Best Component Ever, for the money

04-27-01: Lev335
Mark Levinson 335 Running a Mark Levinson 39 cd player direct. The sound is so Natural.
Lev335 (Threads | Answers)

Can the Mark Levinson be found in $100-200 range ?

My Supratek Chardonney has made the biggest improvement in my system,

Harvey Rosenberg's SuperIt phono stage. I bought one used for about $100 back in the late 80's, hot-rodded it and used it with good Grados for years. What a delight - slightly warm but natural sound, lots of detail, not finicky about the tubes I fed it. I recently sold it with my old SOTA/Alphason/Grado combo - it needed a new wall-wart, but then it was back in business, playing music for a new generation of audiophiles.

AR-9 Towers from Teledyne anyone? $1600 new , I see them listed in top 10 speakers of all time about 6 times!

For me, for electronics, it has to be the Meitner PA-6i/MTR-101 combination, last manufactured in the early 1990s, but still serviced and upgraded by Museatex (www.museatex.com). I've had this pre-power set in my main system for seven years. I keep bringing in other amps and preamps, some much more expensive, that I hope will improve upon them, but none has yet displaced them.

For sources, it would be the venerable Technics SP-10MKII turntable, preferably mounted, not on the beautiful "obsidian" plinths that Technics made, but on a 20-30 kg DIY composite plinth of Corian, birch plywood, and MDF.

My speaker mega-favorite is the Tannoy System 15 DMT II: when I think these come as cheap as $1500-1800 on the used market (though prices appear to be rising), I'm absolutely gob-smacked.