Hifi Mistakes

Mistakes:-
Not buying a Amazon Turntable One in mint condition £1200
It was sold on a bids re-listing for £970.

Missing out on a Roksan TMS for £1200 Westie.

From a dealer too! And I was stood in front of it with money to buy. Only one word for it: Plonker!

Mistakes - selling the ATC's to move in with herself when we married :cry:

All but giving the Mentor deck away when the Decca broke (like they do) and I couldn't afford something decent to replace it.

I kinda miss the ARC SP14, as it's basically a good sounding preamp, albeit with cachet, foo caps and bling on it to make it desirable to the wealthy.

Not buying some ATC50ASL's when I could afford them - the 'BC1 on steroids' shape is more manageable domestically.

I should have kept the Lustraphone LP100 I had. love sounding amp with distinctive for the times styling.

Selling the krell KSA50S. I HAD to and knew I'd never be able to fully do it justice. In this old system, my 45+ year old Crown D-150 sounds the same as it has an easy load to drive...





Gear mistakes - too many to mention and I forget I did my share of box swapping in my early days in the industry -

let's see - Rogers HG88 (this one was shagged)

Snell E II's - another boomy ugh! with harshness at the crossover too in a smaller room

Linn LK280 - took six months to even begin to lose the grainy sound I hear in related LK100's and early Klouts too (these latter got much better I believe as they went on) and the sound was forced as through a toothpaste tube

Tube Technology genesis Mono valve amps, which caned their quad of EL34's to death in a year - I had the choice of these or EAR509's and wish I'd bought the latter looking back.

Not buying a crown DC300A when they were cheap twenty odd years ago when studios were clearing out and going fully active with their monitors... I may have one coming as part of a deal, but it's up in the air presently...

The LK100 is a horrible amp to my ears. Grainy is a good description,. Paired with kabers, it’s closer to being a weapon than a piece of hifi

Here we go again.....👬


MR FUKIN KNOW IT ALL........WE ARE ALL PLEBS AND OUR VIEWS SIMPLY CANNOT COUNT.

DAVE....✋

Snore fest dave.......ffs.

My biggest mistake was getting involved with Hi-Hi in the first place. Just think, I could have led a normal life and not spent forty years obsessing and being broke .

Mind you knowing me, it would have been something else, maybe cars or bikes or photography (been there with those) or fishing or stamp collecting or antiques........or even following a football team around the country, hmm, maybe not. I hate football.

Holy F#ck!

S.

He has loads of hifi mates and acquaintances. Apparently he was offered it for free and volunteered the £50.

I'm hoping the Lk1 wasn't a bad mistake. Darran at Class A doesn't' want to know if the logic board is contaminated by a long leaking battery. Others I've seen in the past have burned out main boards where years of 24/7 operation have cooked the boards. Effin' overdone band limited design, running before they could walk. We'll see if the caps I have coming are enough to fix it. Horror stories on cramped overheating Lk2's as well - all versions. Linn really ought to have a small stock of these boards to keep them going, as it's their fault they burn out due to the recommendation for permanent powering.


Were caps so bad in the 80's and early 90's that things like Lingo's need re-capping now with claimed sonic improvements, or were Quad, Linn and Naim using throttled voltage ones that wear out through stress and over-heating? NVA isn't the only one that claims not to need cap replacements over decades and many Japanese amps of the 70's have lasted decades without serious work being needed... My twenty year old HH pro amp was used 24/7 in an editing suite and the supply caps are fine, the amp isn't running oddly with driftng bias levels and the only sign of years of use is iffy now unavailable Noble attenuators which were very hard used. I replaced some of the axial caps in the main board with Nichicon FG types and 'thought' the sound a little cleaner, but it's a very close call here really and none of them were bulging or leaking at all.

This thing is a project, but it'll be an expensive one if I can't get the remote/logic board to work the thing.

I was glad to upgrade from my last one thirty years ago (Nak CA7 first and then an ARC SP14 which was so much better then - and it was a huge step up to Croft levels of preamp fidelity (musicality and atmosphere, which no Linn or Naim preamp had then until the silly-money 52 came along), which shows just how good and inexpensive some of Glenn's designs were in the early nineties compared to everything else...), but peeps here kept saying how the LK1 makes for a good very cheap MC phono stage, so I've already made up some cables from the tape record outs to try (Van Damme pro patch as the light sound should suit here) and I have a pair of three pole female XLR's too, to try the standard pre outs to confirm my old memories (to either eat humble pie or tell you lot I was right all along!).

These preamps, despite their complexity inside, didn't need 24/7 operation, but in the late 80's I remember we had a very hot Summer period and I feared for the internals as my LK1 case got almost too hot to touch. Most days it was warm. A few slits on the top may well have helped, but the lack of dust inside this one was nice to see and only the battery area of the logic board looks sub-par visually - oh, and I needed to clean the button contacts on the board as these had tarnished

Come back NVA P20, all is forgiven

The LK1 isn't like the Krell power amp which you could cook eggs on if not careful (my Quad 405-2 got this hot driving passive ATC 20's, but I digress).

In normal climate and use, the Lk1 runs 'warm' and over a several hour session, it's benign. It's 24/7 in a confined situation during a hot summer that problems could occur. Mine's been stored unused and this is why the leaky battery went unchecked...

Can't think of anything I've really regretted buying except for a Cambridge 840C CD player that was very disappointing given the cost and the build quality. It was chock full of expensive capacitors. Or maybe it was just not to my taste, as I had no problem selling it on.