What is your front end ?


What is your front end  is it T/T , CD, R to R, Cassette deck, Streaming , Internet Radio , or portable devices such as mp3 players iPod etc, if you have all of those which you enjoy most ?

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Turntables. The primary system is analog only with all tube amplification. A second system is turntable based, again with all tubes but with the addition of CD, TV, and subs. I used to have Tidal Hi-Fi but now YouTube with an adblocker and headphones suffice for streaming.

Excellent ! can't  beat analog, I really deliriously enjoyed  my analog years I've had approx 130 thousand LP's during the Perfect sound forever slogan era 1980's picked up thousands of LP's from flea market sales next to nothing due age and physical disability LP playback became troublesome for me it was not easy to handle and play LP's with one arm, replace most my favorite LP 's with CD's I was fairly satisfied with CD Playback with my Marantz CD94 cdp but it was not as enjoyable as with my analog set up. 5 years ago become a member of streaming society, Accessing massive music library of Tidal , Qubuz etc  sound quality depending  on recordings rather enjoyable , while I was trying to tidy my overcrowded music room found my 5th and 6th generation ipods once is fully charged they were fully functional for sake of fun connected them via headphone socket to my tube preamp , naturally sound was dull and lifeless, decided to invest ipod transports such as Wadia 170i docking station as well as Onkyo ND-S-1 Transports re arrange my iTunes library import almost %80 of CD library to my ipods naturally lossless format (approx 3500 cd's, I've also replaced ipods fairly unreliable hard disc to SSD 128gb ,result is IMHO as good as CD If not better frankly prefer to streaming but you need to good Dac, My Dac is Mcintosh D-150 which I'm planning to upgrade it to Denafrips pontus 12th soon I now have 7  of 128gb ipods with SSD Hard drive , from 1 to 7 ipods labelled jazz , blues , rock,contemporary, alternative, world music , as for the ipod transports personally prefer onkyo NDS1 to Wadia 170i as you know both transports are remote controlled. so my new front end is ipod.

I never considered how difficult it would be to play lps with one arm.  Pulling CDs off the shelf and out of the jewel box also doesn’t sound like fun