Aria phono preamp - Mike Elliot blog

I have followed the Aria WV thread and have been quite impressed with the level of detail he has shared on his findings. And I was so impressed that I made a deposit for this unit in Dec 2004.

With all due respect, it seems like the guy is winging, it.

With all due respect, this is an incredibly irresponsible statement. Yes, like he was winging it 15-20 years ago with the SA9/SA11. Even the heavily-biased ARC fanatics had to concede that this was the superior preamp. And look at what they still sell for today vs. the ARC and CJ products of that time. Only the SP-10 has held onto any following.

but reading the thing gives me the impression that its being done on-the-fly

Interesting - nearly all engineering activities are done on the fly given a good starting design. And in this case Michael Elliot had such...........the SA9/SA11! As one stage is refined, it tends to expose opportunities to refine existing stages. The result is an iterative process. And this is clearly what is happening with the WV.

I see this as an effort to refine the product and try every available part before rushing a product to market. It sure beats suddenly having an obsolete product in 6 months due to a Mk II version with a capacitor "upgrade" that costs the consumer an added $500-1000 more for $50 in capacitors. And with such a process comes the need to ship the piece back and forth, risking damage, and having the music system down for 2 weeks.

And just as so many companies are throwing in the latest boutique capacitors, and jacking up the cost accordingly, Mr. Elliot has actually take the time to evaluate many of these parts.....and not for his desired coloration but rather, for neutrality. This is covered here.

I mean, look at the volume control discussion, he outsourced the relay control logic and now is wondering whether the clicking noise of the relays will be a distraction...of course they click! (not clicking in the audio circuit but physcial noise from the case- you can hear the relays connect and disconnect) I mean I could have told him that before he spent all that $$ to have the board designed.

Once again, it can be done like everybody else .... and suffer the same sonic degradations ......... or an innovative engineer can step up to the plate and make an effort to implement a new solution. Jumping to conclusions without knowing the facts does not make a lot of sense. Clearly even he was quite impressed with the outcome but is looking for ways to deal with the "clicks".

And given the "sound comes first" approach, it is odd that he is saying that he will discard the relay vol control if its clicking noise is bothersome even if it sounds better than the switched attenuator.

I don't find it odd at all. He clearly states that if he finds the sound annoying, he will not push this onto his customer.......quite different than the "take-it-or-leave-it" philosophy. And what do you suspect Mr. Elliot will do if he ultimately discards the relay volume control? My bet is that he will end up with a solution that still betters the typical resistive volume control network so prevalent in many products out there.

Plus, you can easily do a remote for the relays.

It sounds like you would be a great asset to the WV design team. I suggest you contact Mr. Elliot for an employment application.

I would not put a deposit on the thing...put the money in the bank/ invest it and by the time it is done you would have made enough for a substantial discount.

Well, let's do the numbers. For a price of $7200 in Dec 2004, a typical credit union rate of 3%, for 2005, 2006 and even all of 2007, the $7200 becomes $7867....or for a 5% rate, $8335. If you think this is a gamble, so is every deposit into a 401k account. Clearly enough of Mr. Elliot's customers know the potential here and have given him their support to do an all-out-assault design here.

And what exactly is the substantial discount? The Aria website clearly states the WV will likely sell for $12k upon completion.

Just look at the insane cost of line stages. The ARC Ref2 and Ref3 at $10k.........the top phono stage is going to cost you another $7k....and another power cable and another $3-4k in an IC to retrieve the capability of the two. The same can be said for any pairing of top-tier line and phono stages.

As an owner of the Aesthetix Callisto (2 years) and Io (4 years), I have found this combination to be unbeatable. But all the extra chassis and cabling has been somewhat of a hassle. I welcome the simplicity of the WV. And I will not be surprised if it far exceeds many of these $20k 2-piece preamps. In fact, I am banking on it!

Hello Kub, oh yes I am excited...very much so. I too was surprised of all the variations of the WV. And it was great to see the remote volume will be supported as this was one thing Mike had written that he would not provide.

The line-stage-only option makes a lot of sense for those not into phono and/or who may want a top-notch unit for a HT setup. A very cool design feature here is that when powered off, the WV defaults to bypass mode which is a feature I have been looking for over the last few years for my HT setup. With the TV occupying the vast majority of time with the HT system, I would not want to burn my precious WV tubes. I may have to get this version of the WV for my HT system too!

Downunder, I too have some curiosity about how the transformers will perform. But Mike did go through a lot of effort to evaluate many models, and he came away with liking the Sowters very much with the rest of his tube-based phono stage. For those of us who know his work in past preamps, we have a lot of faith in the possibilities with the Sowters. The noise vs. the dynamics vs. the spatial attributes, all of which people point out as the pros/cons of using step-up transformers, will be heard soon enough when the WV comes out. However, there is a 2nd phono input on the WV (for MM) and this opens the door for an external active MC stage to compare to the Sowters.

I have a heavily modified ARC MCP-33 that is all set to be used into the WV's MM stage to compare directly with the Sowters. Unfortunately the external unit adds great expense beyond the cost of the unit itself as a first-rate power cable (Stealth Dream or Dream State) and ICs (most likely Jade Hybrid) from the ARC to the WV will be far more $$ than the ARC unit itself. The modified ARC is magic but wouldn't it be ironic if the $240 Sowter pair outperformed the ARC and all its added fancy cabling and hand-picked premium tubes! I will find out soon enough.

John

Got it tonight. 8-)

Hello Jazdoc,

I am excited and fortunate to have the Aria WV5 XL in my possession. A landmark product like the WV will take 1-2 weeks minimum to get a handle on its performance.

When we put a component into our system, and something is immediately wrong, we know it. Truncated decays, flat presentation, severe problems with tonal coherency, etc., and out it goes immediately. But 5 minutes into listening to a new product and our mind is spinning out of control from hearing a level of refinement we never heard before, and we thought what we owned already was at the top-level of performance, well, we know we are in for a long-haul of evaluations. This is the WV. Seven hours for the first night was only the beginning.

There is much to evaluate here: the line stage vs. others, the phono stage vs. others, with or without the step-up transformers for MC, tube rolling in these two stages, etc. I am dead-tired of cable swapping so I will not even bother with this; the Dream State Dream Catcher PC and Jade Hybrid ICs will be left alone.

I have not written much on A'gon since the Gabriel Gold cables thread. It's a lot of work to write a review on such a landmark product as the WV. I tried this with the Aesthetix Io and Callisto Signature vs. the CAT Ultimate II over a year ago and I put a lot of hours to share my observations. So much playing with cables and tubes, night after night, it can go on and on.

When I read a Roy Gregory, Michael Fremer or Jonathan Valin multi-paged review of a top product, I can appreciate the significant amount of time they took to report their findings. And rather than spending all the time for that, I'd rather be up all night to enjoy the new level of performance the music now has in my home. But I am sure that I will have much to share by the end of the month. Most likely it will be with a handful of friends via email and then we'll see if I want to put forth the effort to document it all here.

John

Hi Bob, yes this is great news. I am trying to enjoy the WV as much as I can the first few nights. I have read many comments that tube preamps can sound very good right out of the box and then they quickly sound horrible and then great again after 100-200 hours or so. So far, the WV is outstanding so I have not hit that "bad" period with 20 hours of play time and 20+ hours of standby time.

What is so cool about this preamp, line stage in particular, is its ability to support a huge library of tube types. The phono stage and line stage are typically suited for the 6DJ8/6922 tube family, but with a switch inside, so many others are supported. I have quite a stash of tubes from owning the Aesthetix Io/Callisto as well as several ARC, BAT and Counterpoint products since the mid 80s. But I also have tried out a few tube types I never owned before but purchased the last couple months while waiting for the WV to arrive. It is amazing how cheap some of these "oddball" tubes are on ebay. And one type tonight at $20 for five, really impressed me here. It displaced one of my favorite mid-priced 6DJ8 tubes by quite a margin.

The WV shows the sonic differences between the tube types to be the same characteristics as what I heard with the Aesthetix gear. However, these sonic differences between tube types are more significant now. I suspect it's due to the WV's greater resolving power. Some tubes are quite mellow with a most distant presentation and others give big and bold projection. So far the only tube that sounds horrible here is the 6H30...a quad that I had when I owned the BAT 31SE for 2 years. The stage was flat and objects were distant and muffled.

I own one coveted tube pair that is absolutely stunning in the CAT amps and the Aesthetix gear as well.....but their magic was most greatly achieved in the amps. And their stellar performance carries on in both stages of the WV. I lucked out and found another pair and will get those soon for the phono stage. And then all I have to do is repeat the process for one final pair.....for the line stage...once I get passed the "bad" period if it ever happens. But this cheapo tube that I got on ebay might just be the ticket for quite some time. Sure beats paying $200-400 for a pair of tubes!

It sounds like a complicated process but really it is only for 2 pairs of audio tubes. Mike Elliot loaded up the power supply with premium tubes that he hand selects for Counterpoint updated gear. I might play a little with one of the tubes but once I get the 2 pairs in the audio stages optimized, the lid goes back on and I can continue the WV's evaluation against other components in house.

John

Hi Kub.....Michael Elliot has contacted his customers that he has provided a newsgroup page for WV users to share their findings with various tubes in the line and phono stages and power supply. This is a great great idea.

Michael Elliot wrote to me that the Voltage Regulator tube has a significant impact on the sound; and I confirmed this over the weekend. But I ultimately had to change two P.S. tubes to make the performance improvement workable.

I hope to finalize on the phono stage tubes and be done with this tube listening process for awhile. Once I have it all nailed down, I will post my tube findings in the Aria newsgroup as well as look to share the overall WV experience here on A'gon.

John

Kub, As I understand it, Michael Elliot has had much email correspondence with a few of his customers (including myself) on the issue of tube rolling the WV. I think he felt it was more efficient to setup the newsgroup rather than try to decipher and track all this information from emails. It's a great idea. I think that once a few of us finalize on our tube choices and do some write-ups in the newsgroup, he will collect this all and make it available as additional information for all his WV customers. I don't see this being of much value to non-WV owners but you never know....perhaps for those with Counterpoint gear that use some of these same tubes in the power supplies.
John

So people will pay big money to have this guy make the amplifier or preamplifier the way it should have been doen....

The way it should have been done? You mean like the way ARC, CJ, CAT, BAT, etc., all should have done their preamps back in the 80s and 90s .... and yet continue to bring out a new "top-line" model every couple years?

...before the company folded

Terryn, please inform me of another engineer in the audiophile world who had some business misfortunes and yet came back a year or so later to support all of his customers, not only to repair failed products, but to work to improve them far beyond what had been done before.

Never having been able to afford the top-tier Counterpoint SA9/SA11 in their day, today I am fortunate to own their successor and at a much lower price. How many of the top-line preamps from the above companies cost less than their top-line products from a decade ago? Zero.

....and the warranty went kaput

Take note of the warranty of many of the companies above and you find that the warranty for your car is much longer.

As for PT-Barnum being right, as Casaross hints here, I suspect that in Barnum's mind, everyone in this hobby would be a candidate for his famous quote.

Casaross: Once you have found the tubes for the phono stage and line stage that work well for you, I would be willing to send you the pairs that work for me in these stages. You could play for a few days to get an idea and then send them back.

I too ran the WV through the burn-in process to achieve 200 hours, but I enjoyed the music each eventing. And after this time, I went through 20+ tubes in the line stage over a 4-5 night process. Many were eliminated quickly due to severe tonal non-linearities or flat presentation. But a handful worked out very well and a couple were extraordinary ..... neither of these latter two were of the 6922 family.

I soon realized that I could also use these top-performing tubes in the APL Denon CD player and it took that player's performance far beyond the ECC99 tube in there. Several concerns I had about this player were gone or significantly reduced by the replacement of that ECC99 tube. I am eager to hear soon from an APL 3.0 owner how this tube works in his player.

Concerning the PS supply tubes, the rectifier tube V5 makes a profound difference but when I changed this it showed up some edginess with the V7 tube. I had a couple different 6JC6A tubes and one of these locked it very well with the changed V5 tube. Going back to the stock pair for V5/V7 brought on a reduction of clarity. I tried a different V8 and could not hear a difference at all. Keep in mind that V8 is actually not a vacuum tube.

Once I get the tubes back from the APL 3.0 owner, I can bring the WV back to its highest performance that I have so far heard it, and then I will try out a few different V6 tubes....and look to seal the WV's cover for a long time to come. Perhaps we can share notes on the PS tubes in the next couple weeks.

John