My "fun" system which I use for music and HT purposes consisted of Wharfedale Opus-3, Krell KRC-3 and Adcom 5802. My preamp is nearly twice the price of my power amp, but I think it is the best way to bring out the sound quality of my system. I swap out the Adcom for a Mark levinson 23.5 and only observe about 5-10% improvement. So, I could almost certainly say that the preamp makes more impact on my overall sound quality comparing to the power amp. How much more impact? I really don’t know.
preamp vs amp: relative effect on sound?
Recently, there was an interesting thread on combining a tube preamp with a SS amp, which is what apparently a lot of people do.
So two questions.
Q1: in a preamp + amp combo, does each unit affect the eventual sound equally, 50/50, or is one going to affect the sound more than the other?
Q2: in a combo of higher gain preamp + lower gain amp, will more gain being provided by the preamp have any effect on your answer to Q1?
So two questions.
Q1: in a preamp + amp combo, does each unit affect the eventual sound equally, 50/50, or is one going to affect the sound more than the other?
Q2: in a combo of higher gain preamp + lower gain amp, will more gain being provided by the preamp have any effect on your answer to Q1?