Shanghai Yummy

Well, one sure sign of my recovery from the doldrums is that I seem to appreciate music again. These last few days, after getting the place a little settled, we hooked up part of the audio/video setup. Couldn't get the whole thing going just yet because I found that I'm missing my Audioquest Jade interconnects, but now I'm thinking about replacing those babies. I have to remind myself that I don't want to spend any large amount of money on my setup until which time I own a house so that I can start back from scratch and do it right, all at once. From the ground up. But listening to good music from a good audio setup is certainly one of those things that life is all about.

Anyway, if you're curious, we're currently listening with Mike's Arcam CD62 CD player, hooked up to Roy's Arcam AVR100 with Straight Wire interconnects and sometimes my Audioquest X digital coax interconnect, Roy's Paradigm Mini-Monitors, and my Parasound HCA-806A power amp for 2-channel music. We both agree that using the analog outputs from the CD62 sound better than using the digital; I theorized that it was due to the Burr-Brown DACs in the CD62, but Roy wasn't as sold on the idea of it all being in the DACs. I do agree that DACs are definitely not the whole story, which is somewhat of a reversal of my old belief that DACs were far more important than the transport. All you have to do is hook up the XBox and play a CD using the digital out (so you use the same DAC) and then hook up, say, my Sony DVP-S7700 and use the same DAC, and whooooaaaa...

So anyway. This is kind of a temporary setup right now. Mike will probably want his CD player back at some point, and once I get my interconnects I'll probably hook up the Acurus. We'll see what it all sounds like then. And maybe some Nordost cables are in my future too.

I blame Roy. Yes, for once, Mike K, you're off the hook. Someone else has gotten me into something that will cause my ultimate doom...