Preamps can color sound considerably. Surprising?

Pretty much all capacitors inside a preamp Color the sound. Are capacitors the sole culprit in coloring the sound? Great capacitors, like Teflon, allow the dynamics to be where they should be. The peeks and the valleys are respected. Assuming you have a great amplifier to go along with us.

You hear preamp manufacturers touting our device gets out of the way it doesn't interfere with the music.  This could not be further from the truth. 

Call it is what it is.

Guess a lot of it is how the harmonics are handled. Tubes being a lot less harsh then solid state.

So I was lucky enough to compare a few preamps and this would’ve been really really helpful before I bought mine.

But at the time, the preamps I wanted to purchase were not available at dealers and if this was the case highly unlikely I could compare them with other preamps that would also need to be available. So what everyone seems to be left with is taking a chance hoping that it will sound OK. Because each component is colored so much, the marketing materials in all their glory are only good for seeing what’s the thing looks like.

You order a very very expensive preamp from a dealer who doesn’t have it on hand, and some do, and then you take delivery and convince yourself it was wonderful.

I have never liked dealers having to buy all of the equipment before selling. It would be nice if manufacturers furnish these items but I understand this may not be practical. Dealers would love to have the stuff and they could probably sell a lot more of it if they did.

So direct to customer sales from manufacturers would seem a very worthwhile outcome toward greater success.

Lots of the time you call up the manufacturer and talk to them and then decide to buy it and have the paperwork processed for a drop ship or whatever, by the dealer.

I found Conrad Johnsen preamplifiers Gat2 to be fairly neutral and not very complicated in terms of how they're built. They load up with Teflon capacitors and vishay switches, etc and this simplicity goes far.

This way at least you don't have to worry about bye really expensive interconnects to further color up the sound. 

Thank you for the nice comment about tube amplifiers.

Big problem is most dealers don't carry a variety of high-end components and comparing them it's not practical

Mcintosh should do a line stage

Correction, they offer one solid state preamplifier with no phono stage , but no pure lion stage tube preamps

They always like to stuff things with a photo stage or headphone amplifier.

Not interested in solid state preamplifiers hey sixfrom McIntosh.  Have Mono blocks that are solid state I wish I could get them with tubes.  I think McIntosh is good for amplifiers but not much else. The processors they sell basically are marantz put into a Macintosh box.

Holmz ,

Clearly you understand impedance and volts and ohms, with respect to their relationships to all the various pieces of gear.  This is quite a feat to accomplish in my opinion.

Are you of the school that sees a difference between a longer speaker cable? I say this because I have 12 foot transparent speaker cables, and then I bought mono blocks which means I could've used a 1 m speaker cable. After spending $2500 for a speaker cable I wish I would've waited.  Also interconnects, the shorter the better?

do the lengths when they are 12 feet or less really matter when it comes to speaker or interconnect cables?