The BEST system you've ever built !!!!

Interesting to hear many of you mentioning your love of vintagey components and old systems.

I would vote for a system I had in high school in 1979: Kenwood KD-500 with SME III and Grado Signature/Dynavector Ruby, Yamaha C-2a preamp, Hafler DH-500 power amp and Magneplanar MG-IIbs -- much more musical and enjoyable than many other mega buck systems I have had in recent years including Levinson, Audio Research, Martin Logans blah blah blah.

I used to listen for hours and now I just stumble around this forum and high end stores like some bleary eyed junkie searching for some relief.

I am not normally a sentimental guy. Has audio quality actually gotten WORSE in 25 years?

Hmmmm......maybe it's just that nasty little binary code --that we keep trying to improve?!?

CW--Ah, nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.... Seriously, I've found the trend you noted interesting also. I really don't think the quality of audio has gone downhill (putting aside digital, analog is vastly improved over the stuff I had in college 30+ years ago), but perhaps it hasn't, in certain areas (such as amplification), improved as much as the industry would like to have you believe, and perhaps in our obsessiveness to improve the sound quality of our systems we've lost touch with what got a lot of us into this hobby in the first place, the ability to just kick back and enjoy our favorite music in the comfort of our own homes without worrying about whether the power feeding our equipment is clean, the effect of different shelving on the sound of our CD player, etc., etc.

Hear, hear, Rc! A lot of the (youthful?) enthousiasm and freshness seems to have gone away... Cheers!

This thread "has legs". I see my last post was in '00. Rc and Gregm; being retired, I have found time to BOTH listen for pleasure each day, and STILL obsess over such things as clean power, vibration control etc. and to that end have lately been auditioning AC outlets.

Since last posting, I've added Vandersteen 5 speakers. This is the single biggest upgrade I've ever made to my system-- and the most expensive-- mostly for the tremendous bass I now enjoy. And experimenting with AC outlets has yielded good results. I now use a combination of Hubbells, Acmes (for speaker subs), and a FIM for amp. I've also recently added a Marantz Professional CD recorder that I like a LOT. Cheers. Craig

I must admit that I've been obsessing since my initial post, although like you, Craig, I find plenty of time for pleasurable listening; the key is choosing components that can bring a smile to your face and lose you in the music, I guess.

In the last 18 months, I have upgraded my analog front end by getting the Debut platter/bearing/vacuum upgrade for my Basis Ovation, upgrading the Graham to 2.2 status, changing to a Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum cartridge, changing to a Graham IC-70 armcable and adding a Lamm LP2 phono stage when the low output of the Koetsu made a persistent rumbling noise from my JP80 too noticeable; added a Sony SCD 777ES SACD player, modded by adding an Audio Logic tubed analog stage; changed from Meitner amps to Sonogy Black Knight Mk II amps for my bass modules (integrate a little better with the Jadis amps); changed almost all of my cabling, on the front end adding some Nordost Valhalla, and from the preamp on switching to NBS Omega (I blame fellow member Ronc for this, I couldn't believe the difference his switch to Transparent made in his system), and having a speaker cable (tri-wire for the satellites) made up by a member of our NJ Audio Society; and added a large amount of isolation bases and platforms of this member's design, which have helped immeasurably with my tubed equipment. The result has been much better resolution and soundstaging, without losing the very much of the character and musicality I always liked about the system (although I sometimes miss a little of that character on some music). I'm still playing with some cables on the front end, where the NBS is too bulky to be used, but I'm done for now, honest!!!!