Warning : Little review ahead : sorry if this is naughty, but I promised BA I'd review them.
Following my posts about what I could do to get the best out of my extremely cheap Rotel RCD965BX, but still using just my Denon AV amp and my ageing but at least HiFi Monitor 3 speakers, I got a PM from Burson Audio asking if I'd like to try putting a couple of their Discrete V6 op-amp substitutes into the O/P stage. I said, surprise surprise, yes please, and chose the vivid models. I'm not a youtube content creator, and I'm not on many audio forums, and I certainly don't write reviews normally, but I'm hoping that BA will be happy to read my little review here, because at the moment (after an hour or so burning in) they're at the top of my christmas card list.
I was actually a bit sceptical at first - I knew from my past that opamps can improve things (I'd swapped something somewhere I remembered) but I thought I'd pretty much got as far as I was going to get with my non-HiFi setup - and TBH, I was pretty happy with what I was listening to from the CDs; since I remembered them being pretty harsh when they first came out, and I stuck to my PT Too/SME309/Lyra Clavis analogue setup until marriage and house moves put real HiFi at the back of the queue. For 30 years !!. Anyway, I'd started listening to CDs again, and bought the Rotel on a whim - and realised that actually, even stock, it was pretty good, and was making my denon AV amp even sound pretty good - but better was calling, at £20 it didn;t matter if I blew it up !!
TL😀R - they're brilliant. I have never heard my HiFi (even in the current case a non-HiFi) sound so interesting - I've heard instruments not heard before, voices change to whispers and back again, and words don't get lost in the noise - I can hear a band, rather than just some nicely presented music from good speakers.
Wrapping up, I can only praise them as being a very very cost effective uograde, even if you have to buy them; From my description, you can see my other components aren't brilliant, but I'm really wondering of Linn were right all along - maybe the source is the most important component - especially at the lower end of cost range ?
Following my posts about what I could do to get the best out of my extremely cheap Rotel RCD965BX, but still using just my Denon AV amp and my ageing but at least HiFi Monitor 3 speakers, I got a PM from Burson Audio asking if I'd like to try putting a couple of their Discrete V6 op-amp substitutes into the O/P stage. I said, surprise surprise, yes please, and chose the vivid models. I'm not a youtube content creator, and I'm not on many audio forums, and I certainly don't write reviews normally, but I'm hoping that BA will be happy to read my little review here, because at the moment (after an hour or so burning in) they're at the top of my christmas card list.
I was actually a bit sceptical at first - I knew from my past that opamps can improve things (I'd swapped something somewhere I remembered) but I thought I'd pretty much got as far as I was going to get with my non-HiFi setup - and TBH, I was pretty happy with what I was listening to from the CDs; since I remembered them being pretty harsh when they first came out, and I stuck to my PT Too/SME309/Lyra Clavis analogue setup until marriage and house moves put real HiFi at the back of the queue. For 30 years !!. Anyway, I'd started listening to CDs again, and bought the Rotel on a whim - and realised that actually, even stock, it was pretty good, and was making my denon AV amp even sound pretty good - but better was calling, at £20 it didn;t matter if I blew it up !!
TL😀R - they're brilliant. I have never heard my HiFi (even in the current case a non-HiFi) sound so interesting - I've heard instruments not heard before, voices change to whispers and back again, and words don't get lost in the noise - I can hear a band, rather than just some nicely presented music from good speakers.
Wrapping up, I can only praise them as being a very very cost effective uograde, even if you have to buy them; From my description, you can see my other components aren't brilliant, but I'm really wondering of Linn were right all along - maybe the source is the most important component - especially at the lower end of cost range ?
Interesting theory if anyone's interested !
I can still hear improvements with these amps at low volumes - but they're obviously much less prominent. So the temptation is to now turn up the volume because I know the sound will improve more than it would have done pre-upgrade. So the improvement is actually forcing me to take the volume to places which I wouldn't have taken it before, because it would have been much less acceptable to listen to. If you know what I mean !!
The way I described the improvement to my wife was this :-
"I've been listening to certain music for 20 years on and off, but I've never actually heard the words behind the lyrics, nor the notes behind the music, before"
Now for re-caping, and maybe a PSU upgrade !!
I can still hear improvements with these amps at low volumes - but they're obviously much less prominent. So the temptation is to now turn up the volume because I know the sound will improve more than it would have done pre-upgrade. So the improvement is actually forcing me to take the volume to places which I wouldn't have taken it before, because it would have been much less acceptable to listen to. If you know what I mean !!
The way I described the improvement to my wife was this :-
"I've been listening to certain music for 20 years on and off, but I've never actually heard the words behind the lyrics, nor the notes behind the music, before"
Now for re-caping, and maybe a PSU upgrade !!