Everyone,
It's meeting day! Carl and I have talked about this a bit and we're both in the "let's make this as easy as possible" frame of mind.
So here's the breakdown:
Meeting starts at my place at 4PM. Folks are more than welcome to come early. Carl will bring over his preamp sometime after lunch so we can have it here and get it ready to be played.
This meeting will be about 3 things:
1) A chance to hear the new Belles preamp and power amp (22A and new Ref 150A) in general. We can swap a couple tubes in the preamp if folks want to see how amenable it is to tube changes.
2) As long as folks are up for it, a comparison of the 21A preamp that Carl has with the new 22A. Carl has Radio Technique tubes in his preamp. So I've put RT tubes in the 22A and have been playing it non-stop since yesterday in hopes of having my new tubes be opened up enough. Listening right now I'm not sure I like them quite as much as the RCAs... but they definitely have some good traits and I can see why carl would like them in his setup.
3) Again, for those that are interested, we can compare a stock Oppo 83 blu-ray player with the new 83 special edition that has the ESS Sabre 32 DAC chip built in for 2 channel playback. We can also compare it with my audio PC feeding the modded Buffalo DAC kit via AES/EBU.
Once we're done listening back and forth at my place, whenever folks are ready, we can move over to Carl's place so we can do the preamp comparison again in his system. The only piece of gear that will go over to Carl's is the preamp. We're leaving his system completely intact. We talked about swapping out cables, amps, DACs, etc. But we thought it would be more beneficial to him and in general to see how the preamp sounds in a different system, not just a different acoustical space. We can bring along the Oppo for those folks that want to spin disks and if you like the Oppo as Carl doesn't really have a high end player other than audio pc, right Carl?
If anyone needs directions or other info, please PM me or give me a call.
I have some basic munchies for folks and a fridge full of beer and soda I would *really* like folks to help me empty out. Rich, there's Newcastle for you as well. No need to bring your own
I'm leaning towards the pizza thing. But I'll wait until we all get here to decide.
See you all soon!