It will likely be a step down in purity, clarity and transparency despite the tubes in the Foreplay. The upside of a Foreplay will be that the tubes will bring out the 3d aspect of your system and with good tweaking can sound pretty darn clean and halographic as well. The Benchmark should sound fairly neutral otherwise in this set up
Benchmar DAC-1 as pre vs Bottlehead Foreplay II
Hi all! Currently I am using my Benchmark as a preamplifier to feed two monoblocks Rotel RB-1091 and I like what I hear. My soucers are a Shanling SCD-T200 and a Primare CD21. However I wonder if I would get better results by adding a Bottlehead Foreplay II (with better caps and a stepped volume control) as a preamplifier. Any bottlehead and Benchmark users that can shed some light in this regard? Thanks in advance four your comments!