Obsessing over equipment YOU ALREADY OWN!

GUILTY AS SIN! Let me explain.....

Just as a slight variation I thought I'd start a new thread. COVID 19 has been an excellent opportunity for me to concentrate on the equipment I own. Over the last two weeks I've been paying careful attention to how my kit works together as a unit rather than individual components. I must say that it's paid dividends and now I'm getting more out of the kit than ever. It's cost me nothing, I've learned a lot and saved money as well. This all started when I realised I'd have to use a lowly Shure M55e as the main cart on my valve system. Usually we have high end SPU's, Ortofons, or DECCA's kicking around. Firstly I look looked at the how much impedance my cartridge could "see", it wasn't a pretty comparison, I also audited the impedance of ALL the connection from the cartridge to the IC's entering the phonostage. Geeky but worth it for any future changes.

I checked and rechecked my toneaerm setup and found both the tonearm to be maligned, the tracking weight and anti-skate all slightly out. Next I looked at speaker placement, I've got 2 250 litre speakers sitting in my room and they can very easily have position mismatch, yep, guilty m'lud!  Needless to say I corrected this. I looked at my listening chair position, yep, slightly off left, this was corrected. Finally I looked at voltage going into my valve system. My old valve amp suffers from transformer hum so I decided to check incoming voltage and discovered 245-250 volts coming in with 3% distortion. I reconfigured my P10 and now we have 230-231V incoming and 0.1-0.5% distortion which has resulted in an audible drop in transformer hum. Finally I decided to pay attention to the vinyl and got my US cleaner working.  Now everything is cleaned and re-cleaned.

So, COVID 19 has taught me not to start looking for the next best thing for an upgrade as it might already be sitting on my rack. I now pay very careful attention to setup and external variables which could affect my systems performance and as a consequence I've received a nice uplift in sonic presentation.  The Shure m55E is old, lowly and easily bettered but to these ears sounds great through my system and I'm happy to keep listening until my replacement MC appears.