You may well be right George. I have many unanswered questions about this unit and I'm certainly not here to vouch for it, as I've never seen one and don't intend to order one myself. When I go this route it will be with a simple, but good quality, distribution amp that I will be building myself since the Decware, nor any other unit that I could find, seemed to fit the bill for my particular setup. But, I wonder if any effect at all of the ZBOX will be at all evident with the distribution amp...even a small of it might be significant...not as any vindication at all of the ZBOX product (not at all recommending that ghosthouse go out and buy one), but simply pointing to the genuine impedance matching question, possibly.
Will changing gain affect frequency response?
NOT talking about increasing the volume at the listening position by turning the volume up...
Rather, with volume kept more or less constant at the listening position, is there some technical reason for things sounding a bit brighter when the pre-amp's gain setting is increased from -10 db to 0 db (again, volume adjusted downward, accordingly) OR is it my imagination?
Think I've encountered this with my pre-amp and most recently by altering the gain setting on my phono pre-amp. Increasing the gain by moving the jumper to the highest position seems like it opened up the sound from the Grado cart I run.
Hence the question...will changing gain affect frequency response?
Thanks in advance.
Rather, with volume kept more or less constant at the listening position, is there some technical reason for things sounding a bit brighter when the pre-amp's gain setting is increased from -10 db to 0 db (again, volume adjusted downward, accordingly) OR is it my imagination?
Think I've encountered this with my pre-amp and most recently by altering the gain setting on my phono pre-amp. Increasing the gain by moving the jumper to the highest position seems like it opened up the sound from the Grado cart I run.
Hence the question...will changing gain affect frequency response?
Thanks in advance.
Showing 2 responses by ivan_nosnibor
I second what rlawry says above about the non-linearity of the particular gain control, versus that of the volume control itself in particular. Almost as an aside, Steve Deckert of Decware advocates introducing an extra gain stage control inserted after the source, in addition to the one at your amp (ZBOX). This allows you to do some "gain riding" as he calls it, letting you either turn up the gain going out of your source while also turning the gain down going into your amp....or vice versa. I haven’t tried it that way (yet), but he says that increasing the source output gain while lowering the amp input gain, definitely changes the overall character of the sound...in the right adjustment zone, he says the sound in that instance is much more dynamic. Presumably you can take this idea too far and it may begin to deteriorate the sound in some other regards the further your adjustments go, but his point is that you have a choice of what sounds best to you. If this arrangement produces that result, then perhaps it is not hard at all to accept that you are hearing, ghosthouse, a slight difference in tonal response in your set up (and that Al would be correct by way of what he has already pointed out, as usual, but I defer to Al and others on most matters ee). Here is the ZBOX link which has a description and a link to the owner’s manual: www.decware.com/newsite/zbox.htm Steve makes mention of both impedance and frequency response. |