They are chalk and cheese. Although both approaches have their merits I much prefer the vibrancy offered by the Trio design, it has dynamics to die for. The yanks have a saying related to car engines, I think it goes something like; 'there's no substitute for cubic inches' which metaphorically speaking is very apparent when listening to the Trio, the presentation is effortless at any volume whereas the BTE/Quad combo begins to sound congested around the 11 o'clock position on the dial. My MA's are like; "Whoa, hold the phone - we have a heartbeat..."

I think you've had a perfect example of why some of us recommend an active preamp (or active line circuitry) over passives. They really do have more life and dynamics and just make better music in my opinion. It's probably more to do with allowing the volume pot to be within the line circuit so that a final active stage can present a lower output impedance into the power amp circuit, and of course is more critical if the preamp and power amp are split.

'ello chaps, I'm back. Been doing other stuff for a while so forums of all genres had to take a back seat for a while, plus I began to tire of reading the same old regurgitated stuff to be perfectly honest.

The system is more or less the same as it was before I took a break, although I'm back to using the BTE passive & Quad 306 as the Trio needs a lot of love lavished upon it, this costs money and as ever that particular commodity is in short supply. One big change has been to my computer which is now bang up to date, or at least as bang up to date as funds allow, and what a massive improvement some carefully chosen components have made to the quality of the audio output.

The star of the show is an MSI Gaming 970 AM3+ mobo. I cannot recommend this mobo highly enough, it has a superbly well engineered audio section onboard and the sound quality available from it's optical digital port knocked me for six, and that's using Win7. Can't wait for my free Win10 upgrade, which I've heard should push the quality up a notch or two.

Ensconced in the mobo is an AMD FX-8350 4GHz 8 core CPU which I have mildly overclocked to 4.2ghz. A sealed liquid cooling system from Coolermaster keeps things nice and chilly, it has never broached 28c in operation since I put the system together a couple of months ago. 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 CL10 HyperX Fury Red Series (soon to be 16GB) does what it does, and being red in colour (uh oh, vanity alert XD) it looks super-cool sitting in the black and red mobo.

The Windows drive is a Crucial BX100 250 GB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD. I meticulously researched SSD's available in my price bracket which enabled me to choose a unit which had the best balance between read/write speeds. It boiled down to two units, this one and a Kingston 240GB item, however the write speed on the Kingston is significantly lower than that of the BX100, which is undesirable. The Kingston can read files a little quicker however it isn't noticeable in everyday operation. Main storage is handled by a 7200rpm Seagate Desktop 2TB SSHD with 64MB Cache (8GB SSD Cache). The third drive is a Western Digital Green 1TB HDD and the entire system is backed up onto this and also onto a 1TB partition on my 2TB Western Digital external HDD (Can never be too careful, eh?)

The fancy looking stuff is dealt with via an MSI NVIDIA GTX 750Ti Gaming 1085MHz (Boost 1163MHz) which sports 2GB of DDR5 internal memory (this card overclocks magnificently, and safely too). I cannot praise this graphics card enough and at £114.99 on Amazon it is an absolute steal. It pays to shop around though as I picked mine up from DABS for the princely sum of £108.99.

The fitted PS is my venerable 650w Be Quiet modular unit which was purchased a few years ago. It is an excellent PS however I am painfully aware that at 4yrs of age it will need to be replaced fairly soon. The system enclosure is a classic Antec 400, the same enclosure that contained my previous machine. It is no 'fancy pants' , however it is functional and offers great cooling potential. It contains 3 160mm fans (two at the front and another outputting through the cooling systems' radiator to the rear) plus a 200mm fan at the top of the case.

All in all I am absolutely delighted with the new PC. It is fast, almost silent and most importantly of all, it has improved my listening pleasure immeasurably.

Good stuff, Dave. My AMD 6-core is prone to overheating so I have backed off any overclocking to standard settings for the summer. It really needs a bigger CPU fan or liquid cooling, as you have done.

The only change I would make would be the SSD for a Samsung 850 Evo as I love these units. Mega fast in standard form, and they get even faster if you run the Magician Rapid mode on them.

Thanks for the welcome guys, and apologies in advance as my second post after returning is a bit of a rant, but one I feel is necessary :/

I tried to reply to your post MArtin but for some reason Chrome won't open a txt box. Anyways, Quick Reply works so here goes:

I did consider the Samsung Evo Martin but unfortunately it was way outside my budget for this build. Either way the Crucial has resulted in a machine that works very slickly indeed. I obviously knew there'd be a significant increase in performance over the old Core2Duo based system but I was not prepared for the utter speed demon now sitting before me. Incidentally, the total bill for the components I list above is just shy of 500 quid, not bad eh? Of course that was helped along by utilizing existing kit such as the casee and PS. I also already own a genuine Win7 install disk

Hi Brian, good to hear from you mate. If you're not busy this evening I can call so we can catch up on a few things, or you can call me if you like. let me know which

Hey Chris, how you doin' fella?

I know I may regret writing this (after all I have said the same before) but I really do think I may be done with the main system this time. I was going to put that I am delighted with the way it sounds except that would be to miss the point entirely. These days I never worry about whether the system might need a little tweak here or there because the music has taken on a life of its own which transcends all that. Basically this system has become a window onto the performance and I'm loving every minute of it.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination: I'd like a little more bass extension for example, and yet that would require bigger speakers with larger bass drivers, which I know from bitter experience would upset the weird but delicate acoustic balance of this room, and in turn this could lead to overblown bass or in fact hardly any at all (yup, I have experienced both using large speakers in here and I can't explain it either). Nope, it would seem that I have hit a sweet spot with the Monitor Audio r852's plus they sound bloody fantastic whether hooked up to the BTE/306 or the KA=801 so it's win-win for me...

A time of system stability is always a good thing. Makes you appreciate the music.

I ordered a 1.5m Audioquest Forest Toslink cable from SuperFi on Wednesday for a very reasonable £24.99. It arrived today and so, when I got in this evening, I wasted no time installing it between the computer and the Rega. It replaces a non-branded but reasonable quality one metre cable I acquired a few years ago now, from MCRU if recall correctly. I've had a bit of a move around recently and as a result I discovered that the original cable was only just long enough to bridge the gap between 'puter and DAC. The old cable is quite chunky and rather rigid so I was concerned that over time it might induce unwanted stress on the Toslink sockets.



The AQ Forest sits on the bottom rung in the firms Evergreen range, so I am led to believe, but you wouldn't credit it from the build quality. It is not a 'chunk' by any means, in fact it is rather slim and very flexible, however AQ still see fit to clothe the Forest in a sharp suit, namely an attractive looking black and green braided cloth sheath. The cable is 'topped & tailed' with good quality AQ branded Toslink connectors, as you can see above. Pretty it may be but if it sounds like crap then that is no consolation 

Now there could be a couple of reasons why the Forest sounds as good as it does in this system, the first being that the previous cable only just bridged the gap between the two components it served, therefore it is likely that the Toslink connectors may not have been optimally seated in their respective sockets, thus this may have led to some jitter being injected into the signal. Secondly, it is entirely possible that the AQ Forest is the better product, or maybe it's a combination of both. I care not as the result is truly jaw-dropping.

It is difficult for me to single out one aspect of improvement as the entire 'shebang' is now so much tighter sounding across the board. If push came to shove though I'd have to mention the amazingly expansive soundstage which now exists in this room, extending out, via every axis, towards an almost impossible sonic horizon, it really is a wonderful thing to behold.  And another thing, totally gone now is a slight fizziness which existed before near the top of the frequency range. jitter in absentia perhaps?

This may be AQ's budget Toslink cable offering but for me it is a definite winner...

Here we go...   I've not seen Pluto with my own eyes and yet I'm more than certain it actually exits as I trust the thousands of astronomers who say just that. I also trust that you read the second paragraph of my post Chris, you know, the one where I offer two possible explanations for the leap in performance, the first of which is more than a little likely...