Modern Linestages

A line stage has 4 functions:

1) control volume
2) select input
3) add any needed gain
4) control the interconnect cable at its output

Of these, it is the the last that is the least understood. Audiophiles are very used to auditioning interconnects, and so do not think about what the benefit would be if the interconnect's artifact is eliminated.

You cannot eliminate this artifact with a passive; in fact you cannot *avoid* cable artifacts if a passive is in use. This has nothing to do with the quality of the passive control nor the quality of the cable. It has to do with the capacitive and resistive interactions of the source, the control, the capacitance of the cable and in the input impedance of the amplifier being driven.

The lower the source impedance, the lower the volume control impedance and the lower the amplifier input impedance, the less artifact the cable will have. However this set of parameters is almost impossible to meet due to the low impedances that are actually needed.

This is why a *quality* line stage will often be considerably more neutral when compared to a passive control, regardless of the quality of the passive.

Now I realize that this statement may be controversial to some, if this is the case for you I exhort you to examine the emphasis on the word 'quality' above.

Onhwy61, if you want my opinion, keeping in mind that our preamps have a patented direct-coupled balanced output...

We solved a major problem facing tube preamps with that patent. It means that we can build a tube preamp that is flat to 1 Hz and can drive 32 ohm headphones directly, without additional circuitry for the headphones (other than the connector). So its my opinion that when you get into preamps that have that sort of price tag, you a paying for eye candy- really nicely machined, nicely finished and often very thick metal work to house a circuit that otherwise might be found in a preamp that costs 1/2 or 1/3 as much.

However such a budget does allow for more ornate switching schemes for the volume control and inputs and perhaps a few other things...

Now in our case we are already using custom materials for our circuit boards (to reduce dielectric effects of the board material) which is also extra thick (for the same reason). We have custom-built resistors, V-Cap Teflon caps, custom-built wire, proprietary regulators, the whole thing is balanced differential from phono input to line stage output with only 3 stages of gain in that path. In fact we set up the standards for how you connect a phono cartridge (which is a naturally balanced source) to a balanced input. We figured out how to do differential equalization and deal with a host of other issues, simply because no-one had done anything like this before we did. And that patented output does allow such cable control that if you set things up right, you will not be able to hear the difference between a cheap cable and a very expensive one (and it can drive over 100 feet of cable with no problem)! Overall its a pretty tweaked out preamp that has been refined over a 22-year period. So I don't think I could do your question justice with a casual answer.

Yes, if I take Grannyring's line of reasoning, he is talking about using synergistic effects to make a system work.

Its my opinion that its a Bad Idea to use synergies, for example using a dark preamp to go with a bright source. What you wind up with is additional distortions and you can't get it to sound like real music.

You also wind up flushing huge amounts of $$$ down the loo.

I prefer instead to have each component stand on its own strengths and not need synergistic effects to make it work. The system will thus editorialize less, will be more transparent and the system will allow you to listen all day and all night.

However I'm not buying George's approach either, although I do think that as PVCs go his is one of the best. I've just never found a passive that did not suffer from colorations depending on the volume control position, and I've not found the quality of the passive to be able to affect that.

Charles1dad, regarding your examples- I don't know about all of them but I know about some and those are good examples.

Grannyring, years ago we had to face the issue of 'what is reference?' To that end we came to the conclusion that no media could be trusted as it all has flaws as you mention.

So we used direct microphone feeds. What we found with microphones running direct is that they can be so real that you can be easily fooled by the result of playing them, as long as the speakers are not in the same room as the mic!

We found that the media (tape, LP, CD and other digital formats) is source of the greatest degradation. Nevertheless I have found that it is very useful to have an LP of a recording that I have made and that I was there for, so when I hear the playback I have some idea of how it was really supposed to sound. At any rate its been my experience over the years to keep the processing of the playback as minimalist as possible, so long as that minimalism does not compromise the playback.

Its a tricky path to follow. But I have found that by doing that and also avoiding synergistic effects that I have the most success approaching the original- and mind you, it is not possible to get to the original music no matter how hard we can try, but OTOH getting to the original **recording** of that event is much more within our collective grasp.

To that end I have found a good line stage to be indispensable if you want to capture all the nuance in the recording. This allows the signal to arrive at the amplifiers without any contribution or editorial from the interconnect cables.

Naturally all products are marketed with consideration to cost.What I was referring to was that there are no strict norms as to mark-up.All products will sell for whatever the market will bear.

This statement is just not supported by the facts of this industry. Believe it or not, its rather competitive so if someone comes out with an over-priced product they may have troubles selling it. As a result most manufacturers stick to a fairly simple markup formula.

Martykl, thanks for the question. I'm not exactly sure how to answer- it might help to tell the story of the MA-3.

This is our flagship amplifier. I had the idea of 'something' for a long time but it was pretty nebulous. But along came a customer that wanted something beyond our MA-2s, and was willing (he said) to wait, **but also to pay for it**.

So I really had to think about what an amplifier like that would really be. I went though 15 chassis concepts and about 7 major circuit concepts before I settled on something that I thought we could build but also suited the 'idea'. That process took 7 years and involved a few blind alleys. Ultimately we lost money on the original amplifier, which is pretty normal on any R&D project.

Now to your question- what would such a preamp even look like? There are a lot of questions to be answered, and we have an issue of perspective- from where I sit, we already make the state of the art in that the existing MP-1 has a patented direct-coupled (and very reliable) balanced output. It has no feedback, and only 3 stages of gain from the LOMC phono input to the output of the linestage. It can drive headphones directly (something most tube preamps can't do without additional circuitry) and is fully differential and balanced from input to output.

I don't care what preamp you are talking about, what I just put in that last paragraph is a mouthful of SOTA stuff.

So to give the question justice its simply going to take time, but since this is the 2nd time this has been asked of me maybe I better devote some time to it...