Whats my weak link?

B_Limo,

Just asking, what are you doing?

On March 1 you buy Vandys. Four days later you buy KEFs.

So what are you doing? More importantly, where do you want to go and how much money do you have available to try to get there?

Honestly, it sounds like you don't know, but what you do know is when you hear something better, you want that sound.

Tmsorosk told you that the synergy of the components is the thing that makes or breaks a system. You assumed that the KEFs were the winning factor in your friend's system, but they didn't do that same trick in your system, so it's not just the KEFs alone that gave your friend his sound.

Do you have a dealer nearby who can help you? It appears that you're flying blind and all you're going to do is keep on spending money with no plan in place.

Chuck

YOur room probably has different acoustics than the other guys. Have you played with speaker placement and orientation to get them locked into your room? Gotta do that first to get a good baseline from which to judge what aspect of the sound, if any, needs to improve and how best to achieve that.

Dont know why people recommend changing powercords when you havent even stated what you already have. You say " upgraded", thats a good start. Since you've asked for opinions, I would start by replacing that old pre/pro and try a tube pre.

Hi B,

I have three comments:

1)I second Mapman's comment about room acoustics, speaker placement, and speaker orientation. Yogiboy's suggestion of having the other person bring over his gear is also a good one, if it can be arranged.

2)It appears that you have the power amp placed directly on top of the preamp, and that both components are right next to the digital stuff. That raises concerns in my mind that RFI/EMI/interference might be radiating between the components, with unpredictable but very conceivably audible sonic consequences. As an experiment, I would suggest that you temporarily move all of the components as far apart from each other as is practical.

3)Given that your DAC includes a headphone amp, you might find it useful to purchase a pair of relatively inexpensive headphones. That would help you to isolate the sonic issues you are perceiving between the source components and source material on the one hand, and the downstream components, speakers, and room acoustics on the other hand. The $100 Sony MDR-7506 provides surprisingly good performance considering its low price.

Regards,
-- Al

I will try to get my buddy, Steve (who I bought the kefs from) , to bring over a couple of pieces of equipment. He was on the next level, compared to me and my system (5 yrs of obsessing vs. 9 months). He really has had numerous power cords, conditioners, cables, everything. We talked a long time about synergy within a system. He was using really cheap pressed board from a hardware store to tame some flutter echo so I don't think that was the difference. I'm more picky about speaker placement than he is. My system just sounds like the mids are predominant. These same speakers on his rig sounded so smooth, transparent and perfectly eq'd, for a lack or better description. It did look like he had some sort of power conditioning going on also. He was a tweaker in that he is on the level of opening his pre amp up and soldering in better caps, op's (whatever those are) and a bunch of other stuff that went over my head. He had also put dynamat on the insides of some components and built shields around the power supplies. I'm not talking about his system imaging better, which it did, but more the overall sound (tone?) of his system. Again, my paradigm, vanies and now these kef's are just too pronouned through the mids and I can't figure out what's going on here. I guess I should add some powercords and room acoustics because those will help ang gear, and then try his pre amp as I'm suspecting that's where I could gain an improvement.