Since tomorrow is holiday, so I take this Sunday as a “long holiday”. So I pay a visit to my good friend, Mr. Paul a.k.a PJ. I also bring my DIY Speaker and my DIY Aikido.

I don’t remember the way to PJ’s house (been there once), so I fire up my GPS on my Asus P835. I search location of Cipinang and trace down a little bit. I mark the location on my Google Earth and put coordinate on my GPS. I’m ready to go.

After 1 hour of traveling time, finally I arrive. My suggestion, don’t trust 100% with a gadget named GPS. It’s good, useful, but you need a brain with good logic to make it perfectly usable 😉 Just use it, and you will understand my point.

Here is PJ’s system. A nice floorstander speaker from ProAC (R3) and a bookshelf R1S also from ProAc. You also can see his 2A3 amplifier and 112A Pre-Amplifier there. A nice system as reference.

My DIY speaker with PJ’s system. It seems like the 2.5RMS of 2A3 can’t provide enough power for my speaker. I have to admit the magic of SE, but absolutely we need more power! Later, we use the Conrad Johnson PV10A Pre-Amplifier and around 40RMS Golden Tube SE40 Paralel Single Ended Amplifier to drive my speaker.

The ProAc R3 driven by Golden Tube SE40 Paralel Single Ended Amplifier and CJ PV10A Pre-Amplifier. This speaker also can’t be powered with tiny 2A3. So we must use more power. You can’t get both side of the coin.

In detail of the Paralel Single Ended configuration. A Shanling CD Player (top right shelf), CJ PV10A Pre-Amplifier (top-left shelf), and dual mono Golden Tube SE40 Push Pull Amplifier (bottom shelf) with six 7581 tubes each channel and all with individual bias setting. We also can see the 2A3 and 112A tube on the floor (sorry, the image was cropped).

The Golden Tube SE40 could provide more power to finally make up perfectly with my DIY Speaker. The live sensation and smooth treble delivered nicely with this configuration, while the 2A3/112A configuration may have more emotional sensation, but also with underpowered nuance. Time to go with GM70 or 845? 😉 Well, I don’t have enough guts – at least for now 😉