@david_ten My apologies for the delay in reply in regard to your inquiry as to how my DI SE's are settling in...you very well that is rhetorical. They have completely broken now and they sound incredible! The fine detail, the deep, punchy bass, the imaging...it is everything I had hoped for when upgrading from the DI's!
Mac-if you think you like the sound of your new Duelund caps now, wait until they break in, which takes a good 400-500 hours, you will see why they are 3-4x the cost of their competitive peer! Aric's Motherlode preamp is in full bloom, and I cannot think of any piece of gear that would better it's performance at any price! At any price that I would consider paying, anyway.
And once again, I have to give thanks and shout out to Bill(grannyring) for opening my eyes and ears to what is possible in sonic improvements from a DIY perspective! A month or so back I was reading on this thread about the NOS Western Electric cable that some people were using with great results in their DIY projects. Of course Bill was one of the voices on this and other forum threads that I ran across as well in researching further. I reached out to Bill to see if he would build me a USB cable using the WE wire and he said yes, but that he would use the new(er) Duelund tinned copper wire, as the results were even better. Suffice it to say that it blew away the rather pedestrian Audioquest USB cable that I was using at the time.
This got me thinking that now with all new gear that I have in my system over the past year or so(Tekton, Aric Audio and Pass Labs), all of my cables are most likely a weak link. Bill said he will build me speaker and interconnects using the Duelund wire, but I wanted to try my own hand at DIY. Bill was gracious enough to suggest where to source, what to purchase and how to construct each type of cable. My first project was a pair of speaker cables, as they seemed to be the easiest to build. I was floored with the result! The Audioquest Comet cables sounded like I was using lamp cord in comparison. I am now in the process of building a shielded phono cable as well as two sets of IC's using the Duelund 20g and 16g respectively.
So what is the moral of the story, said for the fact that Bill kicks ass?!?! For the last 25 years I have been, "chasing the audio dragon", as I like to refer to it as(it is in fact addicting, as you know), and thankfully, my system has never sounded better. And I did it by liquidating all of my expensive, over marketed, heavily reviewed gear in favor of craftsman who are as equally passionate about music and sound as I have become. Not parties who appear(to me anyway now that I have had the opportunity to become involved in the build) to be over engineering the process with low(er) end parts. Just saying...
Cheers and happy listening!
Brian
