New amp and speakers

12bore

I am looking to upgrade my 14 year old system that I got from RicherSounds.
Consists of Cambridge Audio p25 mkII amp, JPW mini monitors and a dirt cheap Eclipse cd player. Think the whole thing cost me around 180 sterling, so it is about as budget as you can get.

Have been doing a bit of googling, and the amps in my price range that I am looking at are Nad 325BEE or Rotel RA-04. They seem to get pretty good reviews from journalists and users alike.

A few questions:

Any other amps worth considering?

Any speaker suggestions? Budget of about 300 euros, maybe a little more.

Listen to all sorts of music, rock, techno, reggae,blues, developing a stong liking for bluegrass/c'n'w. I should add that most of my listening these days is pc based, high quality mp3 (if that isn't an oxymoron.)


Am I going to get a noticeably better sound over my current system, or am I going for overkill and wasting my money? I know it is all down to my preferences, but it will be very hard/ impossible to demo stuff as I live way down the country.

Thanks for any input.

mossym

haven't heard either amp...but the nad consistently get good reviews. i think from what i've read i'd go rotel myself, but there is nothing wrong with either..

a good set of bookshelfs are probalby what you are after from wht you have wrote. i'd recommend the b&w 6 series, or 3 series if budget deosn't stretch...have the 6 series floorstanders myself and love them. cloney audio is the dealer in ireland

Slaphead07

Is your entire budget for this upgrade €300? If so then remember that the whole point of separates is that you can upgrade piece by piece.

I'd bin the CD player if I were you, spend the €300 on a NAD 525 (richersounds have them) and enjoy that upgrade. In a few months buy better interconnect cables/speaker cable and enjoy that upgrade.... a few months later a new amp and finally new speakers.
By taking a piecemeal approach you actually hear where your money is going and frankly it's more affordable in the long term.

ZENER

Completely agree with the above. If you replace the lot in one go and don't like it you won't know which component offends you - this way the sound will either please you or it won't and fixing it is only changing one part rather than the whole lot. Me though, I'd start with the speakers then the amp then the sources - subjectivity - the meaning of life n'est pas ?

ZEN

Slaphead07

ZENER wrote:

Me though, I'd start with the speakers then the amp then the sources - subjectivity - the meaning of life n'est pas ?

ZEN

That's a long-running bone of contention among hifi geeks.... which is more important, source or speakers? Personally I think you'll always hear the weakest component so it's a moot point, I don't really have a view on which is more important.
In this case the amp and speakers are alright (just!) but the CD player simply can't get data off the disc so no matter what speakers you add you'll be limited to the CD player's capability... which is poor.

Not disagreeing with you like...;) just sayin'

mossym

i think you'll get a bigger wow effect for the buck from upgrading the speakers and amp first, but that's my choice.

and lets not start on interconnects. get some decent ones, but buy the rest of the gear first before you decide if you want to buy into the marketing racket on interconnects

12bore

hanks for the responses.

My budget is about 250-300 euro for each component, but not buying everything all at once - would never get it past the money controller!

Going to go for speakers first, rarely use the cd player, started to FLAC rip cds to hard drive (just got a big new hard drive) and output through the amp. Not true hi-fi but it is convenient.

Will try and get to Cloney on one of my rare trips to Dublin. B&W 6's appear very highly recommended, but suspect they may be slightly over budget - pricelist on Cloney website is absent. Otherwise looking at the typical choices - MA BR2, Wharfedale 9.1, etc etc. Can get these on net delivered under budget, but obviously no demo. Do Cloney stock these type of speakers?

Have seen the fairly recent thread about these speakers, so no need to go through that all again.

Thanks,
12bore

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

MA BR2, Wharfedale 9.1, etc etc. Can get these on net delivered under budget, but obviously no demo. Do Cloney stock these type of speakers?

they don't. As mentioned in another thread a mate is selling a pair of Mission 752 floorstanders for €250. A bit old (10 years or so) but a bargain at that price.
These are the exact pair.

Slaphead07

mossym wrote:

and lets not start on interconnects. get some decent ones, but buy the rest of the gear first before you decide if you want to buy into the marketing racket on interconnects

I'm not suggesting high end ones, just something better than the lenght of wool you get in the box with these products. Cheaper than a shiney box upgrade depending on funds at the time. I've found going from cheapo stuff like Monster or Cambridge cables to proper ones to be a huge upgrade... but sure maybe I'm gullible and my ears are plotting against me:rolleyes:

mossym

Slaphead07 wrote:

I'm not suggesting high end ones, just something better than the lenght of wool you get in the box with these products. Cheaper than a shiney box upgrade depending on funds at the time. I've found going from cheapo stuff like Monster or Cambridge cables to proper ones to be a huge upgrade... but sure maybe I'm gullible and my ears are plotting against me:rolleyes:

no no i'll agree that far..defo upgrade from the in the box stuff...but there is sensible and the snake oil, blue smoke seasoned oxygenated hydrated calorie free caffeine enhanced individually wound cables...

Slaphead07

mossym wrote:

no no i'll agree that far..defo upgrade from the in the box stuff...but there is sensible and the snake oil, blue smoke seasoned oxygenated hydrated calorie free caffeine enhanced individually wound cables...

are you sayin' my Van Den Hul Carbon hybrid interconnects are a rip off? (no.... I really do use them! )

12bore

Have just been reading about diy cat5 speaker cable, I am going to have to try that. Neighbour is an electrician with rolls of the stuff lying around. Might leave me with more to spend on other bits.

Have also come across another irish hifi shop with a webpage, munstersounds.com. Haven't seen them mentioned on these pages before (search function isn't working for me at the moment.)

Prices look okish, considering we live in ripoff land.

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

Have just been reading about diy cat5 speaker cable, I am going to have to try that.

A mate of mine did that and I have to say it was very impressive. It was bi-wired, braided and covered in a neat sleeve bought in Maplins. Go for it!

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

Have also come across another irish hifi shop with a webpage, munstersounds.com.

I just had a look at that... some wonderful stuff there but some utter muck as well. Buyer beware!

ZENER

Slaphead07 wrote:

A mate of mine did that and I have to say it was very impressive. It was bi-wired, braided and covered in a neat sleeve bought in Maplins. Go for it!

Ok you can take your tongue way from your cheek now . . . .

ZEN

Slaphead07

ZENER wrote:

Ok you can take your tongue way from your cheek now . . . .

ZEN

Huh? I'm serious.

12bore

They look pretty easy to make, very very cheap compared to a lot of speaker cable.

Supposed to sound pretty good as well, gives some expensive cables a good run for their money. Seeing as it's not going to cost much to make them, trying can't hurt.

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

They look pretty easy to make, very very cheap compared to a lot of speaker cable.

Supposed to sound pretty good as well, gives some expensive cables a good run for their money. Seeing as it's not going to cost much to make them, trying can't hurt.

Use good quality bullet or banana plugs and solder, it would be a shame if the cables were of poor quality because of minor details (and those details do matter!). As I said above a mate made some and I borrowed them for a while, I had to buy Nordost Blue Heaven to find better. Despite what the cynics say audio cables do take a little time to "burn in" so allow a few months of normal use before forming a final judgement on them.

12bore

Just done a very quick google for price of Nordost Blue Heaven :eek: :eek:
You must have a pretty high-end system to warrant their use. Lucky you.

Planning on using banana plugs and solder, no need to scrimp on extras if the cable is free.

mossym

Slaphead07 wrote:

Huh? I'm serious.

then i would seriously question the money you spent on the expensive cables..

you're aying expensive interconnects are good, cheap interconnects bad..yet cheap diy cat5 cable is good? how many strands of cat5 was he putting together to get similar guage to decent speaker cable?

Slaphead07

mossym wrote:

then i would seriously question the money you spent on the expensive cables..

Question away... I do know what I'm doing. The CAT5 cable was good but not good enough. I had tried old Audioquest solid copper cable, mains cable, Transparent cables and a mates pure silver ones before deciding that only Nordost delivered what I wanted.

mossym wrote:

you're aying expensive interconnects are good, cheap interconnects bad..yet cheap diy cat5 cable is good? how many strands of cat5 was he putting together to get similar guage to decent speaker cable?

Very simplistic interpretation of what I said. The free "in the box" interconnect is rubbish - that's a fact. What you upgrade to depends on your system. I've ended up with Van Den Hul but I didn't start out there... a mate produces "Dalkey Audio Cables" (worth a google) and gave me a pair to try out (this was when I had a more entry level HiFi system) and the improvement was incredible... like cleaning dirty windows. As my system improved so the cables. I can clearly hear what I'm getting from those cables and I don't claim to have "golden ears".. I'm just a bloke who wants to hear the music as it was recored. It's all about the music.
Cheap cables are rarely good. Good cables are rarely cheap, that's not to say that expensive cables are always good either, I don't know anybody who believes that.

I never said the CAT5 was used for interconnects.. just speakers therefore your comparison is incorrect. Speakers have a much lower load and you can get away with all sorts when wiring speakers, the cheaper stuff can't carry all the details in the music (actually it carries very little detail) and your bass and treble will be compromised. I don't how many strands he used for this but he knows exactly what he's doing... as it happens the guy is a scientist.

Incidentally I had two much longer replies typed up to this but the connection went both times... this is the short version!

also... there is no debate here on cables... I know they make a huge difference - I've heard it time and time again. If others want to scoff that's just fine, if some want to insult (as happened before) then that's not fine.

ZENER

Simple confusion over terms used IMO. You say tomato . . .

To me an interconnect is a connection between (inter) two devices, reasonably therefore a speaker cable is an interconnect.

Aside from all that I'm still at a loss (pardon the pun) over how a CAT5 cable could be better than a mains cable carrying audio signals in your opinion - I thought you were being sarcastic above to be honest.

I won't go down that route with you again, as I've said before it's all subjective but I prefer the more scientific and provable approach and I like facts not opinions.

ZEN

mossym

Slaphead07 wrote:

Question away... I do know what I'm doing. The CAT5 cable was good but not good enough. I had tried old Audioquest solid copper cable, mains cable, Transparent cables and a mates pure silver ones before deciding that only Nordost delivered what I wanted.



Very simplistic interpretation of what I said. The free "in the box" interconnect is rubbish - that's a fact. What you upgrade to depends on your system. I've ended up with Van Den Hul but I didn't start out there... a mate produces "Dalkey Audio Cables" (worth a google) and gave me a pair to try out (this was when I had a more entry level HiFi system) and the improvement was incredible... like cleaning dirty windows. As my system improved so the cables. I can clearly hear what I'm getting from those cables and I don't claim to have "golden ears".. I'm just a bloke who wants to hear the music as it was recored. It's all about the music.
Cheap cables are rarely good. Good cables are rarely cheap, that's not to say that expensive cables are always good either, I don't know anybody who believes that.

I never said the CAT5 was used for interconnects.. just speakers therefore your comparison is incorrect. Speakers have a much lower load and you can get away with all sorts when wiring speakers, the cheaper stuff can't carry all the details in the music (actually it carries very little detail) and your bass and treble will be compromised. I don't how many strands he used for this but he knows exactly what he's doing... as it happens the guy is a scientist.

Incidentally I had two much longer replies typed up to this but the connection went both times... this is the short version!

also... there is no debate here on cables... I know they make a huge difference - I've heard it time and time again. If others want to scoff that's just fine, if some want to insult (as happened before) then that's not fine.

alright, yeah lets not confuse interconnects and speaker cable, as i did.

however, let's get one thing right. Speakers are not a much lower load. lower loads are harder to drive which is the reason you need an amplifier to drive them. Interconnects go to high impedance inputs, which makes them easy to drive. speakers are usually 4/6/8ohm, ( which is failry incorrect in itself, as the impedance will vary over frequency). Line level inputs,which you use your interconnects for, are many times that. you've surely read that 4 ohm speakers are more difficult to drive than 8 ohm


ah blah to it all anyway..i've seen too many of these cable arguements to think it'd get anything but ugly. true enough the ones that come in a box are worth upgrading. make up your own mind to the extremes you want to go to after that. personally, solid, well built low guage cable will do me. combining loads of twisted pairs of cat5 seems ludicrous to me

but if you're like slaphead and the music sounds better to you with expensive cables then go for it.

12bore

Can't hurt to try them. Might save you a small fortune. If you don't like them, throw them away!

Some links you might find interesting:

http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/diycables.html
Lots of reading here about diy cable making, including interconnects and mains cables.


http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=740215
Instructions, with photos, on how to make cat5 speaker cable

http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/cables/diy-speaker-cable-faceoff
Comparison, with scientific measurements, between diy cat5 cable and branded speaker cable.

Googling will unearth a ton of other stuff.


Got a 300m roll of cat5e this morning (for free:) ), going to make up a pair of biwirable speaker cables over the weekend. Banana plugs, braiding and heatshrink arriving next week thanks to fleabay.

Also have a shiny new pair of MA BR2's. Huge improvement over the JPW's, don't know why I didn't upgrade years ago. But I have to get some stands, they are on a fairly high mantlepiece at the moment, and the difference in sound when sitting and standing is huge. Never noticed that before with the JPW's. Could be another diy project;) Don't fancy spending 100 quid on something that looks like I could build myself.

Slaphead07

mossym wrote:

but if you're like slaphead and the music sounds better to you with expensive cables then go for it.

The fact that they're expensive is irrelevant in this context, I didn't choose them because they were expensive.

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

the difference in sound when sitting and standing is huge. Never noticed that before with the JPW's.

The ideal position for tweeters is ear level so...... Tweeters carry the higher frequencies which generally give a recording it's soundstage or stereo image, sitting down probably allows the image to snap into focus.

mossym

Slaphead07 wrote:

The fact that they're expensive is irrelevant in this context, I didn't choose them because they were expensive.

okay, that's not what i meant, i didn't mean you chose them cause they were expensive, but expensive is never irrelevant

12bore

Cables are made, I have sore hands.

Three lengths of cable/speaker, braided together. Biwireable. Took a couple of hours to make. Banana plugs haven't turned up yet, so all connections are bare wire wrapped around terminals.

Definitely a different sound, even to my non-audiophile (and to be honest, sceptical) ears. This could be due to cleaner connections, the bare ends of the old wire were a bit grubby, wouldn't say I have looked at them in 5 years.
Also, my dog had chewed one of the wires when a puppy, so one wire was about two foot and the other was 5 metres. Don't ask why I didn't cut the long wire in half to give equal lengths, only thought of that now:rolleyes:

Initial impressions after a couple of hours listening are that the sound is brighter, highs are more pronounced, lows have lost a bit of oomph but are better defined . Quite happy with the sound, but have to do lots more listening with different types of music.

Might try out some flex just to see if it makes any difference.

Slaphead07

12bore wrote:

Initial impressions after a couple of hours listening are that the sound is brighter, highs are more pronounced, lows have lost a bit of oomph but are better defined . Quite happy with the sound, but have to do lots more listening with different types of music.

As I said earlier they will take a while to "burn in" so don't make your mind up just yet. Usually 25 hours of normal play. Try repositioning the speakers (are they floorstanders?) to/from a wall to effect the lows. Even positioning them toe-in or toe-out might alter the soundstage. If they're on spikes try the 8c upgrade by putting a one cent coin under each spike.

Next week... squash balls and isolation.

12bore

Squash balls, what's that all about?? I'll try most things once if they don't most much.

Made up a pair of speaker stands today (I'm a farmer, waiting for the rain to stop before I jump on a combine). Spent about 20 euros in builders shop. MDF base and top, 4 inch pvc piping, and some flanges usually used to connect tumble dryer exhausts. Will fill them with sand/cat litter when I get a chance, also need to paint/stain them. Anyone want photos?

Sound has improved leaps and bounds, no bass complaints now. Nice wide sound with good depth. All those audiophile terms are beginning to make sense (a little, anyway). Listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station at the moment, my jaw is dropping. Never sounded anywhere near as good before. Some friends who think I am a little bonkers are quite impressed.

Beginning to question if I really need to buy another amp. Think I will try making some interconnects next, only have the cheapo crap ones that come in the box.

Slaphead07

Squash balls? Right... well they're made of sorbothane - an energy absorbing rubber that can have very useful sonic characteristics. Cut the squash balls carefully in half and place one half under each foot of the CD player (roundy bit down!)... the player is now better insulated from vibrations and the sound should have a more 'airy' feel about it.. basically the Union Station harmonies should be cleaner and each voice more distinct.. the soundstage should also be more 3D than it was and should have depth as well as height. It also works under amps... even preamps and DACs! There's a lot of products out there that do the job better but none as cheap. Nordost Pulsar points start at €90 for 4 or, better again, Ceraballs at €150 for 4. The only people who scoff at these products are those that have never heard them or have no interest in hifi. Worth a shot eh?