My living room system.. WAF.

[jasonweiser59]

I have a humble system with a Chinese Wilsonton R8 with vintage tubes. Power tubes are NOS Mullard El34's, my personal favorite. I run them in triode as opposed to ultra linear. Excellent New Old Stock tubes up front as well 6sn and 6sl7s. All my tubes always come from Jim and Charles. Valvesnmore if they are for me or a picky customer.
I've listened to a lot of amplifiers and I have a couple very nice spare amplifiers with very nice tube sets. Haven't been able to beat the combination I have going with the R8. I have always used it in the past with its own preamplifier but I now have put the Conrad Johnson pv11 up front. Wow. Have I discovered wonderment. I have a humble pair of Klipsch cornwalls. 2 years old. Bought them new. They are each supported by a pair of Rel subwoofers for sterio. And yes you can tell whether they're in stereo or if they're just plugged into an amplifier married together. So they each get their signal from their adjacent speaker. Works great.
Input is a project turntable with a Rainer cartridge Moonstone styles. It's time to upgrade that whole get down. It was a good turntable until I had a great preamp. Like I said, wow.
I also stream music through it with a computer and a dragonfly red and a good cable. I use Amazon music HD. I've tried many of the other streaming services. Frankly they all pretty much suck. At least Amazon helps curate few lists I use it for discovery then I buy the record. I also stream music in my office at the work bench through a vintage Marantz. Streaming from a blue sound. I do like the blue sound for convenience but when I sit down it's vinyl.
Happy listening.

[Big Dog RJ]

Very glad and interesting to learn that the Will-S amplifier matches quite well with your CJ PV11. Driving the Klipsch with EL34's in Triode mode should be a wonderful expansive soundstage. And fine musicality of course!

Cheers, RJ

[admin]

A very nice system and the PV11 is going to fit well in there.

You mention that you are not getting optimal performance from Amazon music and you are using your computer as the source for this. You should be aware that Amazon Music Unlimited (AMU) desktop player (both windows and mac) do not support bitperfect output. Everything is being resampled and fed through the windows audio stack before being sent to the Dragonfly,... which pretty much means it's being degraded before hitting that nice DAC. There are limited ways you can get bitperfect output from AMU, the easiest being utilizing a streamer that does support bitperfect output.

I actually think AMU sounds very good, but again, you are only going to get optimal performance with a bitperfect output source and a good DAC combination. Happy to discuss options if you would like.

[jasonweiser59]

I got me a bluesound node and a denafrips Ares ii.
Problem solved. As far as digital music from Amazon unlimited goes. Much better. Thank you very much for the advice.

[admin]

Glad it worked out and you are getting top quality audio! Enjoy the tunes.