Yep - the big walnut plank sits atop two 12 X 12 hemlock beam chunks and the two short walnut planks sit on brass feat.

grateful November 25, 2011 01:53

love your equipment "rack". Walnut? you just gave me some great ideas with it.

gadmanrdh November 19, 2011 13:31

Well, finally after a couple of years, have finished the back of my listening room. Bricked the remaining walls, installed a tin drop ceiling - out ran silicon on all the hanging rales and used construction adhesive to affix foil backed bubble wrap insulation to the back sides of each tile - the result is deadened dampened ceiling - nice. I also affixed Dynamat Extreme to the duct work. Super nice to finally be done after 2 years of work. The only thing I would have done different is ran heavier gauge wire for the dedicated stereo mains - I ran 10g a but if I could have done it over I would have gone bigger - why??? Well, in the course of doing this rebuild I have learned that wire gage makes a very noticeable difference in the performance of power tools (like electric brad nail driver, circular saw, etc.) even though the "book" says 14 to 12g a is acceptable.

grateful October 27, 2011 03:14

System edited: Added Purest Audio STB-9000 record clamp. Very nice, solid and weighty - constructed of solid brass and chrome plated. Provides some nice dampening and flattens warded records. Highly recommended for such a low price.

grateful March 28, 2011 23:48

Yea, my DAC has wandered pretty far from the various kits offered by Brian at AN Kits. Mine started off as a 3.1, then the power supply was significantly changed by building a separate chassis dual-mono power supply (using 2 kits) then the kit caps were swapped for Cerafines, Mundorf Tube Caps, and V-Caps (I know many don't like the Mundorfs, but I'm not necessarily looking for the "AN sound" but instead what sounds most natural to my ears). The digital board includes the kit diodes swapped to silicon carbide CREE diodes along with caps swapped to Cerafine. The analogue stage has received V-Caps, Mills, and so forth.

I don't know how my CREE's sound in comparison to your STI's, but probably comparable I would guess.

One bridge I have not fully crossed is the output transformers - I did upgrade to the AN Ultra Hi-B's but I can't help wondering what you get for the SIGNIFICANT increase in expense of the AN silver and perma 50% nickel transformers. The price of a pair of these almost matches what I have invested in the whole DAC... could they improve the sound that significantly???

Anyway, thank you for the info

grateful December 16, 2010 14:58

I gave you the wrong site for the diodes. My computer, trying to be helpful,
filled something in it thought was close.The three tines was the tip off I had
gone wrong.

I looked up the ones you have on board. This is not the ones I see on all the
AN DACs at their site. I bet someone has read my posts some years back,

Here is the one in mine: http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-
pdf/pdf/22174/STMICROELECTRONICS/BYW80200.html?

The difference is phenomenal. It lets through all the music as the stocks ones
couldn't. Drum solos are amazing. Slam attack is nothing I have heard with
any DAC. The highs come into focus. Transients improve. Singers step
forward, while drums are behind with force.

I first did this with an AN One .1. I held an audio party. A fellow audiophile put
on his AN DAC 2.1 with lots of upgrades. After about 10 minutes of this, one
of the fellows yelled out, "Can we put Vince's DAC back in please?" It makes
that much different. Now, with my DAC 2.1, the music is better than anything
I have heard. Just imagine what your 3.1 will do.

We went to see Chanticleer on one of their rare visits, and bought their last
Christmas CD. We put it on the system, and the similarity with the real thing
was amazing.

muralman1 December 16, 2010 06:48

Muralman1, I wonder how these sound in comparison to the silicon carbide Schottky diodes I have on my digital power board - I'm using the CREE CSD01060. which reportedly have a 0 ns recovery.

grateful December 16, 2010 04:37

This will take you right there. They should replace the little diodes on your Digital Power Supply Board. I have Scintillas which, like your Quads, can define every little detail it is given. The diodes make a world of difference.

http://cpc.farnell.com/stmicroelectronics/stps60l40cw/diode-schottky-2x30a-40v/dp/SC07421?in_merch=Products%20From%20This%20Range&MER=e-bb45-00001003

Also, if there is a dealer nearby for you to try the Flatfish, please do give it a whirl.

muralman1 December 13, 2010 03:14

Thanks for the kind works.

Muralman1, tell me about the Schottkys you refer to.

grateful December 13, 2010 00:50

What a beautiful system, so cool. Enjoy !

sympaticonorm December 12, 2010 04:22

Well, darn. I did miss steering you to the best transport. The winner should
have been the 47 Lab Flatfish. This transport is better than any I have heard
including the PSA. It has revolutionized my Audio Note sound in ways I never
thought imaginable.

The most loving thing it adds to the music is natural flow 47 Lab calls,
"harmony."

By the way, I will give you the part number for Schottky super fast recovery
diodes. They will move your DAC from musical and smooth, to just plain live.

muralman1 December 12, 2010 03:49

Oh, I should add to the last post - that while recording CDR's, the Marantz is VERY susceptible to power fluctuations. What I mean is; if a sudden strong draw of power come on, such as the central-air unit, then there is an error recorded - a pop or a brief loss of sound on the recorded CD.

At first, I would listen the recorded discs and hear these pops and ticks and I thought that the Marantz was damaged. But, as I played and fiddled, I began to noticed these errors would correlate with when the central-air would kick on (while recording). The error would occur just when the unit kicked on, not during its entire working, which makes sense, since when the AC kick on, it "all of a sudden" sucks a large amount of power from your homes internal power grid. I shut the unit off (preventing it from cutting on), recorded, and no problem.

grateful October 10, 2010 19:07

Well, still waiting for the monitor loop cables from Grover, but in the mean time I picked up some of those cheapo / standard RCA cables to test out some CD recording.

So, I connected the Marantz to my MP-3 pre via the tape-monitor loop in/outs. Set the front and rear switches to analogue input and made the necessary control set up adjustments. First I recorded from a dead cassette making several adjustments to volume, balance, DNR in/out MPX in/out, and eq 120/70. What I found is; the best sounding was vol out at noon, balance 0, DNR out, MPX out, and eq at 70. This resulted in a CD that had no tape hiss, clean & crisp, and as natural sounding as the cassette. Of course, the limits of the cassette and recording were present (mostly limited highs, such as cymbals), but again, these limites were present in the original recording. The CD sounded exactly as the cassette - and this was very pleaseing, as the Nakamitsi makes the cassettes sound fabulous.

Next I recorded from my phono. The albums I chose were ones I had on vinyl and factory CD. This allowed me to compare the 3; the vinyl, the factory CD, and the CDR from the vinyl. The result... Well, I reckon it's what one might expect - the CDR sounded the worst of the three. Not unlistonable, but definitely inferior to both originals. Comparably, in a word veiled - not as crisp, clean, nor as dynamic as either the factory CD or vinyl. The natualness of the vinyl is noticeable but definitely lesser, the crispness of the factory CD is hinted at but distantly. Stage is comparable but, again, lesser so. Articulation, micro dynamics are there but veiled.

To sum it up, I would NOT replace my vinyl with CDR's of it!!! But, I would happily consider CDR's of my vinyl for car listening... As far as CDR's of my cassettes - well, thats a different story. I'm hearing that the CDR of cassettes are as good as the cassette recording.

Why the difference? I don't know if it's due to my cassettes being recording of live events and, as such, have such recorded imperfections that higher fidelity just is not possible or if it is the limitations of the cassette media that does not allow high enough fidelity to hear differences, or is it the cables...

None-the-less, it is what it is and I am happy just to be able to preserve these cassettes of live shows. So, I will commence recording all my cassettes to CDR but will not consider the same for vinyl - once I have the Grover interconnects for it.

Lastly, I will post a comparison of the Grover interconnect loops once I get them.

Cheers

grateful October 10, 2010 18:57

Copied some discs today with the Marantz CDR510. Much more natural sounding than comparative copies burned off a computer. Less edgy, less bright.

I'm not technically experienced enough to know what the audio-only Marantz does differently than a computer, but you can definitely hear it! So much so, I'm recopying some CDs I had burned years ago.

Anyway, I'm waiting on a patch cable from Grover Huffman to begin the cassette to CD endeavor - will follow up later

grateful September 04, 2010 20:58

the Nak 680ZX back from Willie Herman. Sounds absolutely fabulous - in fact, I did not know cassettes could actually sound this good!!! Amazing!!! Anyway, Willie said this was the nicest 680ZX he had seen since he was opening them brand new from the factory back in the day... Looked like it had never even been out of the box, required very little to get it up and running perfectly, he said. He completely cleaned and calibrated it, realigned everything, reset the internal oscillator, set the speeds, wow, & flutter, and so forth...

On a side note, Willie is absolutely fabulous to deal with. He even called me while he was on vacation and he let me know when he got it and what was going while he was tearing it apart and so forth. He is truly an exemplar businessman and a rare dying breed...

Anyway, so why did I go through the trouble to reconnect to a 30+ year old dead technology (ie - cassette tape). Because I happen to have kept a fairly large cassette tape collection of live Grateful Dead show recordings left over from my youth. And amazing enough they have survived those days fairly well preserved. In fact, I'm listening to a show from Boston Music Hall now and it sounds exceptionally good. I have a little over 100 shows recorded. So my thinking is; I'm going to use the Nak deck to feed the shows to the Marantz studio CD recorder and hear what I get using gold archivable CDRs. I'll have to do some test burns to get the levels and all correct but who knows, it would be nice to transfer all my Dead shows to CD... Once I get things going, I'll post how the results sound.

grateful August 27, 2010 21:04

Yes and No...

A server with several terabytes of memory would have the capacity to store this much music uncompressed and with memory as cheap as it is now-a-days, would certainly do the job.

However, I simply do not 'trust' computer memory. Enterprise class hards drive are recommended to be replaced every 5 years. And in the short 2 decades that I have utilized computers, I have lost data many times. HD fail unexpectedly, memory chips loss data overtime, 'burned' CD's degrade, Magnito discs are unreliable, ZIP/floppy/tape all degrade... And that doesn't even scratch the surface when you consider the continuous maintenance and literal "hand holding" that must be performed to keep the systems running. Just this past week, I wasted over 8 hours of my time fiddling with Comcast to get the internet back running after they made a "change" in my bill.

I know I'm against the grain now-a-days but the ease of remote control does not come even close to make up for the computer & network maintenance. I believe the technology should work for me, not me for it...

Bar a house fire, the CD's will be protected much longer and with much less effort when compared to a server.

It's not that I dislike the computer stuff, I just stick with the tried and trusted...

grateful August 14, 2010 03:28

Won't the PWL signifigantly shrink the size of your CD collection?

lewhite August 12, 2010 01:57

In the process of updating pictures, I included one of my "music vault" - I have a side room right off of the music room which I use as a storage area. The room is about 8' X 4' and is completely incased in concrete block (remember this is a basement) with one door. So, I filled it with shelving from Lowes (the nice commercial metal stuff) and store my tube stash and music stash.

The picture shown is of the CD corner of the room. What you're looking at is one of the shelving units populated with the Discgear Selector 100 (you can google it), I currently have 43 of them with each one holding 100 discs. I show this because folks have asked me in the past "how do you store all of your CD's" - well this is it. Obviously archiving large amounts of music tends to create a "space" problem but also I absolutely despise most of those plastic CD jewel cases -- why, you ask, well think of all the ones that clamp the disc down so tightly that you have to bend /warp the disc to "break" it free of the case (and, yes, I have broken a disc once trying to free it). So through searching many and many different storage products I found the Discgear to be the best option out there for several reasons;

1 - Does not "outgass" noxious and destructive chemicals, which can degrade the CD poly over time. (I actually spoke to the development engineers to verify the material and chemical make up of the Discgear). Most folks don't think about this but for long term storage of discs this is very important - watch out for other products.

2 - Holds CD in a way which is upright, stress and contact free; which prevents warpage and surface damage.

3 - the obvious space saving.

4 - the super easy "indexing" CD finding and extracting system, which is playing suface contact free.

5 - absolutely nothing touches the disc playing surface.

6 - did I say absolutely nothing touches the disc playing surface...

Again, I looked at multitudes of other CD holders, boxes, sleeves, storage, etc devices out there; played with them, tested them, spoke to the companies, and so forth -- and the Discgear Selector is what I found to be the best protection for my $80,000.00+ investment/collection.

And, No, I do not have any relations with Discgear -- I'm just very happy with their product. That's my 2 cent.

Oh, if you do decide to go with this system, or any other for that matter, its best to type yourself a catalogue/index of whats is where. -- I have numbered all of my Discgear Selectors with roman numerals and created a catalogue of each CD to it's location - for example; Billie Holiday Strange Fruit . . XXX!V#67 - so this tells me this particular CD is in Discgear unit XXXIV and is in spot number 67 of the unit. I made my printed catalogue using Adobe InDesign but MS Word would work too and I made it fun by including graphics from the internet of the band and/or performer. Anyway, works for me...

The rest of the "vault" is tubes (I have a ton of), equipment parts (like cables, cartriges, etc), a few cassettes, and, of course, vinyl records. --cassettes and records are stored in there own cases and jackets.

grateful August 09, 2010 17:19

System edited: new pics added. Moved stuff around to make room for everything and repositioned Quads further apart to enhance the sound stage and imaging

grateful August 09, 2010 04:39

System edited: Decided to finally cross the bridge back to vinyl... Been a 1/2 of a lifetime ago since I played a record, so decided to go slow and test the waters... Bought a Micro Seiki DD-40 with Micro Seiki MA-505 tonearm and a Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge. Had the whole thing serviced and completely dialed-in by Master Technician Alex Lok @ The Analogue Store in Raleigh NC. Alex is such an amazing guy - professional, a wonderful friend and extremely knowledgeable concerning TT, reel to reels, tuners, vacuum tube electronics, electrostatics, and more. In-fact I trust Alex so much, I travel over 5 hours round trip to see him... If your looking for service and even to purchase antique and new audio equipment, I HIGHLY recommend The Analogue Store - can be found at http://www.theanalogstore.com/index.htm

grateful August 08, 2010 03:51

Hello and thanks. The PWT openned up after ~250 hours and I continued the breakin till 500 hours. From past experience, I placed mine ontop of Symposium Rollerblocks right off the bat, which set ontop of a granit plinth, which set ontop of a timber eq. rack... I did not try to compare the PWT with/without, because my experience over the years has been favorable toward Symposium Rollerblocks under digital sources -- I've been using them consistently for years now.

grateful July 30, 2010 17:42

Wow what a system! And an even greater journey. My PWT/PWD will be here in a couple of days. How long did yours take to ferment. And did you find it to be in any way vibration sensitive?

lewhite July 21, 2010 16:39

Hello Charles1dad,
Good to hear from you -- I'm glad you are happy with the PWT. I've been tickled pink with mine.

I think cables are one of the hardest things to get right and the experience can be frustrating -- cables work in melting the semblance of other equipment and speakers together -- so, whatever is before and after the cable changes each cables effect and of course, the cable itself has its own signature - it's like dealing with three items instead of one. That's why there is such controversy over cables, as such, one cable may be the-cats-meow in one system but a rusty-nail in another.

Anyway, as far as Grover Huffman cables; I had climbed up the hill to Pure Note Cerulean cables, they are a solid core silver,round, thicker / heavier gauge than most, older version of whatever Pure Note is offering now-a-days. The Huffman cables were quite noticeably sonically superior in every way. I don't know if it was because of the heavier gauge of the Pure Note creating a capacitance or what, but the Huffman cables stayed and the Pure Notes were sold (as a side note - the Pure Note cables were 4 X the price of the Huffman cables).

I had wondered myself as to whether the Huffman cables would be as good as solid silver, as the Huffman cables are a copper and silver mixed. Well, the answer was a resounding "yes", at least as far a being compared to Pure Note cables. I believe it's due to them being super thin ribbons (look at skin effect theory). I opened one up not to long ago - the ribbon wire is much thiner than paper, I micrometer 0.0015 for the silver and 0.00225 for the copper - several ribbons make up each path, some copper and some silver - each path is within a round teflon tube, so there is plenty of air dielectric. A good construction and the real deal.

I reckon a good future test would be to ask Grover if he would make a pure silver version and compare it.

Since the Huffman cables took up residence in my system, I have not compared them to anything else. So, I can only confess that they beat the Pure Note all silver cable but none other. The Pure Note cables had supplanted Kimber Silver Streak and Homegrown silver cables, which had supplanted Kimber PBJ and KG4, which had supplanted StraightWire Encore, which had supplanted Monster and others...

Give the Huffman cables a try, Grover has a full return policy if you don't like em - he's a good guy, but can be a bit slow getting them out the door sometimes as he is a one-man shop.

best regards,
William

grateful May 23, 2010 03:53

Hi Grateful
I`m looking for speaker cables and am bias toward good solid core silver for it`s smooth and transparenent character. Your Huffman SX cables are mixed metals, did you compare them to silver? If they are sonically close then the price of the Huffmans sure is attractive. I`m still waiting for my G.H. power cord and digital cables ordered about 5 weeks ago.By the way my PWT is fully broken-in and combined with the Yamamoto YDA-
01 DAC is an organic and natural match made in heaven.
best Regards

charles1dad April 22, 2010 00:51

I just recently purchased a stash of The Abso!ute Sound issues from previous years ('74 to '93) and am partaking in enjoying and reminiscing in the "style of the day", insightful wisdom, and old arguments.

Anyway, while reading an editorial letter by Ian Eales (audio engineer Studio City) in the April 1984 issue (vol.9, no.33), I find an "ah ha" moment.

Mr. Eales is commenting toward the 'vinyl vs digital' argument of the day and goes on to say, "...let me tell you what I hear (speaking of CD)... ...the first thing you notice missing is the cushion of air that surrounds an instrument... ...this gives the illusion... ...as an increase in definition. Everything is put in its own little box. Cymbals do not move any air, they just sound bright and sizzly... Vocals do not project... Percussion doesn't float out on the music... ...digital... ...homogenizes the sound..."

In reading this, I thought to myself (as I was listening), he's right, and I agree with his assessment -- digital (in general) "homogenizes" and flattens the music -- taking out it's dimensionality (air, breadth, and depth) -- kinda like 2D versus 3D video. Of course, we all have heard this, but I think over the years I had 'forgotten' this perspective, getting lost in terms like "soundstage" and overemphasized facets, like "clarity" and so forth -- I think you know what I'm saying...

Anyway, so this brings me back to what I had lost and what I recently found -- in reviewing the combination of my most recent additions (AN DAC & PS Audio PWT) - I really have been blown away at what I'm hearing... I tried to convey this in the two reviews I wrote (on this site, in the Reviews area and partially here) but all in all, I think this old letter by Mr Eales sums things up best --

I am now, finally, getting back to what has been lost (via digital). My sound is back to NOT being "homogenized" and has been reborn into a living, breathing organism, rather than 'overemphasized' and 'enhanced'

I hate to go on and on and on about how happy I am with my system now. But, I thought this "ah ha" to be particularly insightful (for me anyway), so in it goes into the annals of my system forum...

grateful April 01, 2010 02:39