Vintage '90's era system with various component upgrades, rebuilds and repairs over the years. The music server built and added 2016. The digital chain is limited to 24b/96khz but that's fine for my old ears. It's fully balanced from DAC ==> amp.
This system is very high resolution (though never clinical) yet still very natural sounding with an astounding soundstage. Despite the commonly expressed view that "equipment has improved greatly" since this era, my feeling is that it would extremely expensive to make meaningful improvements in the sound.
Originally bought in 1988. Factory rebuild in 2016 with new wires and mylar.
Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 CD Transport
Upgraded laser assembly
Assemblage D2D-1 Dejitterer & upsampler
Sonic Frontiers SFD-2 MKIII DAC
Born as an SFD-2, the unit was upgraded to mkIII status ca. 2002 (one of about 100 units). Recapped and other audio stage upgrades in 2014.
Rega Planar 3 Turntable
....running Rega Exact 2 cartridge. TT upgrades include tungsten counterweight, 24v motor, PSU MK2 power supply and Incognito tonearm wire kit.
Threshold FET 10/pc Phono Stage
Bought new. Why Change?
Stax SRM-T1 Headphone Amp, Lambda Pro headphones
Hewlet Packard ML310-G5p Audio Server
Audio Library Server: CPU: Xeon X3370 quad core, 3.0Ghz RAM: 8Gb ECC OS: Windows 10 OS volume: 146Gb, 15k SAS drive Data volume: 2Tb RAID 5 array, 7.2k SATA drives Audio: Running Foobar2000 on Asus Xonar Essence ST Other: Wired 1Gb ethernet, P400 array controller w/ 512Mb BBWC
Tascam DA-30 DAT deck
It's pretty obsolete these days but . . . . > It works, > It sounds good (especially when upsampled to 24/96), and > I've got a substantial collection of recordings. So it remains.
