Thad E Ginathom
Well-Known Member
With very mixed feelings, I bought a new amplifier.
Why mixed feelings? Isn't this something we all love to do?
Well, not when perfectly happy with the old one, and also not using it enough to really justify major expenditure.
So why? Because my Cyrus 3i was increasingly failing to respond to its control buttons, and the remote had ceased to work altogether.
This is an amplifier that I bought around ten years ago, for GBP300, half-price, ex-demo (my kind of deal
) and which, when I took it home, a little concerned at how it's 50w might stand up to the existing 120w Sherwood, knocked me back with delight: it made the Sherwood sound nothing less than course!
Planning repair, I contacted Cyrus in UK. They have fixed-rate service/repair charges for each model. Not cheap, and it is a hefty thing to ship, plus worries over customs both entering UK and returning to India. Cyrus said, please talk to our India distributors.
Well, it seems that Cyrus really don't want to say goodbye to an old customer.
Jay, of Soundnvision, told me that repair for this ten-year-plus amp was maybe not impossible, but close to it. The Customer-keeping exercise was to offer the current model at a fairly hefty buy-back discount. This was still a lot of money.
Jay responded to my obvious doubts by offering a previous model at a similar discount, and I decided to go for it.
There used to be a much loved black 3i on my shelf. There is now a silver 6vs2.
First impressions? It is hard to say. I spent far too much time swapping speaker terminations to do what I can call a reliable AB test, and, due to those different connectors at the amp end, I cannot swap and play.
I'd say, hmmm... maybe a little lighter weight. Physically, it is certainly a lighter weight. I suspect that the big toroidal transformer in the 3i might have been the victim of some economising. Anyway, the Cyrus silver looks smart. Very smart.
I haven't had the time yet to plug the headphones in, and, these days, I use the headphones more than speakers (on the PC: the 3i lacked a headphone output). That should be interesting
Now my really ancient entry-level Marantz CD player is ailing too... so I am keeping my vulture eyes open for a bargain. This one has to be a keep-us-going modest machine, partly because we just don't have the money, and partly because music increasingly is fed through the Squeezebox. We could live entirely without a seperate CD player, even playing physical CDs on the PC via Squeezeserver.
But a CDP is so easy. And, what with the cassette player being dead too, that shelf looks so bare...
What really upsets me is how much a modest Marantz costs here, compared with picking up one (or a Cambridge Audio) in London, especially from Richer Sounds, but international flights are more expensive than amplifiers, and I have no other reason to be rushing back there for the foreseeable future.
Why mixed feelings? Isn't this something we all love to do?
Well, not when perfectly happy with the old one, and also not using it enough to really justify major expenditure.
So why? Because my Cyrus 3i was increasingly failing to respond to its control buttons, and the remote had ceased to work altogether.
This is an amplifier that I bought around ten years ago, for GBP300, half-price, ex-demo (my kind of deal
) and which, when I took it home, a little concerned at how it's 50w might stand up to the existing 120w Sherwood, knocked me back with delight: it made the Sherwood sound nothing less than course!Planning repair, I contacted Cyrus in UK. They have fixed-rate service/repair charges for each model. Not cheap, and it is a hefty thing to ship, plus worries over customs both entering UK and returning to India. Cyrus said, please talk to our India distributors.
Well, it seems that Cyrus really don't want to say goodbye to an old customer.
Jay, of Soundnvision, told me that repair for this ten-year-plus amp was maybe not impossible, but close to it. The Customer-keeping exercise was to offer the current model at a fairly hefty buy-back discount. This was still a lot of money.
Jay responded to my obvious doubts by offering a previous model at a similar discount, and I decided to go for it.
There used to be a much loved black 3i on my shelf. There is now a silver 6vs2.
First impressions? It is hard to say. I spent far too much time swapping speaker terminations to do what I can call a reliable AB test, and, due to those different connectors at the amp end, I cannot swap and play.
I'd say, hmmm... maybe a little lighter weight. Physically, it is certainly a lighter weight. I suspect that the big toroidal transformer in the 3i might have been the victim of some economising. Anyway, the Cyrus silver looks smart. Very smart.
I haven't had the time yet to plug the headphones in, and, these days, I use the headphones more than speakers (on the PC: the 3i lacked a headphone output). That should be interesting
Now my really ancient entry-level Marantz CD player is ailing too... so I am keeping my vulture eyes open for a bargain. This one has to be a keep-us-going modest machine, partly because we just don't have the money, and partly because music increasingly is fed through the Squeezebox. We could live entirely without a seperate CD player, even playing physical CDs on the PC via Squeezeserver.
But a CDP is so easy. And, what with the cassette player being dead too, that shelf looks so bare...
What really upsets me is how much a modest Marantz costs here, compared with picking up one (or a Cambridge Audio) in London, especially from Richer Sounds, but international flights are more expensive than amplifiers, and I have no other reason to be rushing back there for the foreseeable future.
--- I never throw an old cable away!). My current cable is Richer-Sounds Something-or-Other 
