Well I spent a very pleasant afternoon over at Steve's place trying out various amps and turntables to go with the Tannoys I recently acquired for the attic room setup. Also had a listen to his Nonsuch speakers and Little Awsome subs and to his experimental wallmounted speakers in his kitchen. Steve has an entire garage full of old decks, I'm not joking. Regas, Garrards, Systemdeks, Thorens, Lenco - all in various states of repair (or disprepair), but a bit of an alladins cave anyway. And a cupboard under the stairs full of old amps as well. On the attic system front we settled on a Thorens TD160 and for the amp after trying out an old Rogers (A75? L75?), the famous Sugden A21 (very nice) and a few other odds and sods, I left with an old (ie pre Richers and pre china, St Ives built) but rather nice Cambridge P110 amplifier. Nice bit of kit and sounding very good with the Tannoys. Plenty of features, sweet sound and built like its a solid lump of cast iron. As for the Nonsuch and Little Awsomes. They were gorgeous. More compact than I'd imagined and looking very lovely. It would be a very fussy other half who would reject these. Steve says that they are primarily designed for acoustic, classical, jazz that kind of thing - and what I heard was lovely. Utterly realistic sounding vocals. On the other hand they made a pretty good fist of some Bob Marley we chucked at it as well - the sub woofers (which would make quite nice little stools as well :) sending the bass right through the floor. Oh the little experi,ental wall mounted speakers were very interesting as well. Quite amazing what you can get out of just one little 5cm full range driver.
