Well, following up with my noise issue, I decided to disconnect the ARC and route all cabling directly into the C12 - and the noise is gone. This is a bittersweet discovery; sweet because the noise has vanished from the mains but also to my astonishment, the C12's musical performance is at least as good as the ARC and even a bit better through HDMI it appears, which I can't believe I'm saying. I get a nice full bottom end in the bass that I can feel which is absent through XLR (unless I can go in manually and change that). Bitter because well, I have an ARC that has just nearly been abandoned. Everyone has such stellar things to say about Audio Research tubes but everyone hears differently. To my own ears thus far, the C12 seems to have an edge on the ARC - again, bittersweet and also quite surprising!
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