Upgrading from Primaluna


Recently went down the front end upgrade path and am running a nice table and phono now. I'm curious as to what the weaker link in my system is between my Primaluna Dialogue Premium Preamp and my Dialogue Premium Hp Power Amp. I'm considering swapping out the amp to a Ps Audio BHK250 for the summer to avoid heat, but am curious if I would be better off dealing with the heat and moving up to say an Allnic L-7000/Arc Ref 3 for the Pre. I'm happy with tubes on the front end, but curious if I'm running out of gas with 88DB efficient speakers and a single chassis tube amp. Which amp would you upgrade first and what benefits would you expect?

128x128j-wall

Showing 3 responses by holmz

…Those other posts are full of assumptions

respectfully I would submit that determining the SPL and maximum power the OP is using currently, would be germane as to whether more power is needed.

Like the OP, I too have a Dialogue Premium HP. It seems to pump out 90 dB(A) as measured with an iPad NIOSH app, at ~9’ in a room that is big in spatial volume… and it sounds “o’roight” doing so.
And my speakers are perhaps a bit less efficient than the OP’s??

 

There are 2 problems with those Sopra 2 speakers:

  1. The load is a bit difficult to drive as. It is low impedance and also the phase angle gets high.
  2. The distortion is low, which is good. So they tend have a bit of a quiet sound, and to me they begged for the volume to be turned up.

(When I heard them, they did sound great.)
Hence - with the combo of 1 & 2, I would probably upgrade the amp first.

 

I assume that the OP is using the 4 ohm tap?
They may also benefit from a set of KT120s if they wanted to keep the PL amp.
Maybe that would allow them to punch a bit harder?

How loud do you like it playing?
If you are not playing it loudly and clipping, then more amp is not going to do a lot.

You might have less distortion. Whether than matters or not is a different question.

Not sure why Primaluna is not good enough? I have an EVO 100 integrared running on 89db speakers. It will bring the house down just past half volume. This is with the original EL34s.

To be fair, the OP’s speakers are a difficult load… both phase wise and low impedance.

 

I just installed JJ KT77s and wow! Better of everything, amazing. They will get louder too. Have you tried KT 77s?

^good point^