Spatial Audio Raven Preamp User Experience

Well, I’m hardly objective, but I didn’t actually hear a Raven until fairly recently. When you design a product, you imagine how it will sound in your mind’s eye ... you do have a goal in mind ... but actually hearing the device up and running can be rather surprising.

I was surprised how quick and snappy the Raven sounded, very different than any cap-coupled tube preamp. Drums have a lot of tactility and sense of physical presence, like you’re only a few feet away and can feel them as well as hear them. Pianos sound big and massive. Electric guitars sound like the amp is right next to you, as if you could reach over and adjust the tremolo knob.

Cap coupling, by comparison, seems to blend sounds together, and lessens the impression of physical presence, moving the musicians close by, but just out of reach.

I don’t know if this is helpful, but we audiophiles tend to group solid-state in one box, and tubes in another. The Raven kind of moves at a right angle to that usual set of impressions. Very colorful and vivid, in the usual way of tubes, but plenty of snap and you-are-there quality. As quick as the speediest transistor amp, but without grain or edginess. It does not sound like preamps with miniature tubes in the 12AX7, 12AU7, or 6DJ8 family ... you can tell the Raven uses large-plate tubes by the dynamics alone.

I guess the other thing you notice right away are the vividness of the tone colors ... not in added coloration superimposed on the music, but letting instrumental character come through more directly. A sense of presence.

Don’t know if this helps, but those are my impressions of the Raven preamp.

Thank you Lynn. In the absence of other feedback (I’m surprised), very helpful. I’m not great at using some of the audiophile terminology, so saying "is it good for rock" is my shortcut. I think you’ve answered that. I have no experience with the larger plate tubes, it’s mostly based on the miniature type, which have fallen short of my expectations. I also had an ARC pre with the 6H30 tubes but it was a little too clean and lacking in any tube character.

I was surprised that my newest, highly regarded $5k miniature tube-style preamp has a fairly narrow soundstage. Can you speak to the Raven’s soundstage?

Many of the better (pricier?) preamps seem to use the 6SN7. I’ve been looking at a few of these, but most of the more highly regarded ones seem to have long lead times of 6-9 months. It's 6 weeks for the Raven.

Thanks again for your reply.

The soundstage is enormous, although if the recording is poorly panned and the reverb not that great, it only goes a little way beyond the speakers. On the other hand ... if the reverb is natural, or classic EMT plate from the Seventies and Eighties, or good-quality modern, the whole front half of the room lights up. Not "bathtub reverb", but a sense of air and space.

This takes many first-time Revelation Series listeners by surprise, but it’s not a surprise for me ... preserving very quiet, slightly delayed signals is essential for a spatial impression. My entry into the world of high-end audio was the Shadow Vector Quadraphonic Decoder in 1974, one of the first dynamic decoders to preserve spatial cues. That’s still a focus that I have, some fifty years later.

A key design principle of the Revelation Series is a straight-through signal path with no secondary delays or "helper" circuits. Just wires, transformers, and triodes. Distortion reduction is accomplished through signal balance, not feedback.