anyone else into hifi?

[Josh_Cohen]

as the title if so what you got

 

my list

 

leak 2075 speakers

leak 3020 speakers

leak 2030 speakers

leak 3020 speakers

mordaunt short carnival 3 speakers

mordaunt short ms30i speakers

wharfdale linton 3xp speakers

mission702e's

 

leak 2000 amp

 

marantz amp

 

just a few lol

[Vin]

Sparkomatic 'Dallas' cassette player. With FM.

[HillmanImp]

LOL

 

Standard stereo

 

LOL

 

Standard Speakers

 

LOL

[M'coli]

Now there's a funny thing - I've been hunting around for my personal tape player because I've found a load of tapes of good stuff, some of which seem to be no longer available as CDs or whatever (I'm listening to Miles Hunt's "Hairy on the Inside", which doesn't appear to be available brand new).

[Guest]

Don't have any lol or LOL in my hi-fi set up. Must be a Rochdale thing.

 

NAD C320BEE amplifier

NAD C542 CD player

Marantz DD82 DCC player \ recorder

Technics SL1210 Mk2 turntable with various KAD hop up bits

Pro-Ject Phono Box SE pre amp

Van Den Hul interconnects

Mission M73 speakers

 

Plus some gash Yamaha twin cassette deck, an old Sony AM FM tuner and a Sony JE 540 Mini Disc player \ recorder.

[Justin Case]

NAD C320BEE amplifier

NAD C542 CD player

Marantz DD82 DCC player \ recorder

Technics SL1210 Mk2 turntable with various KAD hop up bits

Pro-Ject Phono Box SE pre amp

Van Den Hul interconnects

Mission M73 speakers

 

Sorry, but that sounds like a foreign language to me Does that lot look anything like this:

 

[eddyramrod]

Erm... no. As long as I can play my Clare Teal CD, alternated with Elvis, I don't care what the equipment is that's making my pleasure possible.

[DSdriver]

Yep, thought I'd get mine in before we get slagged off for being off topic.

Garrard deck with 12inch SME arm

Played through a NAD amp to one 16 inch tannoy in corner cabinet and one Lowther SP6 (difference in speakers because I am almost deaf in one ear)

I only do vinyl. I used to have a Leak valve mono tuner but sold it to a collector in Japan and bought a NAD tuner on ebay for one tenth the price.

[retrogeezer]

oooh, that is nice dsd.

[roc24vIII]

Retro setup in the office:

 

Marantz PM-32 Amp

Marantz SD155 Cassette Deck

Marantz CD-60 CD player

with Mission 701 Speakers

 

with a more modern Gemini SA2400 Deck

[Felly Magic]

Sparkomatic 'Dallas' cassette player. With FM.

 

I had a Sparkomatic Chicago in my old MG Maestro! Wasn't a bad old unit.

[myglaren]

Shenzen Shanling CD T-100 tube CD player.

Marantz CD63 MKII SE KI Signature CD player.

Tosh HDMI DVD player*

Electrocompaniet 4.7 preamp

Electrocompaniet Ampliwire 120 DM6 power amp.

Assortment of interconnects and speaker cables.

LG 50†flat panel TV*

Jamo D590 speakers.

 

*I rarely watch the telly but these are almost exclusively to play my

DVDs, sound run through the stereo.

 

Strangely enough, the daft thing that brought this heap to life was a £12 XLR interconnect from China – the amps are balanced and changing from RCA interconnects to XLR was like chucking £3000 on some upgraded speakers.

 

That's for the sitting room.

 

For the dining room, a Sonab 75S turntable (been gathering dust for the past ten years, physically no room for it on the other heap)

A Sonab R-4000 receiver – mad thing .

Sonab OA5 orthoacoustic speakers – even madder.

This heap is really nostalgia. Bought the turntable when I lived in Sweden but could never afford the rest of it. The amp & speakers are recent purchases but all of it is over 40 years old.

[cobblers]

WHoa, those sonab peakers are worth money? an old mate bought a set from a carboot sale for £2 years ago and uses them in the garage off an old AM radio out of a mk2 fiesta l, listening to the shipping forecast and atlantic 252.

[myglaren]

I paid £117 but they usually cost a lot more.

 

I do have a pair of Dynatron speakers bought at Chester-Le-Street market for £4 about twenty years ago.

Abandoned in son's old room, he took my other Danish floorstanders when he shifted rooms - can't think of the name of the damned things now.

[lovejoy]

Josh, seems like you have a lot of leaks, have you tried antifreeze in your system yet ?

 

Cobblers, Atlantic 252 is ACE, I get that on my AM radio in the Charade, The fiat 900e has a superb Crown radio/cassette player. Luxury.

[Charlie Croker]

1979 Technics New Class A bought off my brother in 1985 and still looks the part and sounds AWSOME. Its all original as it came out of the boxes in 79. All i have upgraded is the speakers. I blew the originals to bits so i bought a kit from Richard Allenn and built those. I would not part with it as i love a great bassy sound and boy this kit provides.lol

[barefoot]

until I read this thread, I had not realised that my hi fi was shite.

 

Upstairs hidden away is a Dual 505 - which google tells me is quite cool.

 

the remainder of my stuff is similarly ancient, but is used daily, is loud, clear & until now

had given me no cause for concern...

 

Google reserves judgement on my Pioneer amp

 

and is ambivalent about my choice of speaker Wharfedale Laser 90's...

 

'Listening impressions were of basically neutral response with no obvious faults. On orchestra and piano the bass was well in evidence but not completely clear-cut due to a degree of overhang. There was a certain vowel-sound coloration on speech and a tendency for high frequencies to vary in balance at oblique angles. This could be contained by careful positioning, and then most types of programme material could be reproduced pleasantly at a wide range of levels. Sensitivity was about average for speakers of this size (at just about the claimed 88dBA) and power handling capacity adequate for domestic listening'

 

If it's any help. all my music (and there's a shit load of it) plays wirelessly through this lot via MP3 from a Mac

 

Opinions please, am I doing his correctly?

[Josh_Cohen]

to me its not what anyone else says its how it sounds to me most of my stuff looks battered but sounds amazing

[Dead_E23]

I'm also into Leak stuff - I've got a pair of TL/12+ valve monoblocks, a Stereo 30 transistor amp and another later one, which I think is a 2200. I've also got an Armstrong 626 tuner amp, another very high quality make that nobody's heard of. Unfortunately my house is way too small for my Lowther Acousta speakers, so it's all stored away.

 

The earlier Leak amps were made in the Park Royal industrial estate (a stone's throw from the Ace Cafe), the Armstrong amp was made just off the Holloway Road, and the speakers were made in Sidcup, so all inside the M25 - I think that's rather good.

 

...and from my wishlist,here's the Quad electrostatic loudspeaker:

 

[myglaren]

The guy I bought my Shanling CD player from wanted me to take home a just-in Quad II/40 setup worth at the time around £23,000. Just to try it out, no pressure to buy it.

 

I did have a Quad 34/405 setup a few years back that was about the same age as me.

Nicer than anything I'd had previously once it had been serviced but the engineer who did it had nothing but contempt for it, reckoned it was too slow to get out of it's own way.

I disagreed, up until I replaced it with Electrocompaniet amplification. Soon saw his point of view after that.

 

If only I could afford a pair of Nemo's.

Fallen in price over the past few years - they used to be £15,000 a pair.

[DSdriver]

Unfortunately my house is way too small for my Lowther Acousta speakers, so it's all stored away.

 

No it isn't! all you need apart from the speakers is a comfy chair in the room.

 

Seriously though Our living room is just 15x10 and chock full of three piece suite and other furniture which does rather get in the way of the speakers, and we don't use much of the volume control otherwise the house would probably fall down, but the quality of the sound is unbelievable.

 

A word of warning, I sent my SP6 drive unit back to Lowther for a service, nothing happened for ages and eventually I got pissed off and got a debt collector chappy to go and chase them up. I don't know what he said to them but within a couple of days a bloke delivered my speaker back and buggered off quick before I could ask him any questions. The debt collector was money well spent as I would have had to cough up a fortune for a replacement unit which would probably need a service.

[cobblers]

Shouldn't you lot be circlejerking over those midi hifis in the shape of footballs you could get out of the catalogue, and fondly recalling memories of having a tape deck that chews tapes up if you let it try and auto reverse, so when the music stops you have to sprint as fast as you can across the room and thump the stop button, before your tape full of music recorded off the radio (with a bit of chewed up paper in the "no record" hole) ends up as bin fodder.

[Dead_E23]

No it isn't! all you need apart from the speakers is a comfy chair in the room.

That would be fine if only one comfy chair was required. It's the simmering resentment from the other chair that puts me off the idea. I bet even the lovely Miss Quad above would stop smiling the moment those speakers appeared in her sitting room.

 

Clearly, what I need is some Klangfilm Bionors to drown out the moaning:

 

 

I'd also wager that myglaren#s system sounds rather good. Not at all sure it counts as shite though!

 

ETA: You comments about the Lowther factory exchange scheme interest me, because one of my drivers needs to go back. I was under the impression that they sent you a rebuilt driver first, then you used the packaging to return the sickly one. Is that incorrect? Also, did you mean PM6 rather than SP6? Not heard of those!

[myglaren]

Good God them's 'r HUGE.

 

I once fancied a pair of Air Partners (Living Voice) but they are too big for my house. Not as wide as yours Lowthers though.

 

I think at least the Sonab stuff qualifies as shite. Doesn't sound too bad though.

 

It's a strange thing. When I lived in Sweden I had aspirations way beyond my resources and lusted after a Harmon-Kardon Citation X.

 

Many years later I find that the guy that designed that was Matti Otala, the Finnish engineer who also designed the Electrocompaniet (Norwegian) amplifiers

[Dead_E23]

I once fancied a pair of Air Partners (Living Voice) but they are too big for my house. Not as wide as yours Lowthers though.

I hadn't heard of the Air Partners before, but they look tremendous! All the more so for the Vitavox sitting on top.

I suspect they are considerably larger (and pricier) than a Lowther Acousta though. The huge things pictured above were Siemens Klangfilm cinema speakers; Acoustas are comparatively modest looking things, particularly when the drivers have been robbed from them:

[Pete-M]

When it comes to oddball and slightly odd speakers, I've got a pair of these that are surprisingly not bad when teamed up with something that produces decent lower end.

 

[Josh_Cohen]

just replaced the speaker surrounds and repaired the crossovers in these

 

there very good

 

 

wierd looking too

[Guest]

I got:-

 

Audiolab 8000A amp - ebay bargain - £250 - which included:-

Rogers LS3A speakers - I'd always wanted some Rogers - although these aren't the legendary LS2/As, they're pretty good

Thorens TD165 turntable - 30-odd years old - my Dad's old t/t - which he regrets giving to me!

Sony TCK-615S tape deck - 'lent' by my neighbour, who moved away, and never asked for it back! - great deck

Technics SL-PS 900 CD player - the weakest link - came with the Audiolab & Rogers for an extra £50 - to be replaced

Sony Mini-disc player - don't know the model, bought it with the Sony CD player from Richer Sounds in about 1996

 

And in another room

Leak Delta 30 - 39 years old - lovely warm sounding amp - used a lot!

Allison speakers (don't know which model - a birthday present when I was about 17)

Sony cheapo CD player - cheap but sounds good

 

I've also got a Bush Radiogram, which I didn't want, and really should get rid of!

[Guest]

yes hello, not only am i into hifi, and do actually own a pair of Leak 2075 ( which are truly awsome) as well as a number of bowers and wilkins speakers, a thorens TD150 and Pioneer PL12D.All the stuff i was in awe of when i was younger but couldn't afford but am also into rare alfa romeos. Yes the 2 can be combined!

so who else out there has a pair of leak 2075's

[Ross_K]

I remember having a hifi before I had kids.

 

I sold my separates after my twins ripped the covers off my lovely B&W speakers and made shit of the domes and the kevlar cones.