Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

We dug out the trusty Denon DL-103R and mounted it on the Acoustic Research "Arche" Headshell ... and got an incredible musical presentation once about 15 hours had passed with some fussing and adjusting. The Denon's sound will continue improving as your tone-arm and turntable get upgraded, but does justice to what you already have.  It responds very well to careful alignment, but it's forgiving of less careful alignment.  It can go toe to toe with carts costing multiples of its US$379 MSRP (Street price slightly less).  If the basic sound is to your liking, there is also a small cottage industry that takes the DL103 and 103R and hotrods them, too.  The Denon DL-103R is not a perfect cartridge by any means, but it is one of those rare true "giant killers" where you have to spend a lot more to do better, and makes you ask "why bother" when considering such an upgrade. We were happy to recommend it earlier, we're happy to double down on...

CD, Grado or Denon - which gives her the breath of life? Yes, we're sometimes late to the party, but we have listened to, and known of Florence and the Machine for awhile through the teens in the household.  And of course, they know if they suggest something on vinyl, it usually shows up and gets played.  So we have 2 of her albums on both CD and LP.  She's had one really big hit, "The Dog Days Are Over" and we admit, we love that song. When we listened to the CD through the Ayre C-5xeMP, playing the hit "The Dog Days are Over" - the song seemed like it is ever so slightly compromised in some manner: sounding nearly perfect but lacking a bit of humanity .  You hear forceful percussion, a lilting mandolin, and her voice coming through but not as clearly and as richly as you think her voice should sound - it gives the impression of the voice as another instrument in the band, and trying to argue a point.  We wanted to have a second opinion on the LP to ...

We've been experimenting with cartridges on our turntable, to see if we can get an improvement in our analog sound.  Given we have a Jelco 750E tonearm, it can handle a large number of cartridges. Once you get in the rarefied air of the so-called super-carts (usually in the more-than-a-kilobuck variety), it may require a better arm to get acceptable performance (high fuss/high reward). Amongst a few candidates we have considered, we found a real standout, that is showing to be such a real value that we want to share right away:  The Denon DL-103R.  MSRP is $379, but the street price is closer to $250.  Link: Denon USA's DL-103R It was originally developed in 1963 for use in radio, TV and recording studios - so it was made to be rather robust and easy to align (you can do so by eyeballing it).  It has been in continuous production in one form or another for the last 50 years, and has been very popular, possibly the best selling moving coil cartridge of a...