Could use some help with a tough match
Well Threshold is right, you will not have close to a 10X ratio. You have a 183X ratio (75000/410). What they didn't tell you is that 10X is the MINIMUM recommended ratio. The higher the better. 183 is much better than 10, so no worries. Obviously BAT gear was designed to run balanced. You can run it unbalanced, but you will not get optimum performance. This has nothing to do with the impedance matching though. Cheers, John |
Hi Don, No need for apologies, I'm just trying to figure out where you want to go here. It seems like you want a tube balanced preamp, am I wrong? Obviously your amp is a poor match for this, so you will need to either change amps, go balanced SS or single-ended if you want tubes. FWIW, when you talk about simplicity of design, a single ended circuit is much simipler to implement than a balanced circuit, with approximately half the parts. So maybe it sounds like a single ended tube preamp is for you. There are many good single ended tube preamps out there, Shindo, Doshi, CAT, Joule, among many others. In fact, your choices amongst single ended tube preamps is far greater than your choices amongst fully balanced tube preamps. If you wish you certainly could try a balanced tube preamp with your Threshold, nothing will blow up. The impedance matching is just to help the sound. With an impedance mismatch like you would be likely to have, would just make the sound rolled off at the frequency extremes. IMHO you would be better served trying a nice single ended tube preamp with your amp. Cheers, John BTW, I currently own a ARC Ref 3, great preamp. I can't say that I have compared the SE to the BAL though, as I've only run balanced. My amp has a 200K balanced input impedance though. |
Don, if you are looking for a great single-ended preamp, I suggest that you do some research on this Shindo Monbrisson. They are a rare find on the used market. FWIW, I have no connection with the seller. Cheers, John |
