Bizarre issue for me is how little progress has been made in cd dac development and how we lost track in audio quality. This and other old reputable designs point this out.

This makes me want to have my 207-14 bit repaired so it can work again. It’s died numerous times. Nice video.

It's a drawer, not draw.

You compare apples and pears. If you use ddc between laptop and dac, it always sound better (even on shitty toslink) than cd spdif straight to dac. Because what ddc does (your douk audio converter you call it) is cleaning signal from jitter and noise and reclocking it. Really no brainer, it will sound better, but not because of toslink, it is because of ddc itself. If you use spdif coax out on your ddc and feed it to su-1 coax, it will sound even better than toslink.....

Nice system. I like the isolation bases, esp where you stacked two. Very Mana Acoustics vibe there.

I heard the prototype of this amplifier rig, both pre and power amps at Glenn's house back in the very distant past. Glenn had triple-stacked (i.e. Three Pairs) of Quad ESL57 loudspeakers, no grilles, quite dangerous! But my God, what an incredible sound. He ran my pair of Mono'd Leak Stereo 20s through them and I was utterly blown away. Glenn made me a pre-amp based on this design inside the case of a beyond-repair Rose RV23 valve pre with specific modifications to run my Stereo 20s at the correct level. A man of very few words was Glenn, but one of the most lovely people you could ever wish to meet. I miss him.

Nice looking designs..

had these for a long time too! only exchanged them for an all valve system... great gear!

Greetings from Montana! Thanks for the well spoken guided tour of a classic British valve preamplifier and *hybrid* power amplifier setup. I remember wanting to get hold of a Croft Micro in the late 80s when l lived in London. Back before the internet Glenn was notoriously hard to contact. More recently, Tarun (A British Audiophile) was trying to score a "review sample"😅 I commented that he should have just bought one and stop bothering Glenn! Sadly now Glenn is permanently incommunicado😢 Fortunately the sound presentation you described are available from any well set up high quality stereo systems. Certainly from my Valve preamp & SS power amps. BTW am I the only person who laments most preamps having no balance control for centreing the stereo image? 🎵🎶🤫🎶🎶🎵

I see now in the comments that you already responded to the same question. Thanks

What are whose speakers you are using in the video ?

Very underrated brand ........no pcb shit and only build to suit music .........as it should be done !

Very nice Glenn Croft gear. I hope to try one of these components someday. The build and design reminds me a lot of Counterpoint equipment. Mike Elliott, and the Counterpoint brand are no longer around either, unfortunately.

Great shame this manufacturer is no longer with us. Love the two volume controls. I can balance the image with these in my digital system.

Your sound description also applies to my Croft Integrated. I've had it for 10 years and look forward to it every day. It's a shame that Glenn Croft and this company don't exist anymore.

Thanks for this appraisal of the Croft Pre- and Power Amps. As for your comments about your preference for Analogue, that's all down to the fact that The World is Analogue and is what our Ears are tuned to. Those people who claim that Digital is superior, are people who have probably never heard a good Analogue system and more likely, never heard a good Valve system. Like you, I play far more Records than CDs on my All Valve system. All 'World Audio Design' kit, courtesy of Noel Keywood. Still going strong, despite being 25+ years old. I totally agree with you about choosing Valves. Noel had a preference for Sovtek valves and I still prefer them to all others. Cheers, Russ. Hampshire.

I quite liked the 206 when I had it, though by the end of it's time in my system it was used to record to casstte and plugged into the direct input of a V6030 cassette deck. I am still quite fond of a lot of older CD players, with 16bit 44.1 CD standard. Back then they often made decent CD players, these days its alll about numbers and cheap chips for silly prices, yet we get some great Chinese DAC's with crazy specs for a fraction of the cost of high end.

Hi what speakers compliment your system ?

Really good transport servo board, suspension? Applying turntable physics to a digital optical reader which reads and (should) use a cache buffer to weed out any variances in reading speed. Suspension, transport, servo etc. 🤣🤣 Hilarious. On a good CD player, rpm is digitally monitored and corrected, which is actually not expensive to do at all. Hence, "old religion" audiophiles do not like that, no feeling of something special to it. When about nearly single cd-player of any can read out and put out the data perfectly at the right speed. The inside DAC can make a big difference for the analogue outputs; But the applying of turntable physics to a CD player, remains one of the most hilarious things audiophiles can do. One of the great things of optical disk, is the elimination of the need of for "suspension", Perfect rotational speeds, etc.

You don’t need to change them at all tbh, they look great and the build quality is top 😊

Once again, it is very helpful & instructive, Sir!

Your genius is shining through!! I'll try hockey pucks with your same ideas. Thanks..

Your video presentations are 1st rate. Very well done!

This may seem trivial, but I have two SS preamps with the same type control knobs. Spectral DM6 & Plexus Phonon. Your video deserves 👏. Thanks!

Hi there, I'm from the US and have always admired Croft since its inception. Good gear!!

T1A is slow blow 1Amp fuse not Quick blow fuse as that will start with the letteer F 😀 I have the Croft Phone Intergrate Series 5 and still getting used to it if I like it or not. First thing I did was modify the dual Volume Controls what doesn't make any sence (IMHO) as the rest is not dual and most signal cables happy running unshielded next to eachother anyway (crosstalk). But that a personal choise.

Fabulous video, really enjoyed your engaging presentation and I look forward to hearing more. I’m Craig from the UK 🇬🇧 on his wife’s KZbin page wishing you a merry Christmas. I have a preamp made by Mark at Malvern Audio Research and my power amps are Audionote.

Glenn was a genius, RIP

You can also use a USB-C OTG splitter cable to provide power and data separately

Wonderful restoration. I owned several of these but I'm more towards the F50 & B51's lately.

I have the SU-1 and have tried it with with a few different sources. Optical was OK, but coax was better in every case. To each their own I suppose.

I use a Meridian 500 CD transport and it’s fantastic. I bought it used cause I liked the form factor and looks but it’s improvement in sound over the Blu-ray player I was using as a transport surprised me.

I completely agree with your comments on the 2m black ,it has great dynamics through the hole range ,,just a very enjoyable cartridge great treble nice firm bass . A musical investment .

How about powering it with a 6V lead battery?

Does this sound better than a Rega Apollo?

My Marantz CD DVD player only has RCA and HDMI outputs I dont know how to connect it to this DAC.

I have also experienced the same. My SMSL SU-1 sounds the best via optical output. My source is a Wiim Pro powered with a LPS (which also powers the SU-1). I already was using optical and recently I tried coaxial, but the sound is better via optical; it sounds more open and holographic. However, with my SMSL D300 it is the other way around: it gets the best sound via coaxial.

Hello. What kind of power can be supplied to SMSL - SU1? 6 volts 2 or is it possible?

is there a usb to coaxial converter or connector. please specify the model

The best CD player (in the 1990`s) in my mind was the Electrocompaniet ECM MK1, (1998) still today it plays excellent!, and can stil be purchased as an MK5 version:-)

thanks for this overview. does your 70s system co-habitate with your new system or is it in its own room? just curious on how folks run two systems in their home.

у меня был в свое время meridian 206 version delta sigma CS, мне он больше чем proceed mrc-100 понравился. хотелось бы сравнить meridian 206 delta sigma и meridian 206 tda 1547

Some of the early CD player DACs really were decades ahead of their time sonically. I still fondly remember buying my first CD player, a Philips CD150 in 1985. It was based around the CDM2 mechanism and had dual 14-bit DACs with 4x oversampling. The specs on paper weren't all that impressive by today's standards, but it totally blew away my brother's 16-bit Philips CD player that cost over twice as much at the time in double blind tests playing back identical time-synced CDs with the outputs level-matched to within 0.1dB. The CD150 sounded far cleaner than its specs would have had me believe, and there were no giveaways that I was listening to a digital source. To this day, it remains the most analogue sounding CD player I've ever heard in person and, although it's not used a great deal nowadays, it still takes pride of place on my shelf of audio antiquities in the bedroom along with a fully refurbished 1977 JVC KD-720 slope-loading cassette deck, and a host of other old goodies that I just can't bring myself to part with.

Buyer beware .... If you are using this DAC on USB from a Windows computer, it will shut down the Windows onscreen volume control and the media buttons on your keyboard. Everything will be running at full maximum volume. If you use the volume control in your media player to manage the volume... other Windows sounds and programs will still operate a full volume, complete with the surprises you can expect from that.

If the converter collects EMI and RFI does it feed into the preoptical signal. This option was found to be the best… so just wondering.

Can we connect an ordinary CD player that can play normal audio CDs? Or does it support only mqa cds ?

Some people will think it’s great some won’t,that’s the way it is

Nice set up! Great video!

I'm sorry, what kind of noise are your isolating/shielding from in a digital signal ?

I use toslink from my Imac playing .flac via Foobar. Sound is nice without any distortions or dropouts. A big influence seems to have the USB to 5V power supply. From SMSL I go directly into a active Dali Zensor via 3.5 mm stereo jack plug. Parallel I listen to an old Onkyo DV 503 CD-Player which uses directly toslink. This sounds not so good...more flat and less dynamically.