Welcome to my ever evolving do it yourself (DIY) stereo page. This all began because I'm one of those older guys that bought records long before them shiny ceedee platters. Due to lack of room in my car, I had to leave my poor turntable with my college roommate. So after around 12 years with lots of vinyl and nothing safe to play it on, I eventually got a Rega Planar 3 turntable.

Well I got an Ortofon MC25FL moving coil cartridge and my current amp, a Sansui AU-217 didn't have an MC input. Using my casssette recorder to boost the signal was kind of hissy. So I needed a new phono preamp. A Curcio Sarah was that preamp. I built it myself, and eventually it worked after sending it back to Curcio to repair. I've learned a lot since then...

Thanks to some easier to build Bottlehead products and a wonderful forum, I'm now addicted.

My current (always evolving) home system consists of the following:

  • Rega Planar 3 turntable and an Ortofon MC25 FL cartridge
  • Electronic Tonalities Seduction phono preamplifier with Stevens and Billington TX103 step-up transformers
  • Custom heavily tweaked Electronic Tonalities Foreplay line preamplifier
  • Onkyo R1 CD player (used as a transport) and a DIY CS4397-based DAC
  • Tascam 220 Mk III cassette deck
  • Electronic Tonalities Paraglow II single-ended 2A3 monoblocks
  • Electronic Tonalities Straight 8 speakers
  • DIY X-Calibre rack
  • DIY interconnects made with Doc's magnet wire, teflon tubing and Dayton locking RCA jacks (WBT clones). Also, 1 pair of shielded Entwined cables from the MC step-ups to the Seduction
  • DIY braided CAT5 cable (biwired) speaker cables. Click here for details
  • 12 AWG solid core 3 braid house wire power cords
Rega Planar 3 Bottlehead Seduction Bottlehead Foreplay DIY DAC Bottlehead Paraglow II