As some of you knew I recently purchased a Cambridge Audio DACMagic 1 for £30 from Richer Sounds. This is an old budget dack from 1994 and it having used it for a week now its significently improved the sound of my £300 (in 2001) CD Player. With everybody especialy the HIFI magazines saying how much digital technology has improved you would expect the DAC to sound a lot worse but its clearly instantly a lot better as there is so much more detail and punch, I now have real bass too the only trade off is a slight loss of smoothness. Also I am using a late 1980's Rotel preamp as a switch and phono stage for my project, the phono stage in this beats the pants of my Marantz amps. My point of this thread? Well with little money buying second items to imrpove new items can work very well. The magazines are always going on about how the Sony CD570 is twenty times better than the 530 for example when really its the same CD player with a new case and a couple of different capacitors in the output stage. I am pretty sure its possible to built a system for £100 with second hand stuff that will sound like a new £400 system so technology can't have moved on that much.