Audio Mirror Preamplifier

I am close with Vlad and have heard his Linea preamp. I demoed a broken-in unit at my house over the weekend. It is incredibly good for its price point. It is very musical, natural sounding, and soulful. It does not have the imaging precision and solidity of the preamp stage in my $38.5K reference T+A SDV 3100 HV, nor does it have the sense of space and detail due to having a softer top end than the T+A. But if I would pick the unit over a number of other tube preamps, of which I’ve personally owned a number, including the Viva Linea, Modwright LS-36.5 DM, PS Audio BHK preamp and many others. I wouldn’t hesitate to place it in the same sonic league as any of those. 

If you can live with its constraints, I highly recommend it. What constraints? Three stereo inputs maximum, one stereo pair outputs, all single-ended / unbalanced. It is a purist preamp, so if you have subwoofers, for example, you would need to get a y-block connector for the RCA outs. 

@tvad Thank you for correcting me on the transformer-coupled balanced outputs. I forgot about that. To add more, there are both the single ended outputs and this pair of transformer-coupled outputs, but a switch is installed to toggle one or the either. Vlad mentioned he cannot bypass this switch and enable both outputs without sacrificing sound quality. 

Your right in the sonic signature of his preamp, and it was a nice change from the preamp he offered many many years ago, which had less bloom and was much more etched and sterile in comparison.

@hilde45 I'll let Vlad know about the thread and see if he can comment. Given how compact the unit is, I don't know what's going on inside and whether he can make a second set of unbalanced outputs, though I know it doesn't take up much room. This would still require folks to use all RCA, where I know many like going balanced from their preamp to amp. In this case someone would need to use some form of balanced splitter, or perhaps have a subwoofer like REL that can tap into the amplifier's speaker outs.

Thank you Vlad @audiomirror for providing accurate guidance and a solution for people with subwoofers!