Alex66

I have the SACD of this I have to say it is rather good a lot better than the cd not sure about compared to the Vinyl though. Have not had a decent TT for a good while but if you want a decent version the SACD is good.

I use a very nice QED cable Precision I think it is called; I bought them for £5 for 2 at such a price I would be getting a Belkin or such so I can not complain. Actually I think it sounds better than the Belkin I tested the device out with how much I could not say.

I would just like to put a little vote in to look at the Dunlop Systemdek, I had one with the acrylic platter upgrade it was very good. Alas I stupidly swapped it for a Linn LP12 and I preferred it to the Linn better soundstage and more detailed. The Linn was replaced by a Pink Triangle which was much better than either. The Systemdek is still made under the guise of one of the Audio Note turntables so you should hopefully be able to get spares and I have seen them go for as low as £50 on the bay. Alas Pink Triangle went bust it seems so spares could be hard and the belt was a pig to get on. I would say for my taste I prefer acrylic plattered TT's others millage may vary. Though I ended up with a Garrard 401 with an SME IV and that was class but they seem to go for silly money and to think I bought my 401 for £40.

I had a separate spur set up for the hifi in a house I lived in, it was like a major upgrade of the stereo. I did have the spur over specced with the highest current cable I was allowed to put in and used high quality 'MK' sockets as they were are better made/more reliable over the long run. So if you are going to the bother of rewiring its worth noting, others I knew who had to do a rewiring job also went to the excess of running a separate fuse board for the spur as well. Although the proviso has to be how much was due to new cabling it can't be said.

That felt to me more of an advertorial than a review, now it may be good but I would not go on that for opinion. How for instance does the device remove jitter when it is post DAC?

Its a hard one as there are some formats that on all but the worst gear are obviously superior i.e. Vinyl was better than tape cassettes and a CD or Flac sound better than an MP3. But if a poor recording is listened to on the highest quality file type it is likely to be less satisfactory and enjoyable than a great performance recorded well on cassette or mp3. Then there are those that do not hear good sound quality, perhaps they do not want to for them it is never going to be of interest or benefit. Personally I want to hear a good recording but if there are faults or things missing due to playback it will irk me, whether DSD or PCM I find both to be enjoyable. That is to say that if a work is available on only one or the other I will be happy, a lot though is due to not having a good enough system at present.

You could buy a USB SPdif convertor, then connect to the coax digital input on the amp. Does the Tosh have a digital output? then you could use that they are sometimes combined with one of the headphone out ports.

They got complacent and misjudged a lot of the directions the market in many things was going in. Though I thought their last hot product was the Playstation, I think their gaming section has been quite good. Its things like TV's where people always thought of Sony as the best one to get. Now for some reason its Samsung, all they need though is some good desirable new thing.

I built a custom multi channel amp for someone just after dvd came out as there was no available model for them. It was a night mare as the 6 channel pot had to be custom made. Then if I recall right had to also do various balancing controls one for each output channel that altered the gain round each stage and then on two of the inputs another set of pots for each channel. It had 6 inputs of 6 channels no stereo all line level outputs. Alas it did not have remote control, which made it less than ideal. I am surprised at the lack of multi channel amps with more than a couple of 6/8 channel inputs though with phonos it does take up a lot of space, could be solved with a couple of 5 pole xlrs or something similar.

I hear a difference and that is listening to a cheep eBay DAC via Toslink, Ok I have a good power supply on it and a carefully selected OpAmp but then I also noticed a difference when using the I Mac's built in sound and a poor yamaha all in one. Obviously the changes have become more noticeable so when I finish my DAC who knows.

Not a very good article as there are many parts of Sony's manufacturing division that are working quite well such as the imaging sensor division. However rather stupidly they got caught on the hoof with flat screen tv's as they thought people would not go for them over the superior Trinitron tube. If and when they do drop lines it will be some of the lines not all as some do still make money and others are good for promotion items. I think they lose money on DSLR sales but as they sell themselves the sensor it comes out as a wash, but something like the A99 is a good example of look what we can do.

Cheers for the heads up I pick up a pair on Tuesday, got to wait for the USB module to arrive and build the rest of the DAC though before any opinion can be given.

As I recall from the pre I made it used a 22 ohm on the output, it could drive the most ott cable lengths. There is a lot of negativity towards the humble OpAmp, but carefully chosen they can be exceptional devices. That is the important thing though the ideal amp for the I/V is not the same as one to drive half a kilometre of cable or for a phono input stage. Now a lot of them can be changed in many circuits with out catching fire or damage but unless you know why you are changing one you can cause a deterioration of quality of the output. The pre was in the days of vinyl so it was a required unit now Ill go with a good volume control either on the input of a stereo power amp or on the output of the DAC (buffered). Software volume controls lack a tactile quality that I like.

I sussed a long time ago that I could build a decent playback system for not a lot of money, the knowledge made me feel that some things are rather expensive from the what is inside perspective. However in the cases where the unit has properly been designed then fair plays it can cost a lot to run an R&D section. Still a lot of stuff is just an expensive use of application notes and the chip/fet makers have done the bulk of the design work. That being said all my stuff though good on the sound dept looks poor.

But Thatcher is so hated by a large part of the population that it would cause uproar and there are a lot of unanswered questions about her too.