What a Year! (The story of my system upgrades)

[rowlandhills]

Well, it's been quite a year for me and my music...

At the start of 2008, I had the following system, which I was very happy indeed with:

• Modified Naim CD3.5
  AV5103
  AV5125 with Keilidh Aktiv cards
  Keilidh's with Kustones and 038/2 tweeters
  All connected with K400 and Linn Black ICs
  Mk1 Centrik, Tukans & Aktiv cards - boxed up, waiting to be part of a surround system

It seems that reading forums like this one might be a bad habit, as I managed to get the "upgrade bug" 8)

The first purchase that I made was a second AV5125, through one of the last posts made on Topica, with the intention of being able to aktive bi-amp all five speakers in a surround setup.

However, before starting to use the new amp, I found a pair of Rosewood Kabers on eBay from Peter Tyson, which I managed to pick up for a very reasonable price. The price seemed a little less reasonable by the time I had the tweeters changed, had them coverted to Aktiv, and bought 5m of terminated K600 to connect them up, but such is life! Of course, at this point I realised a problem, which is that I couldn't find any stereo Kaber crossovers, for the very simple reason that Linn never made them :( so next on my list was finding an external Crossover. Fortunately, Grahams HiFi turned out to have a relatively recent one in stock, and some spare Kaber cards, so £200 later I had the aktiv crossover too, and once it was all delivered and connected, I was able to really enjoy the extra detail and ability to follow the tune which I was getting. :D

I'm hoping to merge my AV and stereo systems again next year (when we're planning to buil an extension) so I'd been trying to work out how to use a new BluRay player in my system. Unfortunately the 5103 doesn't have 6 channel inputs, so there seemed to be no way to get any fo the new "HD" surround formats into my system, which left me looking for a new preamp too. I missed out on a couple of Kinos's but eventually managed to pick up an Exotik for just £750, which seemed a bargain to me. Nice sound, not radically better than the 5103, but a slight improvement, and with the 6 channel input, there's a lot more potential for future improvements.

Finally, today I've had delivered an Akurate DS :D which I found through this forum (thanks PopPop!). All I can really say is "Wow!" :shock:

So, at the end of the year, this is what I'm currently listening to while typing this post:

• Akurate DS
  Exotik
  2x AV5125
  Aktiv Tunebox with Kaber cards
  Kaber's with Kustones and 038/2 tweeters
  All connected with K600 and Linn Black ICs
  Mk1 Centrik, Tukans & Aktiv cards - still boxed up, waiting to be part of a surround system

I can tell that I'm going to have many, many hours of listening pleasure over the coming years, and I'm going to have to be careful not to tell my wife what I've spent on my hobby this year, even though I've spent well under 30% of the new costs of everything :)

Many thanks to everyone on the forum who's given me good advice about various topics during my upgrade quest. Now I'm off to enjoy some music!

[ThomasOK]

Congratulations, that should be quite a nice improvement. With the Akurate DS at the front end and the Aktiv Kabers on the back end I'm sure your music is much more enjoyable.

[lejonklou]

That sounds like a great system!

Hope it will bring lots of pleasure. Make sure it gets really well tuned, aktiv Kabers can be tricky but do pay off when you get them right.