[boneman]

I started listening to my father's Heathkit, Dyna and Scott tube/mono setup back in the 50's.  Then to a Sansui integrated with Sansui speakers and a PE record changer.  Then large Advents with an Advent 300 and a Phillips 212 table.  Added a Marantz 510 power amp later.  Upgrades continued as income improved ending with a ARC SP11 MkII, VAC PA 160MKII monoblocs, Bryston 4B, Martin Logan Monolith IIIx, SOTA Star/SME V table and then I started living overseas. Always into analog with about 2,500 rock/jazz lps, 2,000 classical disks and yes, the inevitable CDs.

We lived in London for six years, back to the US for less than a year and then to Asia for eight, evenly split between Shanghai and Singapore.  When offshore, the LPs went into storage.  By Singapore days I was reliant upon my desktop setup and an IPod with JH13 IEMs as I was traveling over 50% of the time.

Now back to the States, retired and downsizing.  Digitised all 2,200 rock/jazz disks at 192/24, a project that took 285 man days, and have since sold the disks.  Doing the same on the classical stuff but at a much slower pace noting that the disk have no real value, even the shaded dogs compared to where they were no so long ago.  System has been significantly downsized now with a Hegel H200 integrated, two Sota Star turntables (one with the SMEV and a JVC UA 7045 on the other), ARC PH 3SE and Cary PH 301MM with Bob's SUT), Phillips CD 880 for CD transport, Wyred4Sound DAC2DSD w/femto and Sonus Faber Cremona's.

The music sounds as good now as it did in the past although I miss planar speakers.  Still going to see live music a least monthly, locally or in NYC.  Traveled to Nashville for two nights just to see Rosanne Cash perform as artist in residence at the Country Hall Music Hall of Fame.  And still enjoy going to listen to other people's systems.

[JerryM]

Welcome to AudioCircle, boneman. 

[ACHiPo]

What a great space!  Welcome, and great that you're listening to live music.  Regardless how much I spend, and while I do enjoy my stereo, it's still "Memorex"

Is this pic from before you got rid of your LPs, or are those what you have left?  I'd be interested in learning how you ripped your LPs, separating tracks, etc.

Welcome!
AC

[ArthurDent]

Greetings & Welcome to AC boneman  Nice looking setup there. 

[Phil A]

Welcome to AC!

[Guy 13]

A warm welcome to AudioCircle Mr. Boneman

Guy 13

[boneman]

The pic is before.  The only crates left are the ones stacked vertically at the rear.  As for digitising the records, I ripped them from my phone pre outs into a RME HDSP 9632 PCI card to do the D to A using a software called VinylStudio by AlpineSoft.  The software allows one to record and save the music in various formats, i.e. flac, wav, aiff, etc.  It also is linked to Discogs, enrolling you as a member, to obtain the meta data used to split tracks.  This works quite well with rock, jazz, pop, etc. but less so, in my experience, with classical.  The latter, perhaps a reflection of the smaller user base in Discogs for classical.  The raw PCM files are stored on the PC dedicated to the stereo and then the saved tracks which include the meta data, tracks properly split and final format are stored on a NAS.  Playback software is J River Mediaplayer.  I also use JRM for ripping CDs.  I have not yet tried upsampling when ripping CDs to see if there is a noticeable improvement.