HiFi

[Wedg1e]

I've got a Decca gramophone, must be nearly 70 years old, it only does 78 & 33-1/3 rpm, different pickups for each, and it sounds great.

We still have my grandparents' cabinet gramophone, you open the front doors more or less depending on the volume you want... it only plays 78rpm... and all the records we have are made from shellac.

Best valuation we ever got suggests it's worth about a tenner.

My own system is a Rega Planar 3 (the early one with the S-shaped arm), Marantz CD273 CD player and some cheap TEAC cassette deck, all through an Armstrong 625 tuner/amp into B&W DM4s using 2.5mm T&E with all the strands twisted together. The newest part of it is the CD, I bought it new in 1987 for £200!
Also have a power amp based on a pair of Quad 405 modules but with the PSU beefed up... instead of 10,000uF per rail shared between both channels it has 40,000uF per rail, per channel! Same principle as used on MIG welders I used to use it as my monitor amp when I did a bit of singing; prior to that and acquiring the Armstrong it was my main hifi amp fed from a homebrew preamp tailored to the the Nagaoka MP-11 Boron cartridge on the Rega; before that I had a Thorens TD160 Mk2 and Ortofon VMS30.
My mate was/is a hifi designer so I had a bit of help with the electronics on the preamp; RIAA curves were never my strong point but I laid out, etched and assembled the PCBs. It's still up in the loft somewhere...

 

[Wedg1e]

I have some "directional" cable too. It was a good bit cheaper than that though, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I am intrigued about how electrons are able to see the arrows. Otherwise it was good stuff with a pair of heavy conductors seperated with a web of plastic. Branded Puresonic or some such at under a pound per metre from CPC if I remember correctly.

As I recall from 1980s bullsh... er, sound scientific research... it was all to do with the fact that when copper is drawn it lays the crystalline structure down in a certain fashion; unless you mark the cable to know that they are both 'flowing' the same way there would be an end to audio-Nirvana as the sound wavey things are unable to transition from one copper molecule to the next in quite so efficacious a fashion, thus rendering the subtle nuances of Walk This Way or Ace Of Spades completely inaudible. Especially in a car, which as everyone knows is the ideal listening environment with perfect soundstage, imaging, separation, lack of resonance...