Enter the last year of major *beneficial* changes.

I first decided to give tube amplification a try. This was obvious since most people would use tubes along with higher sensitivity speakers. I couldn't go with flea power amps at 92dbm, but I could safely go with a 40 watt modified Dynaco. These classic units are rebuilt and the resulting amp can compete with much higher priced amps. My Dynaco ST-70 was found on the Klipsch forums, freshly modified by nosvalves.com with a driver board from tubes4hifi.com. These mods are reported to be among the absolute best. The resulting change was very pleasing after having taken a lot of the damping out of the room. Everything became much more listenable, but bass and treble extension seemed lacking. It also became apparent at this time that the CD player was a huge bottleneck in my system. When listening to the music I could hear the CD spinning in the player! Now this is VERY bad for the music because that noise and energy all gets amplified and confused with the musical signal that you want.

Hmm I forgot that my chosen DAC was the modified Art DI/O professional ADC unit. I modified this unit to output around 2V instead of the pro-level 9V so that it wouldn't overload the equip. This unit (with enough mods) is said to be a "giant killer," but I really don't believe in such a thing. It was a very nice DAC for the money after mods $100, and that's about it.

Decided to find a replacement for my CDP and DAC at the same time. I chose the Hawk Audio MP-DAC MkIII because of its review in comparison to the Audio Note DAC Zero and it's MASSIVE power supplies and regulation. The approach is simple: use common receiver and DAC with good old engineering and then follow that with an uncompromising solid-state output stage. The output is fully differential using discrete transistors and an op-amp ?in current sensing loop? Only printed circuit boards were purchased and I was left to source all of the parts except for the chipset. It took awhile to source all of the parts (and a lot of money), about $500 worth of parts. Turns out that the schematic and boards had a number of errors, even known and uncorrected errors, that I had to painfully work through. This DAC was completed before I received the new Audio Note transport. It was only a brief time that I played this DAC with the NAD CDP. It simply wasn't worth remembering its characteristics with such a dismal transport.

I loathed the NAD 521i before it was replaced. It barely escaped being thrown out the window a number of times. When you know that a component is really hurting your system it's pretty hard to have sympathy for it. I have no idea how it got such good reviews.

I took the Audio Note CDT-two because I was looking for a *transport* ie. a unit that only spits out bits and does not have any internal DAC. The AN was sent to me by an AA member who was upgrading to the CDT-two MkII. I was happy to take a $4500 transport off his hands for $1450 because it would nearly cost this much to DIY an implementation of the Phillips' renowned CD-Pro laser pickup. It's a simple concept, despite the AN smoke about Black Gate caps used and the AN "sound", it's a solid power supply driving one of the best laser units out there.

I worked very hard at this time to have my Lack-rack completed for when the AN transport arrived. The rack helped the sound in every possible way by a very noticeable margin.

Now with the Hawk Audio and Audio Note connected, I was listening to a completely different system. Right away I noticed that my DIY cables were making my system noisy, so I quickly replaced them with cables from Audio Art. This is a new company and I bought two 2-meter pairs of their copper IC's. These are shielded cables and cost me about $140. Now I could enjoy listening to a completely different animal.

The stereo now sounded very open with tons of detail. It's obvious that the speakers are *not* a short-fall of this system and they lend themselves to that intimate and detailed character. Digital harshness has been nearly eliminated, but the bass and treble still seem rolled-off.

mwoods111 September 26, 2006 23:30

I have made a ton of changes to my stereo in the last year and thankfully all of them have been positive. Up until now my stereo has been uninspiring and I was very tempted to quit a few times. I tend to get pretty determined, even stubborn (which can be bad), when faced with a hobby-challenge like this though. My entire system was essentially born out of the desire to come up with an uncompromising PC transport with an external DAC. The DAC was fascinating to me because at the time, there weren't any audiophile implementations of a USB DAC, so I proceeded to design one myself. At first I thought that I'd have to find an engineer to design it for me, but that wasn't very feasible. I simply studied circuits from that point on. Eventually (a year later), I was able to begin implementing the Texas Instruments/Burr Brown PCM2706. This turned into a headphone amplifier/USB->SPDIF project. Before that project was complete I had delved into a stand-alone stereo centered around some entry level components. Minimally this consisted of the following:

Bob Brines' FT-1600 Fostex 167E based MLTL
These speakers were chosen for their simplicity. They have no crossover and cover a wide frequency range with a single driver. This design makes them perfect for intimate types of music over most popular rock music. They reportedly excel at small classical pieces and small jazz.

Bryston 3BST
Chosen because of a rock-solid reputation in construction and warranty. They are said to be tube-like in response and provide plenty of clean power.

NAD 521i CDP
Chosen because it had great reviews and was inexpensive as a new unit.

Preamp: cheap passive POT kit that was sold as a passive attenuator. They sold these by tricking people into thinking that it was a discrete resistor type unit. So I was taken on this one. Still it was of relatively good quality as far as POTs go.

Speaker cables: two runs of CAT-5 twisted together, still in their jackets, terminated in twisted-pair fashion.

IC's: side-by-side wiring of 660/46 litz with copper Bullet terminations. (WRONG way to do IC's)

RESULT:

The Fostex speakers took a VERY long time to break-in. They sounded harsh and it was difficult to sit down and listen to most music because it would set you on edge and attempt to run fingernails against your eardrums. This is the way the stereo sounded for two years until I did a lot of work on my listening room and damped the heck out of it. Full curtains from both sides of the room, pillows in the corners with additional moving-type blankets. This tamed the stereo enough to listen to it for awhile at least.

mwoods111 September 26, 2006 23:29