Hi All

Been lurking here for a while, thought I'd register. I can't promise to contribute much - life's a bit hectic at the moment - but at least one of your guest lurkers now has a name!

This being a hifi forum, I'd better list the kit...

Sources are from Linn: Ikemi for CD, and LP12/Ekos/Arkiv for vinyl; the latter has a home-made in-plinth phono stage, a relic from my days of Naim tweakery with Dr McBride.

Pre-amp is a Music First transformer-coupled passive pre-amp. The Ikemi runs balanced into it, the phono stage is single-ended.

Amps are interesting: a pair of home-made (-ish) "Class T" amps. That is, they're some big Tripath 0104 eval boards, with components tweaked to make them sound better, running off big linear power supplies. By "big linear supply", I mean 1KVA Antrim toroids delivering +/-85V rails. Tripath's "Class T" designation was arguably just marketing hype, but it highlights the point that their amps were PDM (Pulse Density Modulation) rather than the more typically found PWM amps that are usually described as Class D. I use one channel of each stereo chassis, which seems to be the way to get the best out of them - I think that there are cross-talk issues in the shared low-voltage supply, which one can avoid by using only one channel. They deliver several hundred watts of very clean power, with impeccable timing; altogether very much better than the NAP135 "clones" that I built 10 years ago.

My son has a severe learning disability, so my dear old ProAc Response 3.5s were replaced last year by a pair of s/hand Martin Logan Ascents, whose sound really surprised me (in a good way, I bought them without listening because they were the only thing I could think of that's pretty much indestructible-by-toddler).

The digital amps do chuck some crap out, and the local mains is horrible anyway; so the power feed arrangements are dual rings, one for the power amps and one for the rest; the "rest" are powered firstly by an Isol8 minisub to act as an RF filter, then (as of a few months ago when I picked it up second-hand) a PS Audio Power Plant Premier. These units are daisy-chained.

(I can "hear" the effects of both the minisub and the PPP, separately and together. I expected to hear them though the phono stage with its crude linear power supply, I was somewhat more amused to hear the upgrade via the Ikemi's SMPS...)

We now return you to your normal programming....

Pete