I got interested in Oracles back when Brooks Berdon (sp?)was still working with them at GNP & then his own shop in Monrovia & just never switched. This tonearm is lovely w/ the Oracle & Lyra cartridge. The Helikon is one of the 2 favorite cartridges I've actually used the other was a long ago Kiseki Purple Heart.

This EAD is not the best but every time I think about upgrading I end up messing with a different part of the system. Still very smooth & easy to listen to in my system. Not quite sure about category of the Masterlink. More precise & transparent than the EAD but hard to suppress the noisiness of the hard drive. So I use it to make CDs for the car & mixes & especially to go from vinyl to CD for those purposes.

I like the Syrah preamp very much esp. for the phono & price though someday I would like a Grange. The threads here on Audiogon got me interested & I bought this from a member.

The Quicksilver M-135s are veritile & lovely with a fairly classic tube sound. In this system this is fine as they run only the tweeter/midrange part of the speaker system. These late built 5s use a built-in switching amp for the woofer part. I run these with KT-90 series III output tubes which give the best balance I've heard in my system switching between different sources without changing output tubes each time I switch source.

Although I wish the Vandersteen 5s were a little easier to drive, the only change I would like to make is to take them to 5a. But this will have to wait until the kids are out of school. For me, I can always get captivated by the music when I am listening to them even though they don't do every single thing in close approximation to real live music.

I use a mix of MIT Shotgun, Eclipse & Tara Labs interconnects. I just have trouble spending that much money on wires even though I know & can hear the difference.

The Cable Research speaker cables sound better on the Vandersteens than either of the Tara Labs or Kimbers I previously tried.

I use Nordost El Dorado power cables. Power management is Equi-Tech 2QR & Chang Lightspeed.

Overall I want to keep music as magic in my life. I want to listen to a huge variety of music and understand, appreciate & be swept away in my listening. In a typical year I see live symphonic music, classical chamber music, acoustic folk/singer/songwriter music,jazz, rock'n'roll and traditional/classical/pop music from other cultures. I want to be able to enjoy as much a variety listening at home. I have much more invested both financially & emotionally in the records (especially) and CDs that I have acquired over the last 45 years than I do in equipment & I want to be able to listen to it still with as much pleasure as I ever have.

The areas where I would like to work on are making the sound a bit more dynamic and present. Some of this involves trying to find cost effective room treatments acceptable to my family. I would like to upgrade the Vandersteen 5s to 5a. I keep thinking that as much as I love the Quicksilvers I might still get a better fit in tube amps. I would like to tweak the preamp a bit and ultimately go up in the line.

I can imagine that someday I might go to very efficient speakers & SET tube amps, though I'm not sure about this. Strangely 2 of the most memorable systems I have spent time listening to were at opposite ends of a spectrum. One was a vinyl based system with old Klipsch K-horns driven by a 10wpc tube amp & the other had Apogee Duettas driven by Audio Research electronics(can't remember the model #).