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Some Auralex or similar foam speaker risers could be good for this setup. It would be good for the KEFs generally and also to separate all three speakers from the surface to minimize vibration on the turntable.

Thanks all! Nice times were had, the day before and the day of. Met up with an audio acquaintance Tuesday for a nice BBQ lunch and a visit to a nearby store. Yesterday was a relaxing day reading, talking with a couple family/friends, then out for a nice dinner at a local fish place. they had dropped what was my standard birthday dinner item, but have added it back. Called (now) Bayou Cod, it is described as "Blackened cod, shrimp, andouille [sausage], cajun cream sauce, spinach, tomatoes, rice." They USED to use catfish, then changed to redfish (snapper). For a while they took it off completely, now it is back with cod. Our waitress was awesome, she had been there a long time and said MANY people were up in arms that this was dropped. She also gave us a free dessert for my bday. So as an old manager I had used to say: Fat, dumb, and happy!

You weren't kidding. It's now $300. iFi AUDIO micro iDSD Finale - $299.

Cinnamon bread

wow, I might need a second at that price!

Neck Deep - Life's Not Out To Get You Glad I found this one. Every song is tasteful and fiery. It's classified as "pop punk" which is pretty accurate. It's kind of like Paramore... but better? ex: (I spy Voltron)

A belated Happy Birthday, Todd! Glad it was relaxing and filled with good friends, family and food.

Woah - how did I miss this? Belated happy birthday Todd!

Haven't been online much for a couple of days but a very happy belated birthday to you, Todd. I'm glad to hear it was a good day (or 2).

Suffers from the same problem as the OPA1611 - similar high current noise (4 times higher than the NE5534A). Predicted SNR is 75.3dB - so identical to the OPA1611.

This is about as late as a reply can get (what can I say, I don't check in as often as I used to), and this was AGES ago, so I may very well be misremembering, but I think the first turntable I bought was Ari's old PS-X5. Vintage Sony PS-X turntables seem to be made for the head-case crowd. Too bad they are a reliability nightmare (specifically with the auto functions) but boy, they sure sounded good. I actually just replaced my rig after a brief love affair with my vinyl collection, where I remembered that I liked the activity but wasn't completely happy with my setup. Now rocking the lovely but much more trouble-free Technics SL-100C with a VM95SH into some KEFs in my living room setup. I'm sure it can get better than this but it's hard to imagine by much. Sure my high-res digital sources still probably sound better, but I still dig the romance of spinning bumpy plastic. And it's fun to spin vinyl at a party over my multi-room audio setup even if streaming vinyl over Wi-Fi feels wrong. Oh, and yeah, where some may have speaker stands, I have cat trees. The price of having pets. (P.S. back to the topic at hand, being a relative young'un, my first record was Arcade Fire's Funeral. I will accept your judgment.)

I'm a big fan of Orchard, have now several of the pecan Pi-based products and have had their GaN amps in the past, too. I have chatted with Leo a fair bit, even around his RCA to balanced converter. I thought there were pics of the board itself....at least partial that I had seen in his Facebook group if not on his web page. Yes, it wouldn't be a best-selling product, but there were several folks in the FB group that had use cases beyond turntables.... I have toyed with DAC HAT's quite a bit, including some great bang-for-the-buck ChiFi ones. Orchard's Pecan Pi (BB chips) and Plus (AKM chips) versions still kick butt on anything else I've heard. I have a Plus board with Pi board inside an all-in-one unit that has Purifi amp modules, as well as 3 other fully boxed streamers.... As for the Midgard: I got it in last weekend, have been playing around on a Sennheiser 660S2 as well as an Altiat Cal 1H (Altiat is Aumkar from Kaldas Research). One of the Pecan Pi boxed streamers is front-ending it. I'm hearing some great things with both phones, and the amp drives them easily even in low-gain mode. That said, the RCA outs on the Orchard feed a small Stax setup (252S and L500 Mk 2), and the mids sound more transparent on that. Not sure if it's the amp or phones. Need to listena nd maybe experiment more. But I think for < $250, this is a great amp to try and maybe use ongoing! It's making me think about getting some Focal Clear's/Mg's again.

Indeed. The combination of noise voltage and current was ideally matched to the resistance/inductance characteristics of a moving magnet cartridge. And lots of commercial designs used the NE5534. I have a spreadsheet that calculates S/N ratio with RIAA. AT 5mV the NE5534A returns 77.9dB with a typical MM cartridge of 610 ohms and 0.47H. The nearest equivalent IC is the much more recent OPA1611/12. Lower voltage noise but critically higher current noise. That gives 75.3dB, so 2.6dB worse s/n. My spreadsheet does not take account of 1/f noise. The OPA1611 has much better performance here than the NE5534A, so some of the 2.6dB will be eroded by that effect and it will make the comparison a closer run thing. Discrete opamps can give lower noise for RIAA EQ, and indeed Sam Groner developed a discrete version of the NE5534A that was better performance all round https://groupdiy.com/threads/just-for-fun-discrete-ne5534.57544/ . No surprise that the low noise dual he specified in 2004 is obsolete though.

I remember watching a few episodes of MH, MH. Also, I think that it's easy to forget just how cutting edge All in the Family was when it aired.

I had watched a few episodes....the only one I actually remember is one where she cuts up her credit cards in a seemingly stoned-induced glee..... Beyond that, it's a blur....

So much to love, but oddly Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a show I can’t remember a single scene, was the one that hovered always overhead just out of my childhood reach.

Not sure if anyone has used this stuff to touch up the inevitable scratch during DIY or perhaps to infill, but it seems to work pretty well! No before pictures from all the loading port area, but a tough area on the top where there is a matte finish..

RIP Norman Lear.. (101) Ed: It got me thinking about how much I have watched, and enjoyed his stuff. All in the Family - some, but it was not a staple The Jeffersons - yes and yes Sanford and Son - Hell yes (ya big dummy) Good Times - yup Maude - nope Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman - nope One Day at a Time - yup And that is the short list. Now you know why I am as I is.