Believe me I feel old roda I’m more near the 60 mark
I’m a fair way beyond that, and don’t feel at all old yet.
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The incredible sound stage and separation that can be achieved by putting everything on full-fat Fraim, paying attention to cable dressing and positioning speakers at the right height and in the right position on decent stands. I then just sat and rediscovered so much music.
The second surprise came when I realised it was 3am and I had been listening almost without a break since I set everything up in the early afternoon.
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That having lived with Naim for nearly 20 years that I don’t like a full fat statement system.
Ditto
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Comparing an early Linn with the much-lauded SME III arm and Shure V15III cartridge (tracking at just under a gramme) to the weird Keith Monks unipivot arm with Decca London Gold cartridge (tracking at 2 grammes) and finding the latter way superior.
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Comparing a recording played back on Linn LP12 with Keith Monks arm and Decca London Gold cartridge with the two-track stereo master tape and finding very little difference apart from minuscule loss of detail and some compression. This was with the big BBC monitors and Radford amps back in the late seventies, so todays systems might have revealed a greater difference, but it was still impressive.
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Hearing my first Shahinian loudpseakers (Arcs) and then the Obelisk after that. Gobsmacked… There was more than soundstage. When the dealer went off to make a coffee, I couldn’t resist wandering around in the room and between and behind the speakers to find the performers continued to be present…
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Hearing my first Naim… I think it was a Nait 2, and realising all the fuss was justified
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Replacing the Supra cable for a Kimber Silver between the Meridian 200 transport and 203 dac. Night and day difference! Circa 1994
Then replacing the expensive Kimber speaker cable for stock Linn cable in a Linn system-everything snapped into focus! Circa 2000
Getting a proper wall shelf for my LP12- circa 2000
Installing dedicated mains-every time! (1998, 2007, 2010, 2020)
Getting the Azimuth and VTA right - do not trust the “level and perpendicular” advice! Circa 2017
Yesterday: installed Luna cable loom in my Shindo system (replaced a mix of different brands). Everything improved!
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For me it a home demo of an ex demo pair of B&W 805D3s. I had been using Sonus Faber Minima Amators which I had always been happy with. The improvement was so massive I laughed out loud. Needless to say they never left!!
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Over 60 here, the RaspberryPi is a great thing for us “old” hackers. I have 4, one runs AssetUPNP with a USB drive attached as my NAS, another is my DNS ad blocker running Pi-hole (set your laptop/tablet/phone to use the Pi-hole IP as DNS), another is used as a upnp streamer to a dac, the last one is in various stages of destruction, my test machine so to speak. Never too old, young fella.
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The Naim nDAC upgrade a few years ago. This was completely unexpected, free, downloaded and effected on the day I heard about it and it made a great improvement. Can’t argue with that as unexpected and free!
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Two instances when I was surprised at the magnitude of the effect of a change spring to mind.
The first was some decades ago when Ivor Tiefenbrun demonstrated the effect of an additional speaker in the room using an alarm watch. Had not expected such a dramatic difference.
The second was a few years ago at a hi-fi show when Chord demonstrated the difference between digital cables. To be honest I hadn’t expected to hear any difference but clearly did.
Willy.
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Had a Linn K9 on my LP12 because that was “the right thing to do synergy wise”
- imagine my (a) massive enjoyment (b) shock © anger (d) feeling I’d been mugged for years
when it was replaced with a Goldring 1042 which was unbelievably so much better than the K9 (which had been fitted by the Linn dealer).
It truly was an unexpected surprise at how much better the Goldring sounded.
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I wasn’t impressed by the K9 either!
In a listening session with a friend who had brought some CDs over, not long after playing a particular CD we went back to it to re-hear a track - whereupon we both looked at each other astounded, it seemed to sound noticeably different. (And no, we hadn’t been playing at headbanging levels, dulling hearing, nor drinking a huge amount.) Then we realised, it was a CD that he had brought, not knowing I already had it, and one play was his CD and the other mine. We played both again - and they very definitely sounded different: e.g some things you could pick out clearly on one you could hardly hear on the other, and vice versa. Externally they looked the same, nothing obvious to distinguish: same images, sleeve notes, etc - I think even the disc number. However, close scrutiny revealed one difference, a single word: one said made in England, the other said made innGermany. I presume the difference was mastering, though why they should issue two differently mastered versions without identifying the fact I had no idea.
What it destroyed in an instant was any notion of the value of comparing CD directly with LP, because if two apparently identical CDs sounded different, it would be a meaningless comparison. And it was a lesson to bear in mind in any comparisons of hardware, or of medium delivering the recording, make sure the recordings used are from the same mastering.
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However Leela was rather nice…
Woof woof!!!
Julius, stop your Woof Whoof please!
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Have I been barking up the wrong tree??
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Let me first search the google translate
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Its an English pun!