What's your best or worse audio purchase in 2023?

[JoeN]

Originally Posted by sandecker

Vinyl record brushes from ramar Berlin

https://ramar.berlin/en/

That’s the same brush we use. It’s very very good.

[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by sandecker

Vinyl record brushes from ramar Berlin

https://ramar.berlin/en/

Here too, great brush.

[Fbgbill]

BEST: Back in April I got a new McIntosh C2700 to go with my MC611's. No worse so far.

[GSOphile]

Esoteric Grandioso C1X solo preamp.

[knotscott]

There have been a few good acquisitions in 2023 for me.

The best would have to be the purchase of a used Kenwood integrated amp to use in a horizontal bi-amp configuration to drive just the woofers on my speakers. That led to an inexpensive active crossover, bypassing of the stock low pass crossover, and resulted in great bass improvement. It also cleared up the mids and treble of the tube amps up top. Win/win for < $100.

The worst was probably the ART DJ PREII. At first it sounded clear and pleasant, then I realized it was missing room ambience, and just didn't sound right, so I returned it and fixed my modified Bugle 3.

[Kal Rubinson]

Best:
1. 3rd KEF Blade 2 Meta for center channel.
2. Merging Hapi II 16 channel DAC.

Worst:
??

[Still-One]

Upgrading my Momentum amps to MxV version.

[audiogear]

2023 seems to be a Best trend year!

[cleeds]

My system was pretty stable this year other than a few mostly resolved service issues. (I'm still running a backup servo/xover with my Infinity woofers.) I did finally replace the original feet on my VPI TNT III with feet from MNPCTech that I adapted with a few bits of hardware. I'm not sure there's any sonic improvement, but these maintain alignment much better than the tired springs in the old feet. And they don't look kludged.

[inlinephil]

Since I stream from my network server and the internet, a friend recommended an EtherRegen between the DAC and the network switch. At this same time, I was investigating the benefits of high precision clocks and decided on going another route.

We live in Florida and have a lot of lightning here so I also decided to optically couple the internet modem to the network switch. Yes, it required two pieces of gear but now there is no copper in the path to the internet.

So I chose a Netgear GS510TPP at the modem end and an LHY SW-8 at the stereo end. The improvement was immediate and huge with vast improvements in the size, shape, and layering of the sound stage. But there were a few things that bothered me, like a small HF resonance in the upper vocal range.

Tearing apart the SW-8 I found a lot of issues from ground loops to poor bypass [aka shunt] supply capacitors. After a few weeks of tinkering, all was cleared up.

It appears that the SW-8 with its precision OCXO basically removes timing errors introduced by network packet retransmissions thereby restoring correct audio phase to the DAC input.

While I would not recommend this unit for a seriously high end system, it did clearly demonstrate the need to correct these types of digital errors. I would encourage anyone to audition a similar but higher quality OCXO-based device. Borrowing a friends would be one option.