The hi-fi

Most of my listening is digital, and for practical reasons most of it reaches the system below as a stream. The records and discs are for the evenings when the music is worth more attention than a stream asks of me.

The way music is made now, the single is the unit. A track arrives, you hear it, you move on. Putting something on a disc runs the other way: you commit to an album, in its order, for the length of a side, and the unit stops being the song and becomes the set. CD carries some of that; vinyl carries all of it, because the ritual leaves no shortcut. The record does not sound better to me. It asks for my attention, and I hear the album the way it was put together.

Nothing here is exotic or bought to impress. Each piece earned its place by sounding right in this room, and by being worth keeping and, when it comes to it, worth fixing.

The main system

Technics SL-1210MK7

The turntable, and the piece the ritual turns on. It comes straight from the SL-1200 line, the direct-drive deck that has been the reference for reliability since the 1970s; the MK7 is the current version, with a new coreless motor that does away with the faint speed ripple of the originals. It locks to pitch at once, holds it dead steady, and shrugs off being used hard. That is the whole appeal for me: a deck I never have to think about, that plays the record and gets out of the way.

Yamaha AX-750

The amplifier, and the hub the main system runs through. I like sound that is natural and unforgiving, and I chose a powerful Yamaha from the Natural Sound era precisely for that: the rawness and clarity that come from an amplifier with power to spare, one that never strains, so what reaches the speakers is the signal and little else. Pure Direct is the mode that sold me on it. It takes the tone controls and everything optional out of the path and leaves the source untouched, and it is how I listen most of the time. It also carries a proper phono stage for both moving-magnet and moving-coil cartridges, so the turntable plugs straight in, and two sets of speaker terminals for the pairs I run. I reach for it and the Harman by turns, depending on the night.

ESA Vivace 1

The speakers the system lives on, and a piece of Polish hi-fi history: ESA built these by hand. The Vivace 1 is a clean two-way, a single mid/bass driver under a soft-dome tweeter, front-ported so it sits near a wall without booming, nominal 8 ohms so any amplifier drives it easily. In oak they look like furniture and disappear into the room. They add nothing of their own: no exaggerated bass, no hi-fi sparkle. These are what I listen through day to day.

Yamaha CDX-390

The CD player, from the same Natural Sound family as the amplifier, so it matches it to the eye and pairs with it without a thought. It is deliberately simple: load a disc, press play, clean digital to the amp, nothing to tweak and nothing to go wrong. When the point is to sit with a whole album on a disc rather than a stream, this is where it starts.

Google Chromecast Audio

The streaming bridge, and where most of the everyday listening actually comes in. A small Google puck, discontinued now and a quiet cult object for it, that pulls audio off the network and feeds the amplifier over a plain analog or optical cable. No screen and no extra box pretending to be a streamer: it gets digital music into an otherwise analog system, cheaply and out of sight.

hi-fi 2.0

The second system, and lately the one I reach for most often. It is the opposite of the main rig by design: not purist two-channel but flexible, built for film, surround and more sources. The Harman/Kardon stack runs it, and a good share of the everyday listening now happens here.

Harman/Kardon AVR 147

The receiver at the heart of it: five channels, every input you could want, surround modes for film. Harman/Kardon’s house sound has always been smooth and easy to sit with for hours, which is a good part of why so much of my listening has drifted onto it lately.

Harman/Kardon DVD 27

The disc player matched to the receiver. It keeps the look consistent across the shelf and feeds the AVR for film and the odd disc. Nothing it is asked to do is demanding.

Klipsch R-605FA

The second pair of floorstanders, and the loud ones. Klipsch’s Reference line is built around a horn-loaded tweeter and spun-copper woofers, which makes them efficient and quick: they go loud on little power and hit hard, the opposite character to the ESAs’ restraint.

What comes next

Two things are still missing, and the first is a long-standing dream: a tube headphone amplifier I build myself, to sit next to the Yamaha. The second is the digital front end. The Chromecast and its built-in converter carry more of the listening than anything else on the shelf, and they are the link I most want to improve.

If you have built a tube headphone amplifier, or found a streamer and DAC worth living with, I would like to hear about it. The address is on the about page.