AudioAficionado.org - Ecki's System

It has been a while since I showed my system. Many changes happened, the biggest was us moving from Berlin to Cape Town. Coincidently my furniture for CDs and the hifi system fit snuggly into the niche in the living room!

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds

Let me describe my components:

bottom right: Gigawatt EVO4 power conditioner. This is a Polish product, probably not well known here, but it is a world class power conditioner.
bottom left: Burmester 911 Mk3 power amplifier.
middle right: Brinkmann Nyquist Mk2 DAC and streamer. I love the DAC, it has a wonderful analog sound. It uses 4 tubes and the digital module can be exchanged in the field against a newer generation.
middle left: Burmester 088 pre amplifier.
top right: Aurender N30SA. This is the main source for music. It has an 8TB SSD, a 480 GB SSD cache for the music currently played. The N30SA is the next generation high end player from Aurender, a two house design that sounds even better than the W20SE.
top left> Burmester 089 CD player.

For power distribution I have solar and a battery system that makes my critical loads (such as my hifi) independent of the local power supplier. The power conditioner is connected to the battery-buffered mains via a dedicated thick power cable. There is a circuit breaker directly behind the system and the power conditioner is connected by the electrician with a thick special cable. The Burmester power and pre amplifiers are connected with IsoTek EVO3 Ascension cables. The Aurender and the CD player use Burmester power cords.

The speaker cable is an In-Akustik Reference LS-4004 Air (copper). The whole system is symmetric and the XLR cables used are In-Akustik Reference NF-2404 Air (silver) and Audioquest The Sky (silver) for the CD player. The digital connection between the Aurender N30 and the Brinkmann Nyquist is an In-Akustik Reference Digital 2404 (silver).

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds
Speaker cables in Bi-Wiring configuration.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds
Cables disappear, its all neat and the wife acceptance factor is dramatically increased!

The Burmester gear is well known here (and difficult to image with the mirror effect of the chrome front) so I will not even try my luck making photos.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds
This is the new Aurender N30SA. The top unit contains the dirty stuff, AC/DC conversion, display control and logic etc. The bottom unit is the digital unit with all the delicate outputs. Somehow Aurender seems to try to sell more the older W20SE before they start marketing the N30 in earnest as it is not found on their website yet!

I can tell you however that you would want the N30 rather than the W20SA if you could live without dual AES connecters (one per channel) the N30 lacks. The sound is wonderful. I have no words, it has literally blown me away.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds

My trusted Burmester 089 belt driven CD player that is also sounding rather analog.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...720&fit=bounds

For me software is more important than hardware and my focus was always collecting music. First it was LPs and then CDs. It got out of hand, I had too much and it was (or is) constantly growing. I parted from my LPs and I am replacing CDs with high resolution PCM files where I can. Still I love my CDs and as you can see, there are plenty of them here.

Thanks for spending some time looking at my system and reading about my explanations.

Musik is the best,
Ecki