Just going through the blues of a new SR Orange fuse having dipped into its 'dark' presentation during the course of burn-in. Looking forward to getting to the other side in another 48 hours or so.

Still some more improvements in clarity, especially in the background behind complex foregrounds, better focus on vocals and even lower sibilance.

It has me listening to so much music, a mixture of new and old while still chasing discoveries. Currently listening to more P.J. Harvey back-catalogue.

Hah - I have thought of upgrading my Emperor Triple Crown for an Eva but they are very expensive (must be very low yield OCXOs at that performance) and I don't need a triple output.

If I ever do, I'd move the Emperor down to replace the King on EtherREGEN duties and sell the King, for a double whammy on sound quality.

I've just looked up the price of an Eva and it's £3,866. That's do-able but I need to wait a while.

I've just bought 2 used CDs on eBay, my first media purchase in years. I'm frustrated that The Beloved are only on Spotify because Jon Marsh, band leader, has been doing it himself. So there's precious little chance that The Beloved's music will ever find its way onto Qobuz.

I ripped Conscience using Exact Audio Copy and uploaded it to OneDrive. Plays perfectly through the system so I thought I'd buy their other two albums and do the same. This will become my method of dealing with music not on Qobuz. I'll do the same with the first three Zero 7 albums, too.

One of the Zero 7 CDs has that damnable Cactus copy protection shit on it. It ejects with Exact Audio Copy running. It's going to take more than that to beat me. I had VLC play it as an Audio CD (strictly speaking, it isn't as it breaks Red Book conditions so has no CD logo) and, while playing track 1 I stopped it and opened EAC. Had it extracting the WAVs before it knew what was happening.

All three albums now in OneDrive.

No need.  All you need is a laptop (which you have), a plug-in USB CD drive (about £15) and EAC (free).

EAC is straightforward. Glad to say that it handled the Cactus copyrighted CD perfectly. I remember this one refusing to play in a variety of machines from the past. All Zero 7 albums sounding wonderful (although When It Falls is a bit compromised through Cactus and also some background stuff a la Portishead), I had only heard them on Spotify before and this is so much better, allowing Sia, Tina Dico and Sue Barker to soar.

I've found some more performance!

Background information:
When I first bought an EtherREGEN I was using it in its conventional direction with the 'A' side as input and the 'B' side as output. Eventually I upgraded my ultraRendu to a Signature Rendu Deluxe and that, of course, takes only SFP input into its cage. So I reversed the EtherREGEN and thought I had got the power supply routing right. But I forgot an important point about which side of the moat the input, output, clock and power supply connections lie when used in reverse. So I was inadverdently shorting the moat with one of the power supplies.

For the event yesterday, I drew a diagram for the connections and realised my error when I came to rebuild the system this morning. All the time I had been powering the router and ER together and the clock separately. Wrong! It's the ER that needs its own separate PSU (but in normal configuration it's the clock that needs its own PSU).

After much irritation with myself (it was a learning moment), I built the system correctly so as to not short the moat.

Well, I now have a seemingly 'quieter' presentation but with more clout in dynamics, background detail even more evident and amazing punch in the bass. All for swapping a couple of cables around. I'll take it!

MartinT. I am looking at getting an external clock and wondered how you came to choose the Tubulus Concentus clock cable?