Complete hi fi help .. ?

Yeah it quite possibly is my room. It's a bad shape , it has a suspended floor over a large cellar and has very high ceilings with a huge 7ft tall window spanning one whole wall. I'm not quite sure how my landlord will react with me bricking up the view in the quest for better audio though

I'd love to but I'm up north of England in Lancashire, if I decide to travel a bit downwards I'll give you an email.

Quick question... I'm luckily off work today as usually I don't have the freetime to faff about on the net all day but I've been searching Hifi websites and come across a few nice looking bits of kit. I've contacted my local hifi shop for a demo but they don't have the complete system in stock - they have the amp/speakers only.

So any feedback on what a Primare I21, CD21 and Quad 22L2's would sound ? and if I decide to go and demo , what CD player has a similar balance to the Primare ?

cheers

 

Chinese gear looks good value at first glance, but I've not been impressed by the attention to detail, component quality and finish of many chinese amps and cd players. Some are better than others and I do not want to tar all with the same brush, but I think you have to be careful in terms of service back up and support. Shipping a 15kg cdp back & forth between HK is not cheap.

UK Midrange hifi looks unnatractive when pitted against their heavyweight Chinese cousins, but you DO have good service backup and support, which is valuable IMHO. Just a shame everything has to come in such pissy little 5kg biscuit tins, but that's the economics of the situation I'm afraid.

I think Japanese gear is the best compromise. Compare Marantz/Yamaha/Denon offerings in the £1-1.5k range to UK and Chinese gear and I think you'll see that they trump them both in terms of build, sound, spec and reliability. At least, I've been very impressed with what I've seen

DT

PS The Esound is a very good CD player but a little too bright/explicit/transparent for my tastes. Stunning bass though!

PPS Monitor Audio speakers are awful.

 

What about Icon Audio gear as a compromise - Chinese built but final tweaking done in the UK. Anything goes wrong, it's back to Leicester.

Perhaps in this case they are but for low-mid price systems some models work really well.

 

yeah, if it's not upto turtles standard then it's obviously not worth having at all...don't question the turtle...

 

No real need. You can do a lot just buy hanging a number of panels on picture hooks.

http://www.gikacoustics.com/gikuk.html

http://www.advancedacoustics-uk.com/highendaudio/

I haven't been impressed with Quad's box speakers.

For electronics have a look at Cambridge Audio's Azur range. 840 amp and 840 or lower model CD players. They are stunning value for money. I'd use that stuff in any level of system.

However, I think in your position I would spend a large portion of they money on speakers and room and use whatever is left to buy a second hand amp and CD player since you can get good stuff very affordably.

 

It wasn't a question.......

 

Mmm... I'm gonna issue a caution again about Chinese gear especially their valve amps.
In 2006 I bought a Yarland Pro200SE 300B single ended valve amp and paid in total around 450 quid for it. In 2008 I started to get flashover in the main power valves which I just couldn't do anything about. I put the amp into the hands of an electrical engineer with over fifty years experience. His response was staggering. He had never seen anything so bad in all of his years of work. The amplifier appeared to be a cobbled together collection of junk and was in all probability, dangerous.
Now I'm not trying to say it's all tarred with the same brush but be careful. I wasted around 450 quid on that rubbish.
It was bought via Ornec.

Maybe I should add: I bought the amplifier as a 230VAC unit but it was in fact a 220VAC unit and when run at 240VAC, all of its internal voltages were wrong.​

 

Pity

I use a dynavox valve amp

Its not been without its problems but zanash has very kindly helped.

Valves are (I gather) basically very simple. Thats they're advantage.

It didn't help you had a 220volt one.

 

Oh well bit the bullet

decided to go brand new UK models and picked up a Primare I30 , with I21 cd and the Quad 22L2 in Black... room looks like a bombs hit at the mo but it's all fun

I'm officially skint

cheers all

now on to zanash to make me some more cables .....

 

keep us posted!

See ( hear) which you like!

 

I recently had bad experiences too - a noisy power supply, cheap valves that needed instantly replacing, and ..far too much hum for an amp of it's type (all IMO). Looking inside 'spaghetti junction' just wasn't worth upgrading.

..... So I decided to release my own valve amp

a prototype is being made at the moment. If it doesn't kick major amounts of arse, then a prototype it shall remain...

that's all I'm saying for now... more in about 3 weeks..

 

nb Wickfut -

Tenson uses some pretty great ribbons in his standmounts.

I doubt you'll find speakers in your budget with a better tweeter.

Many manufacturers concentrate on the visibly more evident and sonically less significant bass driver. That's ''all wrong'' in a 2 way with a crossover point where they typically are.

Both drive units are important, sure, but Tensons speaker has it's design criteria pretty much 'bang on' at it's place in the market place.

Worth an audition IMHO, and I'd agree with his Cambridge reccomendations too. These are pretty good amps if you like solid state. I think you can borrow them from Richer Sounds. Why not try some?

I'd rather use a 'squeezebox' for a digital source, but that depends if you want to rip your music and wirelessly stream. That's a ''must'' for me personally.

 

I'd rather use a 'squeezebox' for a digital source, but that depends if you want to rip your music and wirelessly stream. That's a ''must'' for me personally



....as bn says, its horses for courses here.

The effort of putting a cd in the machine doesn't bother me....you can only play one at a time anyway.

Also buying afresh with your dosh you should be able to get some thing pretty damn good.

A lot of pople are doing this ripping/downloading/streaming thing though and it must have convenience on its side (being able to organise stuff at the click of a button).

 

Just wired it up (had to make a bit of space) , CD player is getting delivered on Friday so using the PC as a source..

Playing flak files without any real setup of the speakers and this sounds quite good to be honest.

I like it so far (though I'll hate it next week probably)

hope the cd player doesn't sound too warm as the bass out these speakers is deeper than my old transmission lines