2. amps-preamps
  3. 136421-89400

Pre amps cost vs. value ... what I discovered last month.

Greetings all.

I’m a mastering engineer. www.magicgardenmastering.com . We use Acoustic Zen balanced cabling, highly modified Cary 211 FE tube amps, Bricasti M1 SE DAs and Joachim Gerhard’s Allegra speakers. TORUS balanced power comes 220 from the street. The room is excellent, and you would love to hear it.

For 15 years the pre amp/router was a Crane Song Avocet. I paid around $1800 for it.

Recently decided to try a couple of audiophile products in the pre amp stage and was shocked and saddened how bad they were. Yes, the studio designed Avocet has a relay click for each 1db step, and yes it has a rack mounted 2U body with a corded remote, but it’s clear folks are really getting taken to the cleaners on pre amps. The older and highly regarded Boulder 1010 (used price $5500), was just terrible, truly terrible. The new and fully broken in BAT vk-43SE (demo price $7500) was much better, but still had a cloudy tone as compared to the class A Avocet. Not sure if that’s the cap or the transformer, but it made everything less clear and more generic, more distant from the music.

That’s all. Happy listening.
128x128brianlucey

Showing 3 responses by georgehifi

georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
10,312 posts
 
"How much do I have to spend on a pre-amp to get one which sounds better than no pre-amp at all?"  

If all is impedance correct between source and amp/s.
They sky's the limit, as no active preamp can equal the transparency/dynamics/lack of distortion, that direct source to amp/s feed can give.
Adding a preamp in this case only diminishes and colours these parameters. 

Cheers George
georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
10,312 posts
 
dweller
Was just listening to the Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord". My word, what a lousy sounding album. I wonder if there was a mastering engineer involved in its creation.
I loved this album, and have two or three version one being the MFSL, and yes there is no good copy of it very compressed, as this DR shows all green means good, only track 11 (The Word) has good DR.
And this site has never let me down on which one to get, click on the one with the highest and most green and you have the cat no of it and go search ebay for a used copy.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=&album=In+Search+of+the+Lost+Chord

Cheers George
georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
10,312 posts
 
I agree on part of your post, but the other part????

but it’s clear folks are really getting taken to the cleaners on pre amps.
This is true, when many of todays sources have volume control, output stages as good sometimes better that some of these hiend preamps.

For 15 years the pre amp/router was a Crane Song Avocet. I paid around $1800 for it.
I looked inside this Avocet on the net, and it’s full of opamps, and if 15 years old they’d mainly be TLO5*'s ands NE553*'s which are very ordinary to say the least.

Cheers George
More to discover