Clearsound: Got the oil caps. I'm going to tinker with improving the diodes on the power supply and put a shunt resistor on the volume potentiometer. Also will eventually get around to getting different tubes to play with but I'm just enjoying it for now. One of the great things about it is the fact that you can tinker with it with the manf. blessing. Kirk from AES is very helpful. The only equipment I compared head to head was a B&K solid state pre-amp and there was just no comparison. I bought it basically on the recommendation of Kevin at Upscale Audio. Like I said in the last post, he handles both brands so he should have some idea of how they compare. Judging equipment is so subjective that I rarely give recommendations like "it is the best" or "it is better than brand X, Y and Z". I can say this about the AE-3, it is better throughout the frequency range from top to bottom than my B&K by a large margin. The mids are lucsious and I just love what it has done to my system. I had some concern that it wouldn't match with my amp (Aragon 8008BB). Some tube pre-amps have troubles with low input impedance amps (don't ask me why because it is outside of my range of knowledge). The AE-3 is a very simple circuit design and their is a definately advantages to keeping things simple. Not just from a cost perspective but for the obvious sonic reasons.
