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That's fair.  First I will say that the Decware listening room and everything in it is my reference.  I put together countless combinations of speakers, cables, amps and sources on a constant basis to give myself as broad a reference as possible.  In the beginning that included other manufactures amplifiers and speakers - all of it I could get my hands on. It helped that I worked for an audio store where I got to experience at least 50 amps and as many speakers, dragging them back and forth to my own listening room at home.

But, there are certain things in the Decware listening room that are in fact references of importance.  This is primarily speakers.  In order for any speaker to become a reference, it has to sound the same every time you hear it.  That means it can never be moved, not even one inch. Oh, one inch wouldn't be the end of the world for a personal reference, but I make amplifiers that image.  So I presently have two pair of speakers that do not move.  One are my corner horns, which are literally glued into the corner.  I built the entire room for those speakers... and they do not suck.

The other pair of speakers is on the other end of the room, my house speakers as I like to call them. They are too heavy to move, so they just don't. Both of these speakers are sound stage and imaging champions. Literally the best. One is a crossoverless single driver design, the other is a 3 way using scan speaks most expensive drivers and a crossover that cost nearly as much.

When designing an amplifier with unlimited imaging depth made possible from the lack of negative feedback in the amplifier -- you are analyzing the sound stage and where every sound is in that stage, its size and etc. If your speakers were moved even 1 inch all of those things would change leading the amp designer to think something he did caused it, or to just a lack of confidence during the design.

So my locked reference speakers are the corner horns and the house speakers.

House Speakers more info: https://www.decware.com/cgi-bin/yabb22/YaBB.pl?num=1637209185/0#0





Corner Horns more info: https://www.decware.com/newsite/cornerhorn.htm



These corner horns I did in the early 1990's and they have been my main reference ever since. All the early zen amps were designed and demo'd using these speakers.  Because they are so complex to build with their compound radiused angles the price of these speakers is well into the 5 digit club so we never pushed them or even really tried to sell any, instead just offered the plans for the ambitious DIYer.  If you want a pair today, I can have them for you in about 16 weeks for around 22 grand.

Against this stable backdrop that never changes -- I can use all of the other Decware and non-Decware speakers in more casual setups which is in itself an important reference. God forbid what if it only sounded good on the fixed reference speakers?  Or only when the speaker is scientifically placed in the perfect spot?  You get the idea.


So this is where my reference starts. We don't make sources components for sale anymore, so I have many DACS at different price points but my reference is the Holo Audio May with all the mods.  It's is all you could ever want from a DAC.  I'll expand on that a bit in the next post.

Steve

So getting into a more technical description of my reference source I want to talk about the Holo Audio May Dac for a minute.  I owned and used it for at least a year before I actually heard it.

I have a Roon Nucleus music server that is also a streamer.  It proved to be completely useless, I couldn't handle the sound.  The reason was because it uses a wall wort for a power supply.  I ended up using my Cambridge CXNv2 as a streamer instead which sounded infinitely better.

I went through the digital cable thing, spending stupid amounts of money to see where things stood, and found out the "straight wire" brand digital cable that costs around $400 or so was the winner against everything I tried which included stuff like "high fidelity" brand magnetically enhanced stuff that was almost as stiff as a car radio antenna.

In the end I put a real linear power supply on the Roon Nucleus and it slayed the Cambridge.  So my current digital reference is the Roon Nucleus upgraded with a linear power supply, an Audioquest Diamond USB cable to connect the Nucleus to the Holo Audio Dac.  From the Dac I run Decware DSR3, both XLR and RCA depending on the need at the time.

I feed both the linear power supply and the Holo Audio May with our Decware power cords coming from a Decware Zen Line Conditioner (ZLC).  The power quality out in this shop is less than optimal so a ZLC is very important for consistency.

I have this set up on the same end of the room as my rotating alter and the ZP3 phono stage so it makes it easy to play the DAC against the Vinyl Rig and use a variety of speakers, including the corner horns to make those comparisons.

As good as it was, the DECCA beat it, so I found a perfect FR7f in Japan and had it checked over and sent to me. This is that cartridge.

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This was suppose to be in a whole new league compared to the FR7, and after listening to it for 30 minutes I made it part of the Decware family.

I'll continue tomorrow : )

Tonearm cables are something I spent some time playing with. You have to try more than one. If you don't you're not going to achieve this level of reference unless you get lucky.  The tonearm cable is by far the most critical interconnect in your entire system and by a factor of at least 2 maybe more...   A cartridge is around 100 times less voltage than a DAC.  That makes the way the cable affects the sound drastically increase.  For example, you may have to interconnects, brand A and B.  Behind your DAC you concluded it was a tie.  You can't decide which one is better.  On a tonearm those same two cables could have as much of a change to the sound as comparing two different cartridges.

After 20 years of running the wrong tonearm cables on my FR64fx tonearm, I decided to see what the manufacture, Fidelity Research, had designed for it.  I would hate to have missed something, and after 3 of my own DIY cables, and as many after market offerings some costing too much money I found that my $75 orange Japanese Canare cable from eBay was the winner so this will be an attempt to beat that.  The FR cable arrived and sounded noticeably better, so that is the tonearm cable I presently use.

On my Audio Craft tonearm I am really just starting the process.  I ran the $75 cable on it and it sounded great, but based on my other experience I ordered the factory tonearm cable that went with the arm.  When it arrived, I listened to it for 30 seconds and then re-installed the $75 cable.  

The FR7 and FR7f are both moving coil and require a step up transformer so again after quite a bit of playing around it was a tossup between my own ZMC-1 and the Fidelity Research FX-1 so I went with the FX-1 just to keep the entire package original FR all the way through. That in itself becomes a pretty solid reference.

From the FX-1 to the phono stage (ZP3) I use the cable that is captive in the FX-1 itself because there is no other choice.  This is however a great arrangement because it allows this cable to be properly grounded with an actual shield that is bonded at the source end of the cable and it matches the tonearm cable which is silver.




The ZP3 is stock without any anniversary mods or copper foil caps.  This is because I like the vintage sound of the stock caps that are in the ZP3 by default.  The input tubes I play with from time to time using various NOS 12AX7's.  The 12AU7 which is the output tube of the ZP3 is Cryotone.  The voltage regulator on the ZP3 is an NOS OA3 and the rectifier is a current production Decware 5U4G.

The output of the ZP3 feeds the Sarah 300B prototype through a pair of prototype cables that I considered offering but don't like the stiffness so I scrapped the idea.  They do sound better that my current offering and would have cost around $500 for a 1m pair, so this was an opportunity to get some use out of them.

On the Audio Craft setup, the DECCA cartridge is not a moving coil, so it can plug directly into the phono stage which is how I used it for the first few weeks.  My only complaint was that the gain from this setup was lower than the FR setup and I wanted them to be the same so when I swap from one to the other, I don't have to adjust the volume on the amplifier.  

To fix this, I made a custom Decware ZMC using a Sowter transformer designed specifically for moving magnet/ moving iron cartridges that gives it about 6 dB of additional gain.  I have to say I am super impressed with the result.  The DECCA is super fast and razor sharp focus and I feared the transformer and additional cable would be detectable by softening things.  That didn't happen, and there is more body to the sound.

The FX-1 step up transformer has around 6dB more gain than our Decware ZMC-1 so you can see why it was louder than the DECCA.  Now they exactly match.  From the custom ZMC I use another pair of the prototype interconnects and when I want to switch from one tonearm to another I unplug the interconnects and swap them at the back of the ZP3.  I do this because I just don't want to build a switch, or use our ZSB with an additional interconnect.  As far as the ZP3 is concerned, all of the cables I've mentioned so far would be considered by it to be tonearm cables and that means less is definitely more.

Lastly my turntable motor was designed to be run off of a 12V battery, and was charged by a small wall wort that ultimately became the only power source when the battery failed.  I didn't see how a sewing thread acting as belt to turn a 57 lbs platter could adjust the speed fast enough to be heard so I never worried about this until one day by accident I did something that showed me the motor and thread can in fact cog the platter in a detectable way.  I was really shocked actually.  So now it has a top notch linear power supply running it instead of the wall wort.

The item with the red lights is the ZLC prototype when I considered using lighted switches.  The two boxes on top of that are the linear power supplies, one for the streamer and the other for the turntable motor.  

Hello, Steve
I am so glad you had this opportunity. What a wonderful Christmas present for you!

Brian