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Why indeed?

I now have a stock panny xr45, and it is indeed very average sounding. Improves a lot with Bybee's in the power cord and in the digital interconnect, but even with those, it really doesn't really play at the same level as my reference gear. Good for the $$, but not a world beater, IMO. Which is exactly what I expected.

But the modded Panny is a whole 'nother story. If my initial assumption was that the unmodded panny would be good-for-the-money-but-not-great, I figured modding it would improve it to good-in-absolute-terms-but-still-not-great category. But I was wrong. Very wrong. The modded Panny (modded by Wayne, at Bolder cables) DID beat my AVA reference setup.

Of course I have big full range (and very transparent) speakers, difficult to drive, and we didn't hear the "magic" until we bi-amped them with the Panny. Maybe smaller speakers don't need to be biamped, but mine sounded uncontrolled in the bass until we did that.

I do know that power supply quality seems to be very, very critical with the digital amp modules and the unit I heard had more power supply and much higher quality parts (ie, all black gates), and combined with the bybees is what seems to have put the Panny on such a lofty level. As I remarked before, I was HAPPY with my main system and had no intention of changing it. But the modded panny just sounded better.

My main system is not up for sale yet, as the very idea of this cheap little unit besting my main system so goes against the grain of everying I have "learned" during my 12 years as an audiophile/enthusiast that it is simply difficult to believe. Difficult to believe even for me, and I was there and heard it with my own ears. So, the main system is not going up for sale until I get a chance to do a more extensive re-match with a lot more of the music I listen to (mainly classical and female vocals in the pop and jazz categories). So, this comeing weekend is going to be very interesting for me. Plus, the mods I heard last week were still in "prototype" status, and a few more changes have been made that I'm told increase the sound quality even more. We shall see.

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