Details of My Home Theatre/Main Listening System

I bought this in late 2002 to replace my old turntable, a Pro-Jekt 1.2 which had developed a warped platter and an unsteady playing speed.

The Rega is a good basic turntable, and the RB300 is a well regarded tonearm. I like the modern minimalist styling, as well as the plate glass platter (no more warps!). It also has a synchronous vibration free motor, but I've noticed that it makes a bit of a noise when I start it up. The RB300 is outfitted with a 4mm spacer and nut extender to accommodate the height of the Dynavector DV-20X L cartridge (for optimal VTA).

Stylus/cartridge
Dynavector DV-20X L
(low output moving coil)

This is a well regarded low output moving coil cartridge that I bought directly from Dynavector Australia.

I previously used the Rega Super Elys cartridge with the P3, but didn't really like the sound. It was very bright and lacking in the low end, and was fatiguing to listen to.

The DV-20X L sounds much more "balanced" sound , with lots of detail. I have yet reaced the 50 hour "break in" period for the cartridge, I'll report more once the sound has settled down.

When I was listening to the Rega P3/RB300/SuperElys through the phono stage in the Denon, I found the sound was muffled, lacking in dynamics, insubstantial and fatiguing. Thus for a while I avoided playing LPs.

Since then, many people have advised me to consider upgrading to a better quality stand alone phono amp.

I finally made the plunge in early 2004, and auditioned several models, including the Musical Fidelity X-LPS^V3 and the Lehmann Black Cube. I soon discovered how crappy the Denon phono stage was, and what a difference to the sound a good phono stage makes.

Then someone suggested looking at P-75. I ended up auditioning both the P-75 and the P-100. To me, both the P-75 and P-100 sounded better to the other units, with the P-100 being slightly better paired with the Super Elys.

However, I ended up taking the plunge and bought a new moving coil cartridge, the DV-20X L (see above) as well as the P-75. Together, these two items were only slightly above the price of just the P-100, and I suspect I'll get more of a performance gain. I was right, the DV-20X L coupled with the P-75 sounded far better than the Super Elys and P-100.

The P-75 has an interesting high gain active RIAA network design. It also has an interesting "phono enhancing" circuit for low output moving coils that I haven't tried yet (I'm waiting for the DV-20X L to break in before switching it on).

This is currently my reference player for listening to Super Audio CDs and regular CDs. It has a nice warm sound without sacrificing detail, and manages to make high frequencies on CDs sound decent.

At one stage this was the top-of-the-line multi-channel Super Audio CD player from Sony. It has some interesting features, including separate (and mutually exclusive) outputs for stereo vs multi-channel playback. The reason is because the player normally has a single DAC chip (containing two DACs in differential mode) for each channel in multi-channel mode, but stacks the DACs up in stereo so each channel is decoded by no less than three differential DACs (in order not to "waste" the extra DACs).

I always had a weakness for MIDI sound modules. This is not only a 128-voice GM2/GS/XGlite sound module, it also doubles as a pro-quality computer sound module, able to mix both digital and analogue audio inputs as well as output analogue/digital audio at up to 48kHz/24 bit precision.

I primarily use this to play MIDI songs and record them directly onto PCM without an intervening analogue stage, as well as record my LPs onto CDs. The unit has a number of audio effects built in, which I don't use.

By the time Nakamichi designed the 680ZX, they had essentially perfected the art of making the world's best cassette decks. The 680ZX is arguably Nakamichi's finest non-reversing cassette deck, featuring 3 tape heads, support for metal tapes, a 50 segment meter, and a half speed mode. The sound is gorgeously warm, and the deck is capable of a full 20Hz-20kHz frequency response on a good quality tape (with manual bias adjustments). It only supports Dolby B noise reduction, but that's good enough.

This is the first high definition DVB-T tuner released on the Australian market. On the plus side, it will upsample everything to 1080i. On the negative side, the user interface is a bit slow, it suffers from the chroma upsampling bug, and black IRE levels are set way too high, requiring a custom display setting.

I would like to replace this with a better set top box, but I'm still waiting for a really good one to be released ...

This player generated a lot of interest when it became the first player to be awarded the "Secrets Recommended 480p" award in the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity's extremely tough Progressive Scan DVD Benchmark shootouts. It is a relatively cheap DVD player that seems to do everything right: no chroma upsampling bug, a decent MPEG decoder, reference level video outputs, plus DVD-Audio as a bonus. When Panasonic discontinued the player, it was selling for higher than original retail price on Ebay.

Fortunately, in Australia this player is relatively easy to find in stores and relatively inexpensive too. The DVD-Audio playback quality is fantastic for the price - this player will easily hold its own against much more expensive players.

Having said all that, the player is not perfect. The MPEG decoder is not fast enough to do pans as smoothly as some of the newer designs, and the player does not support PAL progressive.

I currently only use this player to listen to DVD-Audio discs, or to watch NTSC DVDs. I prefer to watch PAL DVDs on my HTPC.

Ideally I would like to separate the digital processing from the analog amplification onto separate units, but I can't afford the high end stuff, and many of them seem to have limitations/compromises.

I bought the Denon AVC-A1SE second hand from a friend (who has since moved on to much more high end/expensive components). This is the Asian/European version of the AVR-5800 minus the radio tuner and RF remote control.

It has been upgraded with the new digital processing board, which means it supports newer formats such as Dolby Pro Logic II and THX Ultra 2 cinema/music modes. Rumours are that a firmware upgrade should be forthcoming which will allow this unit to support Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS Enhanced NEO:6 and HDCD.

I quite like the Denon "sound", which comes across as "clean" and "powerful." The amplifiers are rated at 170W/channel@8ohms, although this is an optimistic rating since I doubt the unit will do much more than 140-150w/channel with all channels driven on a continuous basis, but that is more than sufficient for the size of our living room and the speakers.

The processing power and digital conversion capabilities are quite impressive: with dual HammerHead SHARC 21161 DSPs for surround decoding and 16 Burr Brown PCM 1738E DACs driven in dual-differential configuration.

Best of all, all digital processing can be completely bypassed for analog sources so that the amplifier is capable of routing any input completely in the analog domain.

I bought these as a set, initially as a 5.1 surround configuration that would be suitable for movies as well as multi-channel music. It was quite important that the front and rear speakers are identical, as many quad recordings require four identical speakers. Ideally, the centre speaker should also be identical. Unfortunately, height restrictions forced me to use a centre speaker with a lower profile in order to avoid the speaker blocking the projection screen.

I chose the B&W CDM NT series because I previously owned the DM600 series and really liked the B&W "sound." The CDM NT series are positioned in between the mass market DM600 series and the high end Nautilus 800 series. The CDM NT series sound quite a bit better (in terms of detail and dynamics) compared to the DM600 series but at half the price of the equivalent Nautilus 800 series speakers.

The CDM 7NT front and rear speakers are close to full range, missing only the bottom octave (40-20kHz). Similarly, the CDM CNT centre speaker are also close to full range (50-20kHz), allowing me to avoid bass management. The ASW2500 subwoofer is a powered unit with a 700W amplifer. I quite like the small size, but it doesn't sound as loud or as deep as bigger units.

Don't you hate it when they keep releasing new surround formats with ever increasing requirements for speakers? Fortunately, I had a spare pair of B&W DM601 speakers handy (these used to be in the study next to the computer, but the strong magnetic fields generated by the speaker drivers forced me to "downgrade" to a pair of B&W LM1 leisure monitors (these are magnetically shielded).

These speakers are used for 6.1 and 7.1 surround formats such as THX Surround EX, DTS 6.1 ES and THX Ultra 2 cinema and music modes. They are not used for music listening.

This is Sony's second generation 1366x768 widescreen LCD projector. Although the native contrast ratios are fairly average (mine measured around 183:1 without any tweaking) I have used the SMART III video calibration toolkit plus a CC40R filter to improve the contrast ratio to 431:1. The SMART III toolkit uses an Excel spreadsheet plus a light meter to accurately calibrate the projector to the D65/6500K colour temperature standard.

The projector is mounted on a ceiling using a custom mounting kit. Three sets of video cables (composite video, S-video and Y-Pr-Pb component) are connected to the video outputs of the AVC-A1SE+, and a separate set of RGBHV cables are connected to the HTPC.