Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

If you want to be a proper nerd then you record how many sides of LPs your stylus has played.

obviously normal people cba with all that, so just listen for the "s" sounds getting a tiny bit slurred and when you hear that, think about changing your stylus.

As above, you can keep a record of how many hours use it's had.

Sound starts to degrade at around 1,000 hours and by 2,000 hours it's totally worn out. For DJ use which is a bit heavier on the stylus, replacement is needed after about 500 hours.

But keeping track is a nuisance and I just replace mine every two years.

Ive got Some 400mm high stands, if you want to try them.

Thanks ^^ & ^^^

@BRM Great! Might even be too tall for Aesthetic Overlord of My House, but I'd like to try em.

very low speaker stands

The plinth on the ones I used to have unscrewed / detached for sale/transportation. You could see if there is a smart way of just cutting them to size.

Paving slabs squares to match the base of speakers?

Onkyo and Pioneer add Chromecast and Google Home voice control

^^I used to have two stacks of dense concrete bricks (the type used in driveways) with Auralex foam pads under my desktop monitors.

Get the fuck in! Yes!

I think it's time to update my AV receiver. Surround sound, network connectivity and plenty of latest standard HDMI ports a must. Used for music and tv/films in a 5.0 system. Budget up to about £500 but preferably cheaper. Any suggestions, cheers.

Get the fuck in! Yes!

I guess you have one one these models then?

Anyone got any experience with passive preamps?

Yep. I've enjoyed two setups in the past. I had (sold it on here) a cheap Aural Thrills one with a high quality (Alps Blue I think) pot, running my LFD PA0. I also had an expensive dual mono transformer-based one, running my Beard P100 MkII. It sounded great. I like the simplicity. But something drew me back to powered pres.

I managed to get top dollar for some speakers and a TT on ebay, so i bought a hybrid power amp that is supposed be amazing. I am going to run the pioneer pre through it. it has a high/low gain switch, so it can be used with a passive pre. there are tisbury and the likes around for sub £100 and the LDRs look interesting.

i'd like to get a hybrid pre (with phono) to see what all the rage is about, but need to sell a few bits on first. i can't face selling the pioneer yet...

Our floors are very uneven so I need a solution to get the speakers to stand relatively straight and solid.

What is the best/prettiest/easiest way to DIY this?
The little rubber feet on the speakers are not adjustable.

Not totally related to what you're asking but I just built a pair of CNC phono stages and OPS power supplies on a couple of boards supplied from a guy in India. They came out well and allowed me to dial in the gain I wanted by using specific resistor values. That allowed me to avoid preamps. I'm going through a DAC most of the time and largely use powered monitors, so I use a digital switching/mixing box to switch between sources. Obviously you're building an analog system so you need a different solution. The CNC+Power Supply cost around £150 each in total including the enclosure and interconnects. Audiokarma have a huge thread on it and quite a few on preamps active & passive.

Maybe a plywood stand that is the same dimension as the speaker base with some of these?
https://www.casterland.com/collections/levelers

my DAC has fixed/variable outputs - it's the phono that requires it. if the dac had an analogue input, it would be fine.

the stereo coffee boards look to be good value. i don't suppose you'd fancy building one for a fee?
http://hifiwigwam.com/forum/topic/82725-stereo-coffee-ldr/

So a 'preamp' that has no gain, just attenuates?!

It looks very easy, I'd put it together for you as long as you provide the bits. I'm guessing the biggest problem would be decided on an enclosure and having the right size drill bits. The soldering on that is a 20min job.

I'm going to try and post a pic of the phono stage, I had to source the components from 3 different places and it took a week of evenings mousing around. The physical build took 5 hours for the 2nd unit, the first one took longer because I wanted to test it with 2 9v batteries.

I bet Sachin at Audiokarma has some LDR boards. The phono ones are lovely.

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The cable connections were temporary !

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Erm, yeah, and switches inputs...

Cool man. I'll do a bit more research.

It's an interesting approach, curious to see some schematics as I was expecting 'passive' to mean transformers/no buffers at all.

It looks like the power cables are connected but that's the battery wires tucked under the board. The red, white and black power wires were wired in from below and are out of shot. Temporary of course until I'd built the power supply.