What did you do to your stereo rig today?

Tonight, I've been cleaning, and thoroughly enjoying, this Harman Kardon 430 from my dad's collection. Not everything he 'collected' was gold, but this HK 430 sure was.

different lighting

It has cleaned up very well, and I got lucky that the scratchiness in the volume pot was remedied with a quick spray of DeOxit. I removed the knobs and faceplate for proper cleaning/scrubbing; results were great. The sheet-metal chassis cover has an outer vinyl coating, which makes it very durable; a quick scrub-and-rinse of the cover got things sorted, although there are still a few tiny gouged scrapes in the vinyl coating. On the clear acrylic faceplate, before cleaning, I noticed the below numbers written in crayon/wax/pencil. I'm assuming $4.84 was the price my dad paid for this receiver at a thrift store

Listened to the rig this morning for a couple of hours before bed. I mostly ran through some of my favorite tracks of various sample rates including standard CDs and flac files from 44.1- 96khz (and 192k detuned to 96k). I did this for two reasons, one because I wanted to start a list of reference tracks to compare the pre's dac and the new K13's and just because I wanted to listen to some jams lol.

The Fiio K13 dac arrived today while I was in bed. I should have everything to integrate it into the system by this weekend! This will allow me to spend plenty of time to listen to the stock pre's dac for a couple more days. Not like I'm not familiar with how it already sounds. I mean I've had this pre in this config. for ten years now. I can't wait to start comparing the two units.

Conradicles wrote: »

Very nice. Will you have any DAC's for sale when you are finished?

Only if the K13 doesn't beat the Burr-Brown PCM1798 in the preamp.