This is a partial view of my small music hall. All the equipments, except for one or two, may not be from the world most famous companies, but I garanty you that the sound is unbelievably like in a concert hall. With this I mean for example that the wood instruments sound like wood, without any metallic timbre. Of course all groups of instruments must be well recognized and exactly located. I am not a fan of a direct type of music without ambience or concert hall signature: the music must be full, it must wrap up in a light way the listner. I might say that the music is like a room full of fog with a density that you can nevertheless see through it. For lots of people fog is a negative word. Over here I am using it because fog is made of lots of fine particules spread around which wraps around people and things which are in it. The fine resolution of the particules make the quality and then a third dimension appears (depth). The music can be very loud but it doesn't disturb at all... When the orchestra does his fortissimo, though, then it must sound like live: the phisical part of the music must appear but still in a very clear way. For me most HiEnd combinations either do not have a natural timbre or fail to reproduce all these music attributes. Today lots of people are so bothered in technical aspects of reprodution of music that they get blind (oh sorry, deaf). I just wonder if they have been in a live concert where the sound isn't reproduced with electronical equipment. And if they have been in a concert, did they also concentrate on how they percept the music? The next point on about lots of people fight is: digital or analogue. Since I have this record player I hear practically only records. Of course my CD player is not anymore the state of art. In the last six months I tried top model CD players and digital converters (for example Mephisto from Audiomeca which was the best I ever heared). Of course they were much better than what I have but nevertheless it didn't reach the quality (f.e. resolution) of my record player. The music recorded digitally also sound somehow sterilized. Also the fortissimos are for me blowned up, maybe to give a more spetacular effect. The graduation between pianissimo and fortissimo is not smooth. I must say, I haven't yet heared the new sacd. But also if it is as good as or better than records an economical factor will come in consideration. The development of these equipments changes so much that to be able to keep up with the technology you should invest every three to five years about seven to ten thousand dollars only for the equipments. I am not ready for such an investment: I will keep my 4000 - 6000 records (400 Pop, 300-400 Jazz, rest classical). If you are interested in knowing what I have lately done or evaluate click here. To have a view of all elements of my Hi-End system click here.

The modified Sonic Frontier pramplifier is in the middle (on the right is the power supply). On the bottom left is the MSB CD Gold transporter on top of the Gold digital processor. On the bottom right is the Klyne Phono prepreamplifier. Click in the photo to close box.