Raul,
when I met you at Doug and Paul's to hear your Essential, I was stopped, for whatever reason, from bringing in my Alaap separates which I had with me at the time. We stayed with Doug's preamp. At that time, I believe that my separates were still ahead of Nick's full function preamp. So, it would have been most interesting to hear side-by-side with the Essential. Nick has since found a way to tweak his FF preamp psu to meet the performance of the separates, so today there is not much difference in the sound of the Alaaps. Unless Nick has come up with another tweak he hasn't told me about. ;-)
I do understand, from both a practical and engineering standpoint, why one may think that separates cannot approach the level of a single preamp. But it can and has been done. I agree that if one is mixing and matching phonostages and preamps that it would be most difficult to achieve this.
Still, it always comes down to implementation.
