The following message has been sent by our member Gary, and he has authorized me to copy it on the Forum. It will probably interest a lot of other members:

Nounours,
I have recently made some changes to my Threshold FET 10/hl and I thought I would share the news with you.

Over the weekend I built a new external power supply for the Threshold. The original power supply has a very puny transformer - only 6VA. I measured the current being drawn by the preamp and it draws about 3W steady state (it's a Class A preamp) so that's isn't much margin for the transformer. 6VA is similar to a 6W transformer except that some phase difference between current and voltage means that a 6VA transformer delivers less than 6W.

I upgraded the transformer to a 28VA transformer for extra headroom and changed from a traditional transformer - diode bridge - capacitor supply to a choke input supply, which consists of transformer - diode bridge - choke - capacitor supply. These are more commonly used in tube amps and are known to be very quiet. I also increased the size of the power supply caps to 2 x 10,000uf.

I wouldn't be writing if it wasn't a big improvement. Soundstage is huge and even more transparent than it was previously. Additionally a slight harshness/sibilance I was hearing, which I thought was due to my amplifiers has almost disappeared. It must be a good improvement because I keep wanting to listen to more music. The system right now is a bit unusual but sounding very good.
Source - Modified Squeezebox Classic driving a home built non-oversampling DAC using TDA1541a

Vinyl - Thorens TD-524 turntable and Grado 8MZ cartridge
Phono - clone of Pass labs XONO phono stage
Amps - 2A3 single ended amps, Baby Ongaku design, see http://www.wavelengthaudio.com/SP-BabyO.PDF
Speakers - Horning Eufrodite, see
http://www.horninghybrid.com/

The speakers are based on Lowther drivers but have the whizzer cones removed and then augment the highs with a tweeter and lows with many woofers. It's got the coherence of full range drivers since the crossover points are away from the critical listening range but with real bass and highs.

Anyway, thought I'd share the latest news.

Regards,
---Gary