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It’s near Daventry, Northants. It’s the Royal Ordnance Depot which was an armoury / barracks / prison / hospital for the Napoleonic Wars. Built at the very start of the 19th century

And yet I like the sound from this system quite a lot more. System scaling is hard.

Thanks and yeah challenging is right. If I play my cards right the 4’ voigt horns might be coming my way.

Yes, a bit annoying all that. I don’t think pleading that I was into it before it was cool is going to help any.

Might as well go fully at it, roll my beanie up and start working on an African jazz collection.

Honestly not overwhelming so far especially wrt resolution but the drivers are brand new and need to break in a bit. The scale is remarkable - in this massive space it doesn’t sound like there’s a hifi over there in that corner, it really fills the space wherever you’re standing. I would like to hear more treble tbh but maybe that will come. It takes a while to settle in to any new speaker in my experience.

I got in touch with Northampton’s own Lowther Loudspeakers to talk about possible promo in the shop and now this has happened.

2.1m tall, 4m folded horn, single driver weirdy beardy audio esoterica has arrived. Acoustic treatments to follow.

There’s 4000kg of green coffee in sacks as of this afternoon, that does a pretty good job.

I thought tetrodes were fish.

Awesome. Well feel free to have a poke around if you come to visit.

It would be lovely to have everyone here for coffee and records. Might have booze too if I can get the paperwork done for licensing.

Thanks for the explanation about the batteries. I like listening to this equipment and it annoys me that I can’t understand the technicalities, I watch YouTube videos about people mending electronics all the time but I still can’t get a handle on how this stuff works.

KT88s in these ones. They’re Kora Cosmos power amps, 100wpc class a (!) triode. The matching pre-amp is valve state too, I haven’t opened it up to see what the valves are. It also has an outboard power supply. The phono stage is a kit build (not by me, obvs) PH15 valve state job with Sovtech valves and a pair of 9v batteries for something or other. I don’t know what spec the valves are.

I have owned a Kora Jupiter stereo power amp for a few years and it’s absolutely perfect, I’ll never part with it. I took a punt on it second hand having never heard of it and with no info about it anywhere. I had a saved search for the matching preamp which came up the other weekend. The seller also had the monoblock power amps so I had to go for the set. He did a good deal for the package.

Perfect! R3 has amazing sq doesn’t it? Shame I never listen to classical :(

Yeah I know. Mainly that gear will be disconnected. I’ll put a strap round the dust over of the turntable and the grilles back on the speakers. There’ll be my nice Yamaha solid state and Fiio R7 streamer behind the counter running the speakers day to day. I’m confident parents will tell kids not to touch the amps, they’ll have the cages on over the valves when not in use.

That’s always the aim.

Got my new shop’s system installed now. I bought an entirely over-extravagant amplifier when an eBay alert coincided with a stressful moment and here we are. It’s nice though.

Hoping to open in January and start album listening sessions shortly after.

Please excuse the soaped out windows.

Nice bit of design that. I’d be tempted if it was being produced by a proper business.

Learning to decrease the pressure on a manual lever as the coffee gets exhausted gives you such an intuitive understanding of extraction. It’s worth getting the hang of and it’s incredibly satisfying.

It’s black and yes it has the auto on/off.

Occasionally one will start distorting after being played for a few hours. This happens once every few weeks when used as my daily driver. Turn them off and come back to them next day and all is well again.

They had a new KT66 in each to rectify the problem but it didn’t work.

I think it might be because I had them set to run at 15 ohms for my LS3/5a but then went back to running them on 8 ohm speakers but that’s based on no genuine understanding at all.

I need to have a clear out.
Quad IIs £500 the pair - rarely occurring intermittent fault that I’ve run out of motivation to keep chasing.
BK Double Gem subwoofer £200
Neat Mystique II floorstanders £150
I’ll sort out pics, DM me for more details if you’re interested.

Collection Northampton or postage at your risk / expense

The short answer is a mid-priced washed Colombia. Chocolatey, balanced, forgiving and enough rounded acidity to be clean and not boring.

Depending on what you’re into, certain origins suit espresso better than others. Tart, juicy, washed Central American and African coffees are much more challenging to balance, and an acquired taste even if you do brew them successfully. Lower acidity, smoother coffees are much easier to get along with.

For manual brewing I would say no, anything goes. I can’t really think of any coffee I would avoid in any particular brewer. Maybe except stovetop, follow espresso preferences with that.

A Bluetooth turntable is probably the way to go. Most are crappy but Pro-Ject do the E1 BT for £350 which would transmit to a BT speaker for now and still be good as and when they upgrade to an amp and speakers. It has built in a phono stage too.

Thanks mate!

Near Daventry this one.