Thanks for the great introduction, and welcome to TAS

Enjoy the forum!

Welcome. Have a nice relaxing stroll around the place and join in wherever and whenever the fancy takes you.

What sort of music are you into?

Hi and welcome to TAS!

With all those grandchildren you're going to need more music than ever.
Those Transcriptors decks remain as futuristic as ever, do you also have the matching arm?
You have a nice DAC and ancillaries, too.

Thank you all for the welcome messages

My Hydraulic Reference was made by Transcriptors just before they went to Carlow in Ireland John Michell  took over the Boreham Wood  plant/shop hence the Michell badge. it has a JE Michell badged  sweep arm & Transcriptors stylus brush,  underneath  it has 3 round adjustable feet not the later  bent metal ones. Modifications include 9mm thick Duralumin arm board, 1" with solid brass spacer, No longer AC motor driven it has a Maxon DC motor. The 3 feet are no longer foam filled they sit on Oak Cone's all of the 9 foam pads on the plater were replaced with carbon impregnated PTFE pads.   As per my avatar. 

Originally fitted with an SME arm it has a Hadcock 242 silver + arm with  1mm fine silver conductors  phono lead made for me by my friend  Len Gregory aka the Cartridgeman  on the end is a prototype  Musicmaster cartridge with Sapphire cantilever  & silver coils & Isolator.

Phono stage is  a re-wired Croft the Preamp Ming da MC7R  much modified by Mark the Ming. power amp 100wpc  Rogue Atlas Magnum 4 x KT120's with  upgraded Audyn reference output caps & Mills resistors.  

Tuners Leak Troughline modded by Tim D' Paravicini  when Len got him to make a stereo decoder for it & Meridian 104, both running off a John Linsley Hood steel plate square aerial.  CD players  Cambridge CD4 se  as a transport, Philips CD104 with No Over Sampling mod & reclocked running 14/44.1  as  Philips engineers intended.  
 
All phono leads are fine silver  home made as are my TNT  UBYTE speaker cable but made from twisted  WF100  co-ax  to lower inductance . the OTA Quad 57's sit on OTA Rupert stands. 

" Well, you've certainly paid attention to a lot of minutiae in your system, so well done"  After 70 plus years I have learned the Devil is often in the detail ie living effectively in a square of heavy traffic roads on top of a hill  surrounded by Heathrow & Northolt air fields, 6 very large phone masts & multiple transmitters on buildings on Ealing Broadway. Resulting in around 80 clip on ferrites on digital, power & HMDI leads none on phono leads counter productive.

"Is your Croft The Preamp the original brown crackle case wide one with dual volume, dual selectors etc.? I still have one in the garage".

Len Gregory who used me as a guinea pig to test components/cartridges asked Mr Croft to make me  a phono stage it is housed in a Vitale pre-amp case I know not what incarnation it is  however 2x ECC83 & a cathode follower  I use 2 very rare Russian 6N2P EV OS with  my own adapters PIN 9 to earth unlike adapters from China.  ECC83 ie Mullard CV4004 box plates needed  balancing,  no adjustment of the 2 balance nobs is required the 6N2P EV OS are so well balanced.. the cathode follower is a wired in a 6N1P. I  recently had the  mains socket replaced. the  stage was  tested on an oscilloscope absolutely flat out put on a test signal much prefered in my system to an EAR 834P.  I don't have a garage, only a  parking space living atop a block of flats with loft extension.

"How does the Philips CD-104 (I had one of those) with 14-bit chipset and no oversampling resolve the least significant two bits?"

Whilst I could have done the work my son was at tech. college took him an hour to do what  would have taken me hours to do.
the trick is to drill through the GRIPLETS  hollow rivets connecting the top and bottom PCB's wiring with some left over silver wire  the cause of most faults on this & 204.

The CD104 uses 2 x mono  TDA1540 DAC chips which are 14 bit when Philips discovered that Sony and others were coming to the market with 16 bit Players Philips marketing pencil pushers  forced it's engineers into adding oversampling in the guise of a SAA7030 error correction chip. My reading indicated a Non Oversampling (NOS) mod was required  this  involves desoldering & removing the SAA7030 chip and cutting a track on a PCB then  adding a 1k resistor to the isolated leg on another chip to provide 5v to enable 14 bit's to be read,  It has probably the best transport ever if a little slow with a clear glass lense  now only  used in pro gear

My son unsoldered the SAA7030 Over-sampling chip & fitted  a 24 pin IC socket,  plugged  in a  No Overall Sampling PCB with flip/flop IC reclocking the CD104 from Bulgaria that I bought off the bay  the results of which are beyond belief gone from 16 bit to 14 bit now have more detail better bass; sounds so natural  very analogue as someone commented.

I can't seem to post pictures.  

I hope you like jumping the tracks John (Palace).

My taste is eclectic growing through the beginning of rock & roll ie Buddy Holly, Elvis etc. Had an uncle who played on grandma's piano, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky & List whilst I sat watching him he was taught by my Great Grandmother who  trained as a concert pianist  however at the turn of the 20th century she only played at at a kinema Victorian/Edwardian sensibilities it was not ladylike to travel about.

Living 1/2 mile from the Kings Road Chelsea in the 60's Beatles & Stones et alii, subsequently in no particular order Floyd, ELO, Santana, Stevie Wonder. Emerson Lake & Palmer

Whilst my children individually lay in their bouncer between the Quad 57's listening/chilling to Chopin, Mahler, Simon & Garfunkel, Beethoven, William Boyce, William Byrd, Plain Chant, Palestrina, Benjamin Britten.  Then as they grew gave me Gun's & Roses, a son in law Prodigy laterly my much younger son who married last week deadmau5 he stayed with us the night before his wedding  bringing a deadmau5 double CD inspiring me to buy While(1<2)  which until some recent valve changes my system (Quads) could not do justice now without subwoofers as Peter Walker said they will do bass with the right amplifier.

An Aunt who was born & grew up in India her father was a senior with the Indian  railway ie. they had their own train. She gave me an interest in Indian music I love Tabla, Sarod, Sitar, Mridangam however whilst my multilingual aunt loved the singing I do not, indeed it  grates.

MY long-winded answer is but a fraction I missed Gregorian Chant, Dave Dee Dozy Mick & Tich & Vivaldi, Organ music plus many others though not much in the last 10 years    

Only those with the most sophisticated of tastes can enjoy GnR and Palestrina ...