Your Forever Pieces? What and Why?

For me it's my cary sli80. .I've owned it for 7 year's now and will keep it until I'm 6 feet under. The reasons are 1 it really is a great integrated tube amp,2 lots of options as far as tubes go and 3rd because I've done all the capacitors mods to it and am very pleased with the results. 

Absolutely love this post!  Thanks for starting it Uberwaltz!

i am totally ashamed that I have a bunch of 70s gear in a closet I never use but nostalgia and sentiment will not let me depart with them.   My original Dual 1019 Turntable I had in 1970, an old Thorens 125, am old Kenwood stone-base turntable, my Denon DL 103 I had in law school.  And a bunch of (at least 12) pieces of old Marantz gear - mainly amps, tuners, I integrateds or receivers  (solid  state unfortunately rather than tubes). I also have  a number of old Marantz cassette decks and a few  old Reel-to-reel tape decks by Akai, Tascam and Teac,

  Also in a box in MINT condition but not in current use is a Rotel Michigan RHT -10 tuner that this post may motivate me to bring out and use.  I have a fabulous new rooftop antenna with a rotator I never installed too.

As far as the current pieces I have:

my Conrad-Johnson ART-3 line stage with ten NOS Telefunken CCa’s (love it to death)

SME 30 (not version 2) turntable with SME IV.vi arm

Lamm  M1.1 Reference monoblock amps,

Silent Running Audio CRAZ triple with rankin white maple

Reimyo  CD-77
(all of the above bought 15 years ago - the ART-I was bought then but upgraded by c-j in 2009j

my beloved Rockport Aquila loudspeakers bought I 2008 - unless I ever get a bigger room where I’d go to the Rockport Altair, I will die owning these fabulous transducers. 

A set of Silverline  SR-15 (circa 1993) that I am hoping to use in a second  system soon),

and last but not least, due to my OCD addiction, the following headphone gear:

the fourth ever built 1998 Moth Audio  s2A3 amp (original amp not the later integrated amp)

and from Eddie Current (Craig Uthis, the designer/owner of defunct Moth Audio):

** Eddie Current Studio Amp

** Eddie Current Balancing Act

** Eddie Current 445

** Eddie Current 2A3 MK.iv

** Eddie Current Zana Deux SE (OTL)

** Eddie Current Zana Deux  ZDT

** Eddie Current Super 7

(if anyone has an Eddie Current Electra for sale, I will buy it)

** an Allnic HPA 3000 

** an Allnic HPA-5009

plus and assortment of headphones (Focal Utopia, Audeze LCD-3: LCD-X; Sennheiser HD-800 and HD-650)

Planning on converting a small bedroom to a Headphone Room with all of the forgoing pieces of gear (plus a couple not mentioned) in use with various sources.

yes, I have an illness 

Frank

McIntosh XRT-28 speakers and MC-601 amplifiers. While I haven't had them for a very long time, I don't see them going anywhere. I absolutely love the big wall of sound the XRT-28's produce and the 601's drive them with ease. I think I'll be buried with (or inside) these speakers.

Great posts people, love some of the stuff I am seeing here!
Yes there are some serious addicts too...lol

Let’s see, I have had a Threshold Stasis S2 for probably less than 20 years, a PS Audio 200C for longer, an Audio Research LS15 for a decade or so, a Coda 05R about the same. Various Sony ES CD players and DVD players. All of it has been highly modified. The end of last year however I got a Schitt Audio Yggdrasil DAC, and that changed everything. Now I have a DS2 preamp, and an amp very similar to, but not as good as Don Sachs’ amp. His electronics just embarrass most of the rest of my gear. I really can’t imagine replacing anything in my system currently. If you had 20K for an amp and preamp you MIGHT be able to better Don’s, but you would have to see search high and low to do so, and the Yggdrasil might also be slightly bettered, but I think that I’ll stand pat, for the first time ever, I don’t suffer from listening fatigue. A lot of that was due to speakers honestly, but as good as my SS gear sounds, it sounds good compared to other SS gear, and lessor quality tube gear. Don Sachs has been working on tube gear his whole life and has found some amazingly good components that are simply neutral. He has found components that I had never heard of, and he has allowed other components that I had tried and pulled, to fully burn in. I thought that they sounded so bad that they could never sound good, but he had the patience to allow them to fully burn in, and it turned out that they were truly good sounding after a proper burn in. I cannot recommend him highly enough! BTW, if you do buy from him, he'll make you some very inexpensive interconnects that will better anything I have heard, but only if you are buying an amp or preamp from him.

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