- Apogee Acoustics Duetta Mark II
Full-range planar speakers, refurbished by True Sound Works Audio. Fantastically transparent speakers that throw a soundstage like nobody's business and reproduce bass better than other types of planar loudspeakers.
Belt-drive turntable with vacuum holddown platter. Walnut cabinet
Tangential-tracking, air bearing tonearm; upgraded with a damping trough.
MC cartridge
No-frills, dual mono phono preamp, made in Norway. European manufacturers don't have to pay for health insurance for their employees, so I think they can make products better than some US products at the same price point.
Universal disc player. Also streams YouTube.
Cassette deck with remote control, remote azimuth adjustment, and frequency response of 20-20,000 Hz. With the right tape, recordings are often indistinguishable from the sources.
Cassette deck with pitch and bias controls. Otherwise, a relatively basic cassette deck with 20-20,000 Hz frequency response. Often, recordings are indistinguishable from the sources.
Auto-reverse cassette deck. Instead of reversing the heads to play the other side of a cassette, this has a remarkable assembly that reverses the tape. It looks very cool and makes for better sound. Often, recordings are indistinguishable from the sources.
Two-chassis, dual mono, solid state preamp. One of the most perfectionist preamps I know of--has a series of discrete resistors instead of pots for each volume control; a power supply the size of many power amps; a control for reverse stereo, mono, L or R channels singly. It may need a separate phone preamp for the lowest output cartridges, but works well on many low-output MC cartridges, with an ingenious circuit for automatic capacitance adjustment for cartridges. Very neutral and transparent sound.
Solid-state stereo amp, 100 watts per channel; bridged is 400 watts into 8 ohms, 800 watts into 4 ohms. These amps were chosen by Jason Bloom, the designer of the Apogee ribbon speakers, for many of his demos of those speakers, and they are a fantastic match for them--with sufficient current and power to make them sing.
Digital synthesized AM/FM tuner. Same as the T-117, but with a silver cabinet.
- Absolute Power APS-360m, APS 240m
power line purifiers
When I bought these in 2025, they were acknowledged as the best wireless headphones available. The app has a listening test that adjusts their EQ for the listener's hearing. They have switchable noise-cancelling that is probably less effective than other brands, but I prioritize the sound quality, which is superb, bettering even my trusty Sennheiser HD600 phones.
Excellent-sounding over-the-ear headphones. Slightly better than the HD-580, which I also have.
- Headroom Little Headroom +
Small headphone amp with switches for frequency response and imaging processor; external power supply. Sounds musical.
R2R DAC that is a rebadged Terminator 12th at a lower price. Fantastic soundstaging and bass reproduction, with the somewhat analog-like house sound of other Denafrips DACs.
Digital break-out box. Enables transmission of DSD from SACDs to DAC
Ethernet filter device.
Digital-to-digital converter that 1) allows all digital sources to travel via I2S into my DAC and 2) allows all digital sources to run on the DAC's superior clock, to reduce jitter.
Streamer with 1 TB hard drive. Compared to the Bluesound Node 130, this has more refined low-level detail, reduced grain, and slightly better bass and soundstaging. The overall effect allows greater involvement with the music, which can be very realistic with a high-quality recording--you just listen to the music, not the system.