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February 13, 2007 - 5:28pm
#1
System problem, is amp to blame
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It may be your CD player. Anything with "Creek" on the faceplate will be accurate - sometimes to a fault. If it's warmth you're looking for, perhaps you could stick with what you have and put a Musical Fidelity tube buffer (X-10v3) between your CD player and your amp. Hook them up with something like the Kimber Timbre and you'll be going in the direction you want for a small investment without sacrificing any components you've already committed to. Good Luck.
AudioDigit Tubalizer to the rescue! http://www.audiodigit.com/?section=81
Just put it between your CD and the amp, or put it into your tape/processor loop. $115 delivered. You may want to run it from a 12V SLA.
Hi
What about changing to the Musical Fidelity A3.5 CD and amp ? Everytime i hear MF stuff it sounds great.
Steve
I think you might be right. The European press wasn't nearly as impressed with the 372 as the American press. Then again, the European reviews weren't as flattering about the Creek 5350SE either.
Maybe you have European ears?
I was once in the same situation but with a lesser spend. I had a set of Polk towers driven by a mass market surround receiver. The sound left me cold : dry, uninvolving and cold are descriptors that come to mind.
I've hooked up various other model speakers to that receiver since but no setup had me as drunk on euphonics as an old hand-me-down 70's Pioneer receiver driving a pair of no-name department store bookshelf speakers with rotting surrounds.
There lots of descriptions of gear of that era to be found on the net like "warm", "full-bodied" and "well rounded". I never thought those things, listening to either the single classical station or the single college station in my area into the wee hours. I simply allowed the huge reserves contained in those dinosaur capacitors to do their work, imparting an ease and heft to the sound, qualities that I noticed by their absence later. Think back, you might have a mental reference for the sound you want and a component that was responsible for it.
In retrospect I'd say I was lucky to have had my experience of the me-too 70's Pioneers (going after McIntosh) rather than the more modern, neutral gear available during my youth of the 90s/