The best passive preamp

Has anyone heard the First Sound Passive Preamp and compared with any of the TVCs on the market since the last post here. Quite a while, due to many threads on passives, but this seemed as good a place to ask as any other.

You mean the TVC that became my TVC?

Well, when you find something better than the Lightspeed, let me know:)

Is there balance control with the MLA, or just tight mathcing between channels. I think we might be both of the mind that channel balancing is an important "preamp" function, but most passives don't seem geared up for that.

Interesting to hear Roger's changing view of resistors versus transformers, I
wonder what is causing that, but alas, another thread....actually, probably
relevant to the thread. TVC / Resistor and balance control are key choices for
the best passive. I think Roger used to be concerned with bandwidth
limitations with transformers versus resistors, but maybe transformer, or
autoformers, are getting better, who knows. Similar "debate" a Salvatore's site
in the passive line stage section. And then there is technical breakthrough of
"touch-less" LDRS.

Anthony can you explain the MLA a bit. It uses a transformer to act as a buffer of sorts, but resistors to attenuate volume? Am I getting that right?

What does stepping up the voltage mean? What is the benefit? That has nothing to do with gain, right?

What are the issues that the Electra-Print Magnetic Line Amplifier is trying to address that the Lightspeed Attenuator does not - under what circumstances would that design approach be preferable to the LSA and other "simple" resistor-based attenuators, as well as AVC and TVCs?

Thank you spending all that time with all those topologies, and sharing your experiences over the years. I will give the MLA a listen, I'm sure is uses some very fine transformers, given the provenance:) Ultimately, I think the Lightspeed just fits my some system context to a T, so it might be hard to beat its inherent simplicity in terms of parts (but not so easy in excecution, as you know). I do think the dynamic swing issue is based on simply using a passive in a system that for various reasons simply needs an active to perform its best, and maybe the MLA bridges that gap to in terms of a greater degree of "universality".

Do you anticipate Joe will try an AVC/TVC as an alternative to using resistors?

Sorry, I did mean Jack.