[prepress]

Last night, and especially this AM, I've had a feeling of audio emptiness (I called it melancholy in my tube thread). The realization has hit me that I'm now chasing sound, not listening to music. And I believe tube rolling is a factor in that. The last time I would say I listened to music or enjoyed a DVD w/o distraction was during the initial run with the JJ tubes. There are other factors at play, such as an unfriendly work schedule along with other responsibilities and demands on my time and energy, but as far as the system itself goes my tube rolling isn't helping me. Recently I put the Mullard tubes back into the 2300 and even now, though I like the Mullards pretty well and could see leaving them in for an extended period, I'm listening to the sound, and waiting for them to make a mistake, as it were. Maybe I need to put the JJs back in and see if that fixes my head; I was thinking about that last night.

Another thought has been that, with all the tube rolling and the tweaks I've done to try getting me to a point of rest as a result, maybe I should give deeper consideration to returning to a solid-state preamp and thereby eliminate some of the drama. I'd probably trade in the 2300 toward a C52 in that case, then sell off the modest tube collection I've accumulated. That would give me one sound to deal with (the C52's equalizer notwithstanding) and provide a psychological boost. There was no issue with the ARC LS3 I used from 1993 to 2013, which is solid-state and has no tone controls. Now that I think about it, this may be a psychological issue as much as an audio one; fixing my melancholy and mitigating my curiosity at the same time could be a real boost to getting back to a more fun place with my system (and maybe other areas of life, too).