Bit of an audio find...

I thought I'd just about got to the point where a further upgrade to the stereo was going to be seriously big money, so I've spent the last year updating the AV side of things (integrated system). I started with a pair of cheapo Kef eggs and a Yam E800 and the projector was updated to a 1080p model.

More recently, I finally decided to buy myself an AV processor and spent weeks reading about options and checking various sites for price estimates. The most promising options seemed to be the Meridian, Linn and Lexicon units.
Whilst trawling through the Bay one afternoon, I spot a more off the wall option on a Thule 250B processor. Only vaguely remembering that they were well regarded in their day, I did a bit of checking and found that Thule ceased trading a little while back. So it was certainly not going to be an expensive purchase (at least for me). Finally bagged it at a pretty sensible price and got it up and running last week.
I initially focused on movies, but couldn't resist getting some cheapy audio-technica pro-audio balanced cables to see whether they might help.

To my pleasant surprise, there was such an improvement that it actually sounds better than my existing SB+ as an external DAC/pre-amp, feeding a balanced signal to my integrated amp.

So in short, was shooting for a cheap AV upgrade and ended up with a stereo upgrade too, cool. Big smiles from my side then.

 

Well done Mike.

I tried to do something similar a while ago when my Yamaha processor (E492 I think) packed up and decided to buy a Denon 3805 to replace it. I thought (based on various reviews) that it would be an OK stereo player. It wasn't and how I wished I had bought the cheaper Yamaha E800 and left the front speaker driving to the stereo amp.