Have to say I haven’t missed the KEL84 a bit. True, the Quad doesn’t have quite the same smoothness but it makes up for that in spades with improved dynamics and detail retrieval. Add to that a brilliant phono stage and DAC and it’s pretty hard to think of an argument against it. The Mission version also has the advantages of being cheaper and smaller.

[Cressy Snr]

Yep,
These all-in-one solutions are great these days I’m currently streaming Apple Music from my iPhone to my Denon RCD-M41 receiver. I’d been putting it off but it turned out to be a doddle to pair the phone to the Denon receiver; a ruddy sight easier than it was to pair the phone to the car!

It’s just so much easier now, both with the downstairs system fed by the Denon receiver and the upstairs one fed by the laptop, DAC and turntable. And because things are so easy, I listen to more music, which is ultimately what matters.

[Ali Tait]

Looks good Steve. I'm awaiting delivery of a Technics SL-7. Pretty much as fuss free as vinyl playback gets, and keeps the vinyl safe if I'm having a few jars whilst listening, which is my occasional wont.

[Cressy Snr]

… I'm awaiting delivery of a Technics SL-7. Pretty much as fuss free as vinyl playback gets, and keeps the vinyl safe if I'm having a few jars whilst listening, which is my occasional wont.