Preamps can color sound considerably. Surprising?
Had the pleasure of listening to 4 hi end preamplifiers this weekend. And each preamp sounded very nice. But they were different. Each preamplifier has different circuitry and within the frequency spectrum there was more vibrancy in some areas versus other areas. Amplifiers are the same way.
It takes a while to appreciate sound differences between preamplifiers. And then you got the issue of Breakin which further changes the color.
clearly designers are playing around with all the internal circuitry in a manner that hopefully will be appealing. Clearly, these units do not get out of the way when it comes to moving a signal through the box.
I think solid state is more susceptible to coloring versus tubes. Tubes color sound as well.
It's all about marketing different ways to color Music. This isn't necessarily bad but it's never really talked about this way.
In general, I hate use of these long-stretch analogies with audio. They mainly serve to further derail a discussion that was already careening off track. Don't have relevant experience to the topic at hand? No problem! Anyone can make up a wild analogy! Anyways, I'm surprised that team passive preamps hasn't compared the active preamp to an appendix 😅 |
scm: Thanks re Tortuga LDR, I'll try to listen to it sometime. But it needs external power, and so it is not truly passive. I have a 12 VDC battery-powered Dodd Audio preamp which is not passive, but it's absolutely silent. Can you switch the Tortuga to battery power? ozzy62:I'd bet that most Hattor users are also using the optional external 12 VDC...probably in order to power the signal through the attenuator, but I'll try to listen sometime. wolf-I've heard Schitt Freya--excellent, but not passive. With 6922 or 6NS7 or other great tubes, why wouldn't it be wonderful?. 6922 type tubes are glorious with the Dodd, and I love 6SN7 as well. |
I was a dedicated passive guy until I one day decided to try an active. The “meat on the bone” sound blew away the passives. It was an Audible Illusions current model with John Curl MC phono stage. I have since moved on to an A-S MP-1. Sure, a good passive cannot be beat for transparency. But a good active is also quite transparent and adds musicality. A good active becomes the beating heart of a system. A passive, the liver?
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@jumia , are you saying that cheap interconnects do not color the sound? |
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. |
I was an early adopter of a Schiit Freya preamp...the original version that doesn’t turn the tubes off when switching to "passive" or "FET" modes. You want to hear how much the tube mode distorts or at least hear what sounds different from passive? Instantly find out with your remote...I do it all the time just to see if my insanely long lasting old stock GE 6SN7GTB tubes are still happy...since the tubes are always on, this switching of modes is too easy (be on the fader as the gain in the tube stage is much hotter) and always rewarding. New Freyas need some time for the tubes to warm up so it’s somewhat less instantaneous but doable anyway. Some actually prefer the FET or passive mode, but I assume they haven’t tried tubes other than those originally supplied or, surprise surprise, they have tastes that differ from mine. My Freya sounds amazingly excellent and utterly musical in any of the 3 modes, and since it’s a brilliant design for less than a brake job, I very highly recommend these things...it’s rated superb by me and Class A by Stereophile. What’s not to like? My Pass XA-25 has been a perfect match with the Freya, but that’s another story...with a happy ending. |
@condosound I have tried both passive preamps and tube preamps. Passive preamp is not the most transparent device, and tube pramp is not the most liquid either. They all depend on the price and the manufacturer. Even within the same manufacture, preamps can sound very different, depending on when they were made. |
If you want a better chance of hearing what the audience heard listen to live recordings in a multichannel system. Studio recordings for the most part are sewn together like pieces of a puzzle into a sonic quilt. It isn't the same as a live recording. An audience at a concert isn't listening to "stereo" and are "immersed" instead. If you want to get a good preamp get a multichannel preamp and "immerse" yourself in live concert recordings. |
"...But when compared to a good passive, it's just no contest..." I've tried the Creek OBH22, which provides great clarity and resolution - because I wanted to go direct to an amp, but with a volume control with remote. It did provide greater clarity than my preamps. But... what passives do you suggest? Townshend? Others? I realize this is not focused on passives, and that there are other threads that do - but - just wondered what your experience has been in this regard? |
I’m not sure if this matters but if you think about it, a typical preamp amplifies millionth to volts so a thousand or so times but an amp just takes volts and amplifies less than 100. The pre amp does more “work” & is more susceptible to distortion & extraneous noises because the signal they deal with is so much smaller. |
+1, An effective dose of reality nicely summarized. Charles |
On particular headphones or monitor speakers, with their amplification, after the mics, mixing board adjustments and additions, and all the intentions for that mix to be played over other kinds of speakers (car, radio, etc.). It's color all the way down. |
This is exactly why I eschew active preamps. I have owned quite a few well respected ones, the last being a Don Sachs which was very good. But when compared to a good passive, it's just no contest. As long as you have reasonably efficient speakers, robust source components and an amplifier that is easily driven, there is no need for gain that you are effectively going to throw away. |
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Hard to understand what you are saying without knowing the preamps you listened to. I have no idea what each designer was trying to accomplish unless I can see their designs. As a manufacturer, it is not as simple as designing a product that reproduces the original as I don't have any idea how the music was mixed and put together, etc. I can only interpret either what I like or what I think others may like. Plus I am limited to parts and can only try to select and combine them in a way to reproduce sound. To me, just having a circuit board in a component is an issue to begin with. I don't know who do design a product that is absolute neutral to your ears.
Happy Listening.
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Every component colors the sound to some extent , depending how you are trying to voice your system , from tubes, to cables, even front end phono cartridges, to dacs , every designer of a amplifiers, preamps hav3 their own design philosophy of what they think is correct ,as well as Loudspeakers, You decide exactly what is correct for your Audio system. |
OK, I guess for a “stereo” I agree. |
Those engineers operating the studio gear are putting that sacred "absolute sound" through miles of wires, pan pots, addled brains, unclean tape heads, unclean bald heads, digital manipulation, badly tuned pianos, and personal tastes just like the home hifi geek. The only way around it is to hire musicians to form a circle around you while you lie on the floor after recently having cleaned your ears. Preamps sound however the designer wanted them to so it's up to you to decide what sonic manipulation you prefer. If you're lucky you can enjoy music...or spoken word...or dump trucks backing up...lucky you. |
The preamp is the heart of my system. I use a DAC with perfect measurements and class D amplifiers, on a multi-amped fully horn loaded system. The amps by themselves sound a bit sterile, and the DAC while very good for the money doesn't add much "flesh" to the bones. The active crossover can be considered as transparent as can be. My (vintage) preamp, on the other hand, is wonderful. It's a rather unknown model (Korn&Macway SP100) built like a high end device, and I recapped it using NOS Roederstein Gold caps in the PSU and Elna SilmicII everywhere else. It is majorly responsible for the musicality of the system. I've tried without preamp, I've tried other preamps, I keep coming back to it for its precise yet lush presentation. It's like it's holding everything together. Take it out, and the magic is gone! |
Analog components have various nonlinearities that account for their signature contribution, subjectively negative or positive. Designers select from those components for desired effect and based on economics, availability, and personal biases. Digital components add other considerations like sample rate, bit depth, jitter, latency, and perhaps most importantly, algorithmically - the software. Various codec filter algorithms have audible impacts, and when an encode using one is decided using another, the effects are quite unpredictable. Extended over the entire 'chain' from studio to master to mix to distribution, and finally to your listening room, attributing audible changes to a single item requires extraordinary diligence to eliminate confounding variables, confirmation bias, uncontrolled variables and a bunch more. 'Accuracy' is euphonia. One likes the sound, it agrees with the preconception of what something should sound like and, ipso facto, it becomes correct. Measurements, simplistic by their very nature, provide only the vaguest validation. What measurement, short of tweaking the treble tone control, accounts for the oft-used 'lifting a veil' expression of newfound system clarity. And how many veils are layered over my system in the first place? It's all good fun, and fascinating, in a certain way. |
@antigrunge2 |
At times impedance matching between the DAC and Amp has an impact. For years I used a passive attenuator between a Mark Levinson 360S DAC and a Pass Aleph 5 amplifier - it worked well. Since, updating my amp (loosely based on an older Accuphase Class-A circuit), I now prefer using a preamplifier - it just sounds more musical. |
Maybe… but if one listens at a low volume, then the attenuator also has a rising output impedance, so the cables start to affect it more and more as the volume goes down. But they seem good in theory if one doesn’t scratch the surface. And then if one has an RCA DAC and an XLR amp, there needs to be something in between. Or visa versa. |
knotscott353 posts
Bingo....the true meaning of "Hi-fi" refers to the original sound as recorded. Everything downstream of that is variation of some sort .... we just get to decide if it's a more pleasant variation or a less pleasant variation, and choose accordingly, but it remains a variation. In that sense, the best systems simply reveal with as little coloration as possible, |
The only surprise, to me, is that anyone would possibly think a component would NOT color/distort the sound. If perfection was so easy, why would we need to spend more than $200 on an integrated amp? Are designers "playing with the sound"? Hmm. I would not say i play with the sound, but i do make choices based on subjective likes as much or more than objective measures - most of which appear to be below the threshold of audibility anyway. Which only proves we are missing some measurements..... The Phono stage is particular is ridiculously complex and difficult - it is both a precise (and multi-stage) high frequency roll off filter and also needs to do, by far, the most amplification of any unit in the signal chain - between 100X and 1500X depending on your cartridge. By way of contrast the line stage of the preamp might amplify 3-10X and a power amp (note 1) 15-30X. That is very difficult on many counts, staring with the huge impact of even a tiny amount of noise at the input, first stage, or radiated... G note 1: power amps have other very different -- but very difficult -- issues that are beyond the scope of this discussion |
Cary Direct must have seen some logic in this. If the gear is purchased from them without Cary performing any modifications on it, they do advertise a refund policy if it doesn’t work out on audition. |
Well said. Charles |
