DartZeel phono section...

Ct, to be fair to the Io; i had heard later that Jim White had found that he had some noisey tubes (or was it resistors?) so that might have been part of my issue back then. also, the Lamm has only 57.5db of gain and is loaded at 400 ohms so it is not nearly as flexible as the Io. another friend could not make the Lamm work in his system either.

in any case, the darTZeel pre is just on another level beyond anything i have heard. the dart pre does synergize with the dart amp(s) but i would expect them to be great with any amps but at this point that is a guess.

the Parsifals are excellent speakers; i think the dart amps should be a good match for them as your room is not large and the Parsifals are not a particularly difficult load. maybe check with the dartzeel distributor about whether he has any customers with Parsifals.

Great great post from Mike.

I too have the Io and fully agree with Mike on the issues of the Io's higher noise floor. Some of the treble detail deep in the music is a bit lost compared to some of the more highly resolving phono stages out there. But if your Io has the stock Sovtek tubes, you are not hearing even close to the potential of this product. Do a search on A'gon for the Io and Callisto threads as there is much discussion on tube rolling with these. With every pair of Sovteks removed, the musicality of this unit increases significantly.

This all sounds like a pain but in a month or so of time, and for under $1000 or so, you can have the std Io singing to a whole new level. Not having heard the Io Signature, I suspect the "tube-upgraded" std Io would outperform the Io Sig in some key areas such as dimensionality and dynamics.

So before you pass on the Io, try some other tubes. The one nice thing here, you can play a lot to "tune" the sound to how you like it. It may not be as ultra-refined as the Dartzeel or others, but with a little effort, you may be quite surprised with the musical result.

John

Thanks. my IO has been heavily tube rolled and was a huge improvement over stock. Not real serious, but have been "away" from this hobby for quite some time. Visited the other day and saw all the talk on Dartzeel. Was curious about all the fuss.