Tír Na HiFi

Fair to say that I certainly used to use the reviews in mags as a basis to put together a list of things I wanted to demo when looking to upgrade a particular component. But once into actually demo'ing kit, I never really harked back to the reviews. The good guys like Cloney were always able to offer additional suggestions to the review-based list and a lot of purchases stemmed from there.

But have enjoyed some of the mags as a source of info, especially to banter about over the odd beaker! Really liked HiFi+ when it came onto the scene. But a lot less substance now. And used to rank TAS reviews quite highly. Not for decisions on a purchase but as a basis for further research and banter...

And can very much relate to Dave regarding days of old and What HiFi. Key to knowing the latest Top 10's... Were Mission were now pipping KEF to the post? And if Marantz were now planning a Special Special Special Edition with Mr Ishiwata's John Hancock inscribed on cherry blossom leaves in the transport drawer... Shouldn't knock it, they were great times!

Mr Colloms then brought you back to earth with a lecture on the physics of it all when you got carried away by the Special Special Special Edition. Was that HiFi News & Record Review or Stereophile? Or both? That was great stuff....

somewhere in the distant past i kinda remember a Rotel receiver a dual 1225 turntable a teac tape deck and a pair of non descript Avanti 3 way speakers as my 1st
venture into hifi, sold it all to someone's younger brother and bought a denon pma 830 integrated amp + a 721 dual dd turntable + dual 830 tape deck + a pair of Angstrom 2 way speakers (still have them) added a hafler 500 power amp and a pair of Kef Concerto speakers that kept me well happy for a very long time.

upgraded the hafler to a Classe 25, added a RP 3, replaced the denon with a krell BSP pre, added a Marantz 5 disc CD player and a Nakamichi tape deck and a pair of Goldenear Triton two's and life is now blissfully spectacular............the cows in the next field don't get much sleep of a friday eve.

For me it all started with my best buddy in school. He got into Hifi in 8th class or so, and ended up with Snell speakers and Thule valve amps by age 16! Being active in bands all my teens and twenties all my money was spent on guitars and other equipment, but by my early twenties a proper system had to be assembled. I got my hands on a second hand Rotel amp, a second hand planar 3 (still in my main system) and a new pioneer pd-65 stable platter CD player. I used my old jamo satellite speakers still, but when I moved over here I bought a pair of B&W DM303. The Pioneer broke down after a bit too much modding and was replaced by a marantz DR-6000. One day when I was reading Hifi mags in tower a guy asked me if I was interested in valve amps? I was! Next thing I had swapped my Rotel for an Audio Innovations 300 mkIII. I was very happy with this little system but always lacked bass, so when a MF M3 Nu-Vista came up for sale, I jumped. After much research I decided to pair it off with Emminent Technology LFT-8 that I imported from the US myself. The weak part of my system was now the old Marantz and when it finally caved in I was lucky a fellow member spotted a B.A.T CD player on a adverts. This was a huge upgrade and I was in Hifi heaven. I upgraded my cartridge to a dynavector dv-20x2L and got my hands on a Dynavector P75mkII phono stage. I then decided to change my speakers as I grew a bit tired of the planar magnetic sound and wanted to try conventional speakers. This lead me to take a chance on focal 1028be speakers which I bought unheard. This was probably a mistake as it took me ages to get them to sound right. The saviour came in the form of some big American mono blocks: Cary 500MB. An Ayre pre amp completes the system. For PC audio I use a ciunas Dac along with a NUC PC. I still feel like I have only just started out and there is so much gear out there I would love try. My next system would probably be a valve/quad Esl setup of some kind unless I win the lotto and could head straight for Avantgarde horns!

The Avantgarde horns seem to be considered a destination speaker around here. I dont know myself I just couldnt warm to their presentation, felt like I was listening to a giant head singing in front of me and just didnt feel right. But that's a topic for another thread I suppose.

DaveF wrote:The Avantgarde horns seem to be considered a destination speaker around here. I dont know myself I just couldnt warm to their presentation, felt like I was listening to a giant head singing in front of me and just didnt feel right. But that's a topic for another thread I suppose.

Did you ever hear them in the previous location in Mount St? Very different to the close quarters of Wicklow Street. I think they need room and distance to really sing.

Ivor wrote:

DaveF wrote:The Avantgarde horns seem to be considered a destination speaker around here. I dont know myself I just couldnt warm to their presentation, felt like I was listening to a giant head singing in front of me and just didnt feel right. But that's a topic for another thread I suppose.

Did you ever hear them in the previous location in Mount St? Very different to the close quarters of Wicklow Street. I think they need room and distance to really sing.

I didnt but I've heard from a few others that they sounded better in Mount St alright. That said, I cannot fathom the near field seating in the current setup. Might as well be wearing them.

I was never a really big magazine fan. But back in the 1990's I did very very much enjoy "What Hi Fi" magazine. I loved the way they would have a budget shoot out... lets say speakers or amplifiers etc etc. The last page of the article would have the verdict...... and then the next page would have a new topic "Try it with these" which featured the winning component with other lush components i.e. a source and speakers. Lots of stuff like Marantz, Denon, Arcam, Cambridge Audio, Audiolab etc etc.

Again... further on was a article about a high end component.... two particular articles stand out in my memory... a Red Rose Music Model 5 EL34 Valve amplifier and a Audio Note Soro SE.....

Anybody remember Cable Talk speaker cable as was Audiolab... they where highly rated at the time... best bang for the buck etc... don't seem to hear much about them now. I sure did enjoy that magazine, it was kind of exciting... as it featured lots of possibilities / upgrade routes without breaking the bank too much... other magazines like Hi Fi Choice or Hi Fi + where just way way way out of my league. There was no point in going there at all.

However in the 1990's there was not much about turntables in "What Hi Fi"... CD players were all the rage etc.... but moving into 21st century... What Hi Fi seemed to have lost its way... moving more and more into Home theatre... AV stuff etc. I suppose that is where the market was going... can't blame them really.

I guess if I was to pick up What Hi Fi now... I would not recognize it at all.

Speaking about mags my favourite was Hi Fi Answers. The musings of a certain James Michael Hughes was certainly something to look forward to :)

cybot wrote:Speaking about mags my favourite was Hi Fi Answers. The musings of a certain James Michael Hughes was certainly something to look forward to :)

That was my favourite one too Dermot. JMH lost me when he had a revelationary article about the audible effects of water pipes in proximity to the listening room, or something very similiar.

I put together my first hi-fi system in or around 1974. It consisted of a Trio KD1033 turntable with supplied cartridge, a Trio amp [forget the model but it was about 30 WPC] and Phillips Motional Feedback [MFB] speakers. The speakers were S/H, compact little boxes and very efficient speakers. I was never convinced that the active electronics worked as described but they sounded nice and suited the system very well.

First upgrade was a new pair of speakers. Celestion Ditton 15s which had a passive radiator. These went deeper than the Phillips MFBs but were harder to drive.

The British Hi-Fi press were consistently praising the A&R A60 amplifier so I went to Noel Cloney to hear one. Noel was located in a basement premises in Leeson Street at the time and I brought the Trio amp to compare the two. The A60 blew the Trio out of the water. I bought it there and then. It worked very well with the Ditton 15s. Soon afterwards I upgraded the cartridge to a Shure M75ED11 and got a magnesium headshell. As per magazine advice, I removed the rubber washer between the arm and the headshell.

That system served me well until I replaced the KD1033 with a Rega 2, using the same Shure cartridge. At that time there was a Hi-Fi shop on O'Connell Street – it was beside the Savoy cinema – and from there I got a pair of Litz speaker cables. Cables were being mentioned in the Hi-Fi press around that time, the Litz pair did improve the sound of my system compared to the twin flex I had been using. From that shop I got a pair of speaker stands that I screwed to the underside of the Dittons.

I thought that was it Hi-Fi wise, at least until I could afford the Holy Grail which was a Linn/Naim Audio system. The Linn LP12 was clearly a better turntable and to ease the pain cost wise, Noel Cloney suggested using the Rega arm and the Shure cartridge. This was a serious step up in quality. Later when getting the LP12 checked and adjusted, Noel suggested I try a S/H Supex 900 with the mini step up amplifier for the A60. That combination, to my ears, was the best sound I ever got from Lps in my system before or since.

A couple of years later one channel went dead and the cartridge was the culprit. So back went the Shure which I had kept safely 'just in case'. I presume that I dumped the Supex, I did not know that it might have been possible to get it repaired.

There has been some comments made on Hi-Fi magazines. At that time there were only two sources of information on things hi-fi – the magazines or dealers. I believed what I read in the magazines, to me it seemed that the reviewers were actually trying to help us get the best sound possible from our systems. With the benefit of hindsight it is obvious that the British magazines of that time were very jingoistic – brands such as Linn, Naim Audio, Rega, Meridian etc. were stated as being the only real hi-fi kit worth having. Turntables had to be belt driven, direct drives and idler drives were absolute no nos.

Around the mid 1970s I added an Akai cassette deck [CS 702 D 11] and a Trio tuner. The tuner got little usage but the cassette deck was used extensively to compile tapes for the car player. After a few experiments I found that Maxel UD XL 11 cassette tapes worked well in the Akai deck.

I had the Nirvana upgrade fitted to the LP12. Later when the Valhalla upgrade became available I took my deck to Cloneys and Noel exchanged it for a Valhallad deck. Thinking back on it, those upgrades changed the sound of the LP12, robbing it of its magic and allure. It never occurred to me to ask Noel to remove these upgrades or even to admit that the sound had lost something in the upgrade process. The magazines raved about the upgrades and as I believed what the magazines said, I thought it must be me and not the upgrades that was the problem!

A few years later, sometime in the mid 1980s, I had enough cash to buy the 'ultimate system' of the day. An LP12/Ittok/Asak (my third LP12 as Noel took in my LP12 and sold me the one with the Ittok and Asak already fitted), NAC42, Snaps, NAP250 and Linn Saras. Cloney Audio had moved to a mews premises in Rathmines at that time. I would describe the sound of that system as 'impressive'. Easy to listen to but uninvolving. The famed PRAT quality irritated as did the lack of any real bass or stereo image. Over time I found that I was listening less and less to the system until eventually I felt that I should sell the lot as the system was no longer 'doing it' for me. A customer offered a NAC72, Hi-Cap, Meridian 200 & 263 for the LP12/Ittok/Asak plus some cash which I readily agreed to. Cds took up much less space than Lps!

Two further upgrades to that system were a S/H Meridian 566 for the 263 and a pair of Ruark Crusader 11s for the Saras, all bought from Cloney Audio who had moved again to their present location in Blackrock. I began to enjoy listening to music again especially after the 566 was in situ. I had bass and a stereo image at last. I had long since stopped buying specialist Hi-Fi magazines.

Over the years I bought the occasional magazine and noted that some were suggesting that valve amplifiers had a special magic that was absent from solid state amplifiers. It took me several years to cotton on to the fact that visits to Cloney Audio tended to end up with me parting with ever larger wads of cash for not so shiny boxes. Before that day of enlightenment came, I listened to a Cary SE valve amplifier with 300B output tubes. The sound blew me away. The bass was soft but the stereo image had depth and the midrange was almost liquid. I wanted more of the same but as I liked the Crusaders, the Cary would not drive them. Noel had a Gamma Acoustics 211 SE valve amplifier which I took home to try it in my system. It had nowhere near the power of the 250 but it sounded better in almost every quarter. So off to Cloney Audio went all my Naim Audio kit.

This was around the time I decided to convert one of our bedrooms into a dedicated music room. I had acquired a few guitars, a considerable number of Cds, music books etc. and our sitting room was beginning (!!) to look a bit closed in by technology. A small REL sub-woofer got added to the system.

One of the Hi-Fi magazines, Hi-Fi World, offered self assembly DIY valve amplifier kits and I bought one. An EL34 push pull integrated that pushed out about 30+ watts per channel. Building it was interesting and took a lot longer than the week I had thought it would take. The rush I felt when I first connected it up and heard it speak..... wow! It had more power than the 211 SE but the 211 still had the edge sound wise in almost every area.

Some years later the Hi-Fi website TNT-Audio wrote about a T Amp. This little plastic box had almost nothing going for it, no phono line input, spring clip speaker connections but it was stated to have audiophile qualities sound wise. The 211 amplifier was 'tempermental' and prone to dramatic failures [it blew the rectifiers every 50 to 100 hours thus requiring a trip to the electronics doctors] so I got a T Amp to use as a backup. Sonically the T Amp polarized listeners, some thought it brilliant and others said it was crap. I used mine with a marine grade 12 volt battery and I considered it to be very good. Not as good as the 211 amplifier, tonally it was less rich, but close enough to cause concern to amplifier builders of products priced at up to €1K. Of course its operating envelope was very small volume wise so it was not good for loud music especially through my Crusaders. The sub-woofer did not work with the T Amp, I sold it to Mick of this parish.

My system remained unchanged for a good number of years until the 200 refused to work. I could have sent it back to Meridian for a refurbishment but I was getting fed up with all the boxes on the rack. My music room was looking more like an electronics lab than somewhere to listen to music and relax. So I set out on to research a simpler system that had less boxes. At least that was my original intention.

Musical Fidelity had an all in one CD Player/Tuner/Amplifier that ticked a lot of boxes. Meridian have several active speakers that seemed to fit the bill. Another trip to Cloney Audio resulted in my present system which is: Resolution Audio Opus 21 CD Player, 2 * Classe CA M350 mono blocks & B&W 803D speakers. This has more boxes than I hoped for but as the monos sit on the floor it appears smaller than it actually is. I added a Squeezebox – the digital output goes into the digital input of the Opus 21 – to play music files, stored in FLAC, from my computer. This is controlled from my iPad. Recently the Squeezebox has been superseded by the Sonos equivalent, again controlled from my iPad. The Sonos controller app is not as slick as the Squeezebox app but it is better than satisfactory. The Squeezebox and Sonos apps allow forward and backwards movement within a piece of music, similar to a turntable, this is a very handy feature.

One additional item to record is that I had a dedicated mains supply socket installed in the music room. This has its own MCB box and is a significant upgrade over the standard 2.5 sq mm domestic wiring generally used for sockets in houses.

That is my Hi-Fi history up to date. I did not mention the equipment I tried down the years. The Krell KAV400 amplifier, the active PMC speakers, the Electrocompaniet amplifier etc. etc. etc. These were all good pieces of kit, they did not suit my system or room. I deliberately did not mention cables both mains or signal apart from my first experience with Litz speaker cables or my dedicated mains supply socket. Cables are a very divisive subject, we all have our opinions on whether they work or don't. I tried many isolation devices down through the years, the most recent are E-sorbs from Eist Audio. These unpretentious blocks have replaced Cereballs under my Opus 21 to great effect.

Fair dues to you if you have read this far. You are a mighty man! Go and get yourself a glass of whiskey - you deserve it.