mike_in_nc
Responses from mike_in_nc
| Modern Bluegrass As others have said, check out Billy Strings. This young guy is phenomenal. He plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin; sings; and writes songs. Knows all the classic tunes, and seems to be all about the music. I just love him!If you haven't seen it, th... | |
| Newbie, need advice. Benchmark is quite responsive to customers. You might try emailing their support department. | |
| Power Conditioning / Surge Protection If you are buying a costly power unit and you hope for improvement in sound, the common advice TRY before you BUY is important. Power units' effects vary by system. I have had good results with the Torus RM-20, but that doesn't mean you will like ... | |
| Do you rely on RAID as your NAS backup? RAID provides a lot of storage with some protection against drive failure. If a drive fails in a 4-unit NAS, one can put in a new drive and rebuild the volume with no loss of data.If the controller card fails in the NAS, not so simple!I have my NA... | |
| Amplifier upgrade advice under $2000 I have an SHD in one of our systems and think it’s great.You have a lot of good recommendations already for power amps, so I’ll keep this short.I owned the AVA Fet Valve 400R and liked it a lot. It has been improved by AVA since and now is availab... | |
| Thor Audio repair? Stereo Unlimited was a go-to place when I lived in SD (nearly 35 years ago), and they are still in the high-end business. They are located in the Sports Arena area. You might ask them to recommend a repair shop. | |
| Which in-wall speaker wire I probably would use Mogami W3103. It is professionally engineered for the purpose but not priced for audiophiles. It should be fine within walls; I don’t think it’s rated for plenum use, if that matters to you.P.S. The Belden 5000-series cable fr... | |
| Upgrades that met/exceeded your expectations and those that felt short Exceeded: Switching, years ago, from a conrad-johnson MF-2300 amplifier to a Bryston B14-SST. Wow! Everything was better: dynamics, clarity, bass, smoothness, imaging.Exceeded: Adding a Torus RM-20 power unit to feed my power amp. Despite my skept... | |
| streamer That's a nice CD player!I have an Auralic Aries G1, and I like it a lot. I compared it to the Bricasti M5, and I couldn't tell the difference. They are both really good streamers. Of course, there are many others on the market, too. | |
| Parasound HINT vs. Bryston 135-3 or Simaudio 340i D3PX Not everyone agrees with @stereo5 that the Bryston is bright. I have heard a couple of all-Bryston systems that were stunning. The cubed units are especially refined and NOT bright sounding. That is based on my own 4B3, and also dozens of reviews.... | |
| Amazon HD streaming service ... I tried Amazon HD but dropped it. It would not let me get best-quality output on my PC, nor would it send output to a network renderer (streamer). If you look around, you will find those complaints repeated by many. That makes Amazon HD a great so... | |
| streamer Different products entirely. Roon ROCK is software that can run on the Roon Nucleus, a small, silent computer for running Roon core (ROCK is a version of Roon core). I understand it also can have output to your DAC, so if it’s in the same room as ... | |
| Your system quality vs. recording quality Indeed. | |
| MoOde I tried it once, briefly, but I found Volumio easier to deal with. | |
| Amplifier warm up Really? I'm the only one who thinks, seriously, that having dinner is going to change one's perceptions just as truly as an amplifier's warm-up? (I know if I'm waiting to eat, I respond to music a lot less happily than after a nice dinner.) |