I purchased a Salience 2.5 Mk II about 5 months ago, and I must say out of the box it is a great build. However, when I opened it up to peek inside there were some things that bothered me. Consequently before firing it up I cleaned the circuit boards. There was solder residue, even finger prints on the boards. They came up pretty well when cleaned. The phono section was well laid out and needed little attention apart from the cleanup. Next came the power supply itself. The signal wires and power wires were kinda bunched up together, and some of the lower value caps were a little suspect.
I kinda went crazy and fully upgraded the power supply. I left in the excellent 2200uf Nichicon's, and all the other caps I replaced with Elna Silmic II's. I swapped out the 1N4001 rectifier diodes for SF16's. I even swapped out the "ST" IRF830 transistor for a genuine old stock Motorola just for good measure. I separated the signal and power wires, and replaced the signal wires off the PCB with sold core silver into a beautiful Lemo connector.
Anyway, to cut to the chase this is an excellent and inexpensive phono stage, with incredible dynamics. It breathed a new lease of life into my Shure V15III (Jico SAS stylus). Even my original, unmodified London Decca Gold sounds amazing. While the coupling caps (1uf 400v SCR's) are quite good I can only imagine the improvement when I eventually upgrade to Jupiter 1uf 100v copper foils. This phono stage is worth the expense of high end coupling caps, no doubt at all!
I don't know much about the silver power cord upgrade. I made my own power cord (power supply to phono section) interconnect, using 22awg mil spec teflon coated, shielded silver plated copper wire from navships on Ebay. Gave me a great result when used with the beautifully made Lemo connectors (made in China, too).
