Description

I have been working on this system for many years now. I listen to a lot of orchestral and jazz. I do have a fair bit of rock, pop, etc. in my collection too (it's about 1/3 each classical, jazz, and rock) but what I listen to most often is large scale orchestral music. Mahler, Beethoven, etc. And the Trinity/Torus combination does it for me on that kind of music like no other speaker setup I have heard. They throw a big, generous soundstage that's deep, wide, and tall. They have wonderful dynamics, a seductive midrange, and a warm but tight bottom end. And even in my room with hardwood floors, and high ceilings, they never sound "loud" even when I crank. They always sound sweet. So I can listen for hours on end without any fatigue.

Some people may be surprised to see that the setup can be driven by only 16 watts of SET power. But take it from me, this combo works marvelously. The Trinity's have a very flat impedance and a very simple crossover (effectively no crossover on the midrange, just a cap on the tweeter and supertweeter). Consequently I can play as loud as I would ever want with only 16 watts.

I live in Chicago which is one of the main reasons I bought the MD-108. We are fortunate enough to have WFMT here and I listen to the radio quite a bit. They don't compress at all and are about as audiophile friendly as a radio station can get. We enjoy a lot of live broadcasts on WFMT as well, which is a real treat. The MD-108 is an amazing tuner. I never thought I could enjoy radio this much!

I started collecting master dub R2R tapes a few years ago and probably have 200 - 300 now. So as I've acquired more, I have spent more time tweaking away at my R2R rig. The Manley tube preamps are the latest improvement and they really sound amazing. The ability to adjust the EQ to the various curves found on different tapes is a big plus.

I listen mostly to LP's, tapes, and increasing high resolution digital through the Mac Mini / Weiss Minerva setup. It's not as good as vinyl, but the gap is much smaller than with CD.

The Rix Rax Hoodo is a perfect stand for the TNT, and when it's filled you could probably have a heard of elephants run through the room without skipping a beat on the turntable. It's a rock solid stand that provides great isolation and it's drop dead gorgeous to boot.

The last piece of the puzzle was the wall unit I had built-in to hold my R2R tapes, LP's and CD's (they're in the drawers underneath the ledge) which has made life a lot easier. Except, of course, that I've filled the whole thing up. Time to either stop buying music (unlikely) or find more space to store LP's!

Needless to say, I am not spending much time thinking about gear these days. Most of my time is devoted to learning about new artists, looking for vinyl and R2R tapes, etc. That and trying to create a database of my music. But it's a nice feeling to be off the audiophile merry-go-round. I love tinkering as much as the next guy, but I really wanted to settle down and find a system I could be happy with long term. Having that been said I welcome any suggestions from fellow audiophiles and Audiogoners. I won't pretend this system is anybody else's cup of tea, but it brings me, and many of my friends, a lot of joy. And in my book that's what counts.

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Components Toggle details

    • Wilson Benesch Trinity
    • VPI Industries TNT-4
    VPI TNT-4 - includes flywheel and SDS, removed pully system, updated to latest bearing and platter system with outer ring clamp
    • VPI Industries JMW-12
    JMW-12 arm. Original, not the 12.5.
    • Dynavector DRT XV-1S
    • Rix Rax Hoodoo
    Custom rack by Rix Rax - welded steel frame with wood shelving. Fillable frame. These shelves were a special design by furniture maker Tom McKenzie and feature curly maple with walnut trim. Unique feathering and inlay work on each shelf. Originally designed by Rick Cox and Tom McKenzie for CES as a showpiece.
    • Rix Rax Parthenon Amp Stand
    Amp stands that match the Hoodoo. One per monoblock.
    • Magnum Dynalab MD-108
    Tube hybrid tuner from Magnum Dynalab.
    • Studer A810
    Two track, three speed R2R deck with digital tape counter, autolocate, memory, etc.
    • Chang Lightspeed CLS-9600 ISO
    Passive AC filter.
    • Chang Lightspeed CLS-9900 AMP
    Passive AC filter designed for high current amplifiers.
    • Manley Laboratories All Tube Tape Head Preamplifiers
    Mono tape head preamplifiers - one per channel. Full EQ adjustment with vernier knobs, phase switch, and variable output stage. Power supply is housed in one chassis but is actually two separate power supplies, two separate AC cords, each with switchable polarity. This is run directly off the heads of the Studer A810 (i.e. the headstack bypasses all the onboard squalid state inside the Studer and goes right to the Manley for playback)
    • Nordost BlueHeaven
    All Nordost BlueHeaven wire throughout (except for phono interconnects which are QuattroFill)
    • Wilson Benesch Torus
    Infrasonic generator (subwoofer)
    • Dynavector PHA-200
    Phono head amp
    • McIntosh C2300
    Tube preamp
    • Weiss Engineering Minerva
    Firewire DAC
    • Apple Mac Mini
    Music server - plugged in to Weiss Medea
    • Border Patrol S-20
    Parallel SET 300B tube amp
    • Western Electric 300B
    Western Electric 300B tubes (x4) in the Border Patrol amp
    • Panasonic AE-2000u
    Projector
    • Audionet AMP II
    Solid state monoblocks, 200 wpc, used primarily for projector playback

Comments 5

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Owner
Thanks for your kind words.

The only time I dub tapes is either for friends who want copies, or more often because I come across back coated tapes that are "sticky" and need to be baked. After baking them you have about a 2-3 week window to run them off to new tape before them become sticky again. Whether or not you can repeatedly rebake them without inducing loss is a question that is debated among people I know in the tape world. I prefer to err on the side of caution so I bake once and dub a fresh copy to new tape. It won't sound as good as the original but baking is kind of a nuisance anyway so the idea of baking tapes in batches in anticipation of playing them is kind of unrealistic.

You do lose some fidelity when you dub, certainly. One of the big discussions people get into when they start collecting master dubs is how many generations away from the actual master is the dub in question? The more generations removed, obviously the more loss. I am not sure if it's as cut and dry as 3 dB although that may in fact be true. The dynamics of most the master dubs I've worked with are so dramatic that even a 3 dB loss would still render them vastly more dynamic than most source material. But you definitely lose some transparency and highs when you dub, and some detail and resolution. A lot of it depends on the decks in question. Some decks make better recordings than others. Another issue is that most R2R decks have terrible sounding output stages. They're old 1970's or 1980's solid state based devices, many with opamps etc. Now while it's true that tapes played on those machines will still blow your mind because the source material is so much better than what most of us are used to, it is definitely the case that one of the biggest improvements you can make is to bypass all the internal electronics. (There are some exceptions to this statement - namely the Levinson ML-5 modified Studer A80RC and also the Stellavox.) There are some Class A solid state rigs out there, and then there's the Manley if you want tubes. That way at least what comes out of the deck is as good as possible. Then you can work on the quality of the recording electronics on the other end if you want to obsess that much... there are some places you can get custom recording preamps for R2R setups.

The Masterlink does a good job. I have a few friends who feel that you can make better Redbook CD's with other burners these days. The advantage of the Masterlink is that you can accumulate material on the internal hard drive rather than being forced to burn in real time. So I can just play tape after tape and then worry about editing and trimming and spewing out CD's later when I want to devote time to it. I can also just use it as a sort of high resolution music server. The hard drive holds a fair amount so I can keep a bunch of tapes on it at 24/96 if I want.

But most of what I do with the Masterlink is pull down 24/96 to its hardrive from tape and then burn out onto CD-R's with WAV files on them. At 15 ips you only get 20 minutes or so for a 10.5" reel of 1.5 mil tape, and a regular CD-R can hold that at 96/24 when you use the Masterlink. You can either play those CD-R's back on the Masterlink, or what I have done is used my Mac to compile DVD's of uncompressed PCM 24/96 files. I burn out DVD-R's formatted for DVD-Video using Apple DVD Studio Pro. I just bring over all the files and chapter them in one by one. The DVD-Video standard supports 24/96 uncompressed PCM but won't go up to 24/192. But since my Masterlink doesn't do 24/192 it works out ok.

michaelkach