Spatial Audio Raven Preamp User Experience


Looking for any user info on this preamp. There’s quite a few posts here on how great the company is, what nice guys the designers are, and great input from the designers themselves. All well and good. However, I haven’t come across too much objective feedback on characteristics and long-term experience with this unit. Particular interested in tonal balance, dynamics (the slam I need for rock music), soundstaging, etc. I’ve been in touch with Spatial for the first time on Raven availability and they are going into a new production cycle. The preamp looks great but I’d still like to hear from long-term users. Any input appreciated. Thanks.

jaybe

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.