Description
A maudifi Stage 2 upgrade service for the Creek Destiny 2 integrated amplifier.
New listing – details to follow.
Contact us for details or to discuss other options.
- How does it work?
- We contact you to arrange a convenient time to have the upgrade performed and advise you where to send it to. We upgrade it and return it to you.
- If you want something not listed, that’s fine. Simply fill in your details via the form link above and we will call you back to discuss your desired outcome. We then devise a solution to suit you, if different from standard stage levels. We can proceed when you are happy, organising a time to suit.
- Amplifier not included. This is an upgrade service for UK based customers. You supply your own amplifier. This will be returned to you following the upgrade service.
Nick F (verified owner) –
Vintage equipment from eBay or hi-fi forums isn’t always the bargain it at first appears. Even if it works, decades-old kit will almost certainly have lost its sparkle. Capacitors dry out, relay contacts fail, solder joints crack ….the result is often a tinny, grainy, crackly and ultimately disappointing unit which makes you think that you should never meet your heroes.
Which is what had happened with my Creek Destiny 2, an amplifier I was always curious to try and got for peanuts. Unsurprisingly, it was dispatched to Maudifi for repair. And once there, the temptation to let Scott loose was too great so I asked him to give it a Stage 2 upgrade. The pre-amp was treated to shiny new capacitors, with the power amp getting new and larger reservoir capacitors and lovely Nichicons to sort the decoupling. Apparently it was a bit of an effort to arrange everything, but that’s why you send equipment to clever people who can figure this stuff out.
OK, that’s the tech session over – what does it sound like? I can’t do a before/after comparison as the original unit was barely alive, but it’s now got a very low noise floor, great imaging and soundstage and (after running it in for several days to burn in the many new components) fabulous bass. I’m using it with hard-to-drive Nubert NuVero14 floorstanders (85dB, nominally 4 ohm but dip well below that) and it had absolutely no problem, even at ‘I-hope-the-neighbours-are-out’ levels.
Comparing to my Maudifi Stage 2 Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista 300 was unfair – the TV300 provides sufficient current to power a small city and enough bass slam for a Motorhead gig – but even against that monster the Creek was by no means disgraced. It’s a genuinely lovely thing and offers surprising levels of high-end sophistication. A real test of any amplifier is The Real Me by The Who – Keith Moon’s drum chaos and John Entwistle’s incredibly dense bass lines, combined with a rough-and-ready recording quality can easily make everything sound compressed and muddled. The maudified Creek performed brilliantly with this – real dynamic slam, bass articulation and midrange clarity.
Is it worth spending a reasonable amount on an old amplifier rather than buying new? It honestly depends on what you want. For the price of the Maudified Destiny 2 you could buy a new Audiolab 6000A, which is a perfectly good integrated amplifier but not remotely in the same class. Sure, you get TV integration, Bluetooth etc, but you don’t get the sound quality. To get something approaching the level of the maudifi Creek you’d be looking at a Rega Elicit and to beat it you’d need to maybe look at an Exposure 3510, both of which are many multiples of the Creek’s cost.
This is where Maudifi scores – you get the satisfaction of getting something built to your specs and budget. For anyone in this stupid and wallet-draining hobby, it’s a way of getting genuinely high-end sound without paying new-flagship money or, perhaps more importantly, losing the character that made the original design so special in the first place.