Some pics of what I'm using and not using right now.

But is only £160 cheaper than a brand new one. 

I would point that out to the vendor, and haggle for a better price.

Giving this big Sony 530ES integrated I got off of Mike a run out:



From 1990. Cost then was £300 so about a grand in today's money. Always wanted one of these back then, with the Gibraltar chassis and the big rotary volume control. I did buy it for one of my brothers who is after a new amp but not sure I want to part with it now, especially as it sounds better than I expected.

I didn't expect it to be crap but I did have one of the ES power amps a while ago, the TA-N55ES and didn't rate that much at all, although the rest of the set-up was different back then so who knows?

Re-arranged the rack, did some cable dressing. Room on there for the tuner now:

I'm sort of resigned to the fact that I'm never going to get the sound I had with the Krell 50S back until I get it fixed. Compared to that everything's second-best so doesn't really matter what amp I'm using. I can even hook the turntable up to this Sony, it has MM and MC stages!

Seriously though it is a cut above. It's from 1990 which was before the bean-counters took over and ruined Jap audio (or most of it). Not had an extensive listen yet so maybe I will catch it out but suspect I won't. Why they only seem to fetch around £130 is a mystery to me.

Gayer.
🤨

I owned a Sony 770es, a good amp but not great. I'm sure you'll get your Krell up and running eventually.

Thought I'd give this Sansui SE7 ten band equalizer a run out, just to have a play around. Took me a while to settle on the settings. The trick is to cut rather than boost where possible. Amazing what changes you can make with just a 2db shift at various frequencies. No wonder rooms affect the sound so much.

I pulled the 1Khz down 4db, and pulled everything else except the top end down 2dB. Knocking 1Khz down makes a huge difference! Gives a quite dry 'studio' sort of sound with no glare and a slightly exaggerated top (but I quite like that). Just need to clean the gain pot on it as it's a bit noisy.

I brought it down to put it back in the TV system where it used to live but thought I'd have a play with it in the main system first. Why not?

I think I bought it off of Andy (Rexton) of this parish but I'm not 100% about that. I've had it a fair few years now.

You lose a tiny bit of transparency but it's surprising what a bit of subtle eq can do in terms of bringing out low level stuff in the mix because you can compensate a little for the effects of the speaker/room. Hi-fi wise it's slightly worse but in terms of musical enjoyability it's slightly better.

There's nothing inaccurate about using EQ to flatten the response, the opposite really.

Except I'm probably not doing that here since I've only set it by ear. Only a bit of fun. But it was sounding pretty good with both AC/DC and Donald Fagen earlier on.

Aye. But you have to know specifically what it is not the first place, don't you?

Going by ear alone isn't a guarantee you're correct in what you're cutting or boosting.

I won't tell you how much distortion the pickup cartridge on your turntable introduces then, because you probably won't sleep at night. 

Not sure what happened with the first paragraph. Trust your ears? Well I'd say it depends on how experienced you are with the regards room acoustics. But for the average listener, you're going to have to rely on a visual representation to actually know what's going on. You can faff about as much as you want for a "personalized" sound - if you want to though. As I've said before, some people aren't interested in accuracy. Must admit, it's something I've never ever considered with anything I've bought, and that's nigh-on 45 years. I do though consider it with listening to music on my mobile. The equalisers on music apps I find a total waste of time and never bother with them. Out of curiosity I give them a try, both presets & manual, but I end up switching it out.

In all fairness, nothing wrong with with some mild tailoring. A case of suck it and see. A parametric equaliser would be more useful, but then you might as well just go for a room analyser thing.