[Trippynet]

Vinyl is always a toughie. My setup is respectable, but not ridiculous. Cambridge Audio Azur 550A with separate Cambridge Audio pre-amp. Record deck is a ProJect one (mid-range) with an Ortofon cartridge. Originally, I wasn't blown away by the sound quality of it originally, but the cartridge will take much higher-quality styluses thankfully. I spent a chunk on an Ortofon Super OM 30 stylus and it made a massive difference. Now records really do sound superb from it.

[Irinikus]

Vinyl is always a toughie. My setup is respectable, but not ridiculous. Cambridge Audio Azur 550A with separate Cambridge Audio pre-amp. Record deck is a ProJect one (mid-range) with an Ortofon cartridge. Originally, I wasn't blown away by the sound quality of it originally, but the cartridge will take much higher-quality styluses thankfully. I spent a chunk on an Ortofon Super OM 30 stylus and it made a massive difference. Now records really do sound superb from it.

The really nice thing about vinyl is the fact that there's so much to tinker with, and the resultant improvements are very evident leading to allot of gratification!

[Jacques]

Vinyl is always a toughie. My setup is respectable, but not ridiculous. Cambridge Audio Azur 550A with separate Cambridge Audio pre-amp. Record deck is a ProJect one (mid-range) with an Ortofon cartridge. Originally, I wasn't blown away by the sound quality of it originally, but the cartridge will take much higher-quality styluses thankfully. I spent a chunk on an Ortofon Super OM 30 stylus and it made a massive difference. Now records really do sound superb from it.

I'll be looking for a Nagaoka MP-110 to replace the Carbon on my little RP1, suppose to provide a very good improvement over stock.

[Trippynet]

Yeah, it's surprising how much difference a quality stylus or cartridge can make. My deck came with an OM 10 originally and I found that treble was quite muddy and unimpressive with it. After swapping it for an OM 30 (kept the same cartridge), treble is now crystal clear and well defined.

[Jacques]

So my very little and very modest setup includes a late '70's release NAD 3020, the original one, not the update 'A' or 'B' version. I'm aware it's suppose to have a design flaw but I've never found out what it is. The only thing that seems odd is I need to crank the volume to about 3/4 to get any of the volume LED's to light.

Speakers - Bowers and Wilkins 686 S2 in white/grey. Would have like to have gone for the next size up but they were out of my price range. And the 686's actually pack a nice, sharp attack on bass and give a good clear treble. They could do better in the midrange, but overall very happy.

Turntable is a Rega RP1, stock. Once again, I will probably update the tonearm and platter at some point, but first is the stylus and or cartridge.

CD Player - I was looking for an Arcam CD72 but they kept going for much more than I was willing to spend on my setup. I considered the Arcam DV 78/88 DVD / CD players but they are renowned for eating their CD player lenses (red laser) due to insufficient heat dissipation. CD's are my least listened to medium so I've invested in a good condition NAD C 521i cd player with a 20bit Burr Brown DAC and good power layout. The NAD arrives this week, hope all goes well. Besides, the newer Arcam players are very difficult to repair, the NAD is from '03 and parts are still readily available.

My interconnects are home made Van Damme shielded cable with gold plate RCA connectors.

So yeah, nothing fancy, but enough to get me away from my terrible PC output, which really is terrible, especially the Macbook Pro and the Asus mobo on my linux box. My Mac Pro is not too bad I guess.

Music wise, well just about anything that takes my fancy. I love classical music, jazz, and music from the 80's and 90's - mostly the stuff I grew up with, though I'll not say no to some good 70's stuff as well. The only music I don't listen to is rap, house, dance, trance, and new teeny bopper stuff. I'm proud to say I've never heard a Justin Bieber track in my life! But I'll happily shift from Erik Satie to Smashing Pumpkins to Chris Rea to Pearl Jam in an afternoon.

[jan-jaap]

Is anyone else here an audiophile or into hi-fi? (I would really like to see you post here!)

I like to listen to music, and I don't mind to spend some money to get decent sound. But imho there's a bit too much snake oil in the domain of 'high end' and 'audiophiles'. People who can claim with dry eyes that their gold plated audiophile ethernet cable makes a significant improvement to their sound simply don't understand how things work and it makes me distrust whatever else they come up with.

For one reason or another I ended up with a lot of Rotel equipment. I guess I liked it and ended up buying more and better units of it. Most of it is 10 or 15 years old but it works just fine. At home in my man cave I have a Rotel RCD-991 CD player, an RC-995 pre-amp and RB-991 power amp. They are paired with a set of Dynaudio monitors (forget the type, I know they have the 'nice' tweeters). The combination of the un-colored Rotel and the analytical Dynaudios is not a forgiving one: it can uncover new details in records you've owned for ages, but also unmask a poor recording job for what it really is, which can be a bummer if you liked the music ... I recently replaced the matching Rotel FM tuner with a Cambridge Audio 851N streamer, which also replaced my old Cambridge DacMagic+. I still have an old iPod I keep for sentimental reasons, and for which I have an Onkyo digital dock (connected to the 851N). That makes this little iPod a stealthy high quality source, except I have more convenient ways to stream the same music.



In the living room we have a Rotel RSX-1057 AV receiver and an RDV-1093 DVD player (no longer used) with a set of Monitor Audio speakers and backed up by a REL Q200E subwoofer. Mostly used for watching films and does the job quite nicely while still acceptable for my better half

In my office at work I have another Rotel set: RCD-971 CD player, RC-970 pre-amp and RB-980 power amp. The speakers are a vintage set from BNS, a Dutch manufacturer long gone. I upgraded the filter components a while ago which made a notable difference. The RCD-971 CD player is one with the famous Philips CDM-9 mechanism, and it still works flawless even though I don't have many CDs at work and mostly stream music to using a little Cambridge DacMagic 100.

My interconnects are home made Van Damme shielded cable with gold plate RCA connectors.

I built my own speaker cables using Van Damme Black Series Tour Grade cable I have 6 mm2 in my man cave, bi-wire 4 mm2 in the living room to the front speakers, and single 4 mm2 to the rears and center I believe. The fat speaker cables and high damping factor (== low internal resistance) of the RB-991 are probably why that power amp has good control over the the Dynaudios even if they are somewhat demanding (4Ω units with some dips below that). I tried a few other amps when I got the Dynaudios and they simply weren't "in control", which surprised my at the time.

So yeah, nothing fancy, but enough to get me away from my terrible PC output, which really is terrible, especially the Macbook Pro and the Asus mobo on my linux box. My Mac Pro is not too bad I guess.

If you want good quality sound from a PC, look for an external DAC with an async-USB input. Basically, this makes the DAC 'pull' the audio from the PC, with the clock of the DAC dictating the pace. This will beat any onboard audio, plus a PC usually isn't right next to the stereo and a couple of meters of RCA cable will notably impact your sound quality. I did have to invest in a USB2 isolator though before it would work without glitches with my HP Z600, not such problem with the MacBook Pro.

[Jacques]

Nice! I like the Rotel styling, plain and non-flashy. It's one of the reasons I like NAD And Arcam styling. (The NAD I bought is mostly just Sony gear with some custom bits, common with a lot of CD and DVD players.)

My computers are all 5 meters away from my audio equipment so they're not going to be connected - it would mean ripping up my wooden floor! Most of my digital music library is from old rips / itunes downloads that are in the 128-160 kbps lossy format - hey, I didn't know better back then! Where I can I try and replace my music with LP vinyl, but I'll pick up a CD if I can't find vinyl. At a push I'll try and source a lossless digital file. I just cannot stand compressed lossy stuff, it sounds dull and has so little depth.

I saw this the other day which looks quite interesting, not sure about the quality. Could run that on my RasPi server for sure if it's any good.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pi-da...gIYr_D_BwE

[jan-jaap]

I saw this the other day which looks quite interesting, not sure about the quality. Could run that on my RasPi server for sure if it's any good.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pi-da...gIYr_D_BwE

I did some experimenting with RPi audio before I bought my Cambridge Audio 851N. I used a HiFiBerry Digi+ S/PDIF shield, the RPi 7" touch screen and my Cambridge DacMagic+.

My aim was a device that could be used standalone, so not a "streaming dongle" requiring control from an app. Basically something like a RaspTouch: https://www.audiophonics.fr/en/network-a...-6350.html

And that was a bit too ambitious. The sound quality was perfectly fine, but the software was disappointing. There's RuneAudio (no activity since 2016), Volumio (bugs), Moode audio (complex interface needs a large screen so works only from PC). I would advise you to get a cheap audio shield and see if you like the software before investing a lot of money in an expensive D/A shield. Also, this shield DAC will be fed from whatever crappy wall wart you're using to power the RPi. Not ideal. External DAC is better.

I may trim down my expectations a bit and re-purpose the RPi as a headless unit for internet radio only, controlled from an app. It might be useful in the living room like that.

I ripped all my CDs many years ago. My first attempt was when I still had a 486 PC I think. Low bit rate MP3's, and by the time I reached the letter 'E' in the (alphabetically sorted) collection I was fed up. When I rebooted my effort a while later, I realized technology had moved on, so I'd have to throw away my previous effort and start from scratch. Instead, I started at the letter 'Z' and started working my way back. Of course, but the time I reached 'S' I was fed up again. So when I finally had the energy to start once more, I realized it had to be perfect this time. I used ExactAudioCopy and extracted to FLAC images w./ CUE sheets and log files. Everything has been checked with AccurateRip so I can be confident these are accurate, bit-perfect backups. It took time, but now I have a perfect backup of all my many hundreds of CDs. All FLAC files are meticulously tagged which is a *lot* of work as well. I just have to rip any new CDs I buy now. My collection is synced between my home and my office, so I can use them at both locations without needing to lug CDs around.

Oh, and I still like to play actual CDs, but I doubt I'll ever get into vinyl. When I started buying music (mid eighties) CDs were new and vinyl was old, so I didn't bother with it anymore. I can't justify buying more duplicates of music I already have. A couple of hundred vinyl records would take up significant space as well.

[Irinikus]

I like to listen to music, and I don't mind to spend some money to get decent sound. But imho there's a bit too much snake oil in the domain of 'high end' and 'audiophiles'. People who can claim with dry eyes that their gold plated audiophile ethernet cable makes a significant improvement to their sound simply don't understand how things work and it makes me distrust whatever else they come up with.

For one reason or another I ended up with a lot of Rotel equipment. I guess I liked it and ended up buying more and better units of it. Most of it is 10 or 15 years old but it works just fine. At home in my man cave I have a Rotel RCD-991 CD player, an RC-995 pre-amp and RB-991 power amp. They are paired with a set of Dynaudio monitors (forget the type, I know they have the 'nice' tweeters). The combination of the un-colored Rotel and the analytical Dynaudios is not a forgiving one: it can uncover new details in records you've owned for ages, but also unmask a poor recording job for what it really is, which can be a bummer if you liked the music ... I recently replaced the matching Rotel FM tuner with a Cambridge Audio 851N streamer, which also replaced my old Cambridge DacMagic+. I still have an old iPod I keep for sentimental reasons, and for which I have an Onkyo digital dock (connected to the 851N). That makes this little iPod a stealthy high quality source, except I have more convenient ways to stream the same music.

In the living room we have a Rotel RSX-1057 AV receiver and an RDV-1093 DVD player (no longer used) with a set of Monitor Audio speakers and backed up by a REL Q200E subwoofer. Mostly used for watching films and does the job quite nicely while still acceptable for my better half

In my office at work I have another Rotel set: RCD-971 CD player, RC-970 pre-amp and RB-980 power amp. The speakers are a vintage set from BNS, a Dutch manufacturer long gone. I upgraded the filter components a while ago which made a notable difference. The RCD-971 CD player is one with the famous Philips CDM-9 mechanism, and it still works flawless even though I don't have many CDs at work and mostly stream music to using a little Cambridge DacMagic 100.

I couldn't agree more when it comes to allot of high end audio equipment, hence I'm not really that much into swapping out components in my system any more. (I'm very happy with the equipment I've got.) That main hi-fi of mine took me at leat 5-years to put together, back in the day. (hi-fi was my main hobby back then.)

Besides that system, I have a Meridian F80, paired with a B&W PV1D, which is connected to my gaming PC (An excellent setup for general listening), and a B&O system consisting of a Beosound 3000 MK2 paired with a pair of Beolab Penta MK3's. (The modification of which is an ongoing project, and also an excellent setup for general listening.)

I also have a pair of Beolab 4000's which I still need to pair with my Mac Pro, when I eventually get around to it. (They're also pretty decent powered speakers.) The computer speakers that I use in my computer room are the EDIFIER ECLIPSE, which do a reasonable job.

[Jammaster]

Nice gear ^^ you two.

I have a modest pair of highland aingel. These puppies sound so neutral/good.