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Leave it to Donnie to shake things up! I guess I was avoiding looking at these things. But it is fun, and wild, reviewing years of developing the main system, and that leading to enough nice things to make two more.
I have not sold much of what I finally bought either. And I am still on the lookout for new pieces that might make my experience more complete. But starting with good sounding stuff, and lots of my upgrades over years from progressively making and modifying things, I have no doubt saved myself from a lot of shopping.
At the same time, as things get more resolved and balanced, I am always sort of blown away at how the system and music seem to teach me and refine my perception... which leads into an also seemingly ever-evolving need for refinements toward the "no sound" that can allow pretty complete musical experiences across recordings. Considering it now, I can't quite imagine how many things I might have needed to try, how much more money that would have cost, and how much slower my audio evolution would have been had I not gotten into refining what I have rather than hoping whatever I bought could get me to a similar place.
But even so... seems like quite a list to me:
4 main power conditioners with a bunch of helper devices
5 amps
5 pre-amp stages
3 pair speakers, 1 with super tweeters
1 sub
3 refined audio defined streamers
3 Dacs
All are in use now in three systems except 2 alternate amps, one power conditioner, and a basket of cables.
I would be reticent to count how many nice cables I have to support all the gear, but I saw why the other day, happily re-impressed by what cables can do in a revealing system. A few years back I had loaned a friend three IC pairs I had made so he could explore them in his system. And now, wanting to see what they would do in the new system setup I am working on, I asked him to choose the pair he liked most in his system, and send me the others. For me, letting him pick a pair was a token of my appreciation for a lot of help he had given me while my wife was ill, and on either side of her death.
Seeing what he sent back, I was happy... One is a pair I had not done the final "dressing" on with exterior damping, sleeving, and shrink... and importantly to me, it is one of my later design iterations from years of exploring on a relatively singular track I finally came to. It has a blend of Neotech UPOCC wire gauges and metals with a damping core, geometry, and KLE connectors, each determined by sound... and it is one of the last few cables that finally let me stop having to experiment with ICs over the last several years...(at least for now!)
The new system, as it is, has only two pair of ICs. One I made with balanced ends on the DAC side, and its other ends soldered to the transformer wires in my version of Steve's ZBIT design, eliminating four connectors. The other ICs, go from some nicely fast and transparent RCA jacks on the "ZBIT" output to my old Torii MKIII, which is modified enough to open, resolve and speed it up in relatively transformative ways. From the "ZBIT" output to the Torii, I had been using what is now an old pair of Decware Silver ICs, the ones with super simple silver ends and Jupiter cable/wire that I think I recall was damped with beeswax(?).
This position, an important part of the signal path for sure, if a system will show ICs well, this will. Putting mine in shook me up, having been used to, and liking the sound with the pretty nicely refined Decware cables. The older ICs were nice there, but those I got back from my friend shifted the whole vibe, making the music more alive and immediate... they opened up the whole sound with enough musical speed, resolution and space that the system felt more like it was breathing music than playing it... A great experiential illustration of how important to the whole cables can be, thought I would pass that along....
you know... Will the enabler?!?%^&*()_
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