audio research purchase

@tomic601  I owe you one. I had the itch,and I just read your post, and my itch disappeared. A better ROI for me might be to sell the Aurender A15 and get an N200. and separate DAC.

Curious about HRS isolation.

Sure…. I am definitely an enabler…

both your 75 and 5 will benefit from HRS Nimbus couplers 3 for the pre and 4x for the amp . I have pretty much entirety of 2 systems all with Nimbus couplers. There are of course other brands. Turntables live on HRS spring platforms and Vortex. There are of course other brands of isolation. I’m sort of opportunistic with picking up Nimbus as best I can used …

@skids 

2019 I bought a very old Vintage Tube Preamp, too old for McIntosh to check on because they no longer stock all the parts for it). Audio Classics, very near them in Vestal works on them.

Lucky me, seller didn’t lie, sounded great. Two years later, I visited a friend in Vestal, dropped it off. They replaced a few resistors and capacitors, one LED, all my tubes tested good.

Next visit to my friend, picked it up. Got it home, sounded the same, maybe younger ears would notice something, but I had more confidence in it of course.

What made me very happy is that they replaced all the old rca jacks with new gold plated RCA jacks. I occassionaly had l/r imbalance and found the signal intergrity of the old worn jacks was inconsistent. I think they were originally slightly undersized, or, cleaning them repeatedly made them a slight smaller diameter. Cables are damn tight now, and I changed all my RCA’s to Locking Connectors, so if I mess with any cable it doesn't disrupt another.

@skids 

That was a great buy and while you passed on this deal, take the next one.  It is a fabulous/end-game preamp.  You can continuously build upon a great preamp.

I will just say that I have a REF 6 and I really like it.  I have the stock Sovtek tubes and a Tung-Sol power tube.  Coupled with a Pass Labs 250.8, I feel like I get the best of both worlds.  And ARC has an excellent track record of supporting their older models so this will last for a long time!