Passive Pre - No Regrets?

I posted my thoughts early in this thread and have been following the very constructive discussion.

i read somewhere in the thread that the power supply for the Placette passive RVC does not (or should not) benefit from a quality power cord. that was also my thought 'originally' too. but i did experiment with it and to my great surprise i did hear a bit lower noise floor with the little power supply connected to a good power cord. i don't have my RVC any more and can't remember exactly how it connects....but until you try it don't 'assume' anything.

my opinion is simply that the Placette is sooo damn transparent that any improvement jumps right out. Guy from Placette told me at one point that you can 'stack' 5 RVC's and compare them to one RVC and they sound identical. i believe it. try that with any other attenuator.

"The same with tubes..come on..I know you have a favorite type tube for your equipment... most designers do. Give up the goods!LOL"

Its true. I prefer the tubes that I do because I can get them to be neutral. How neutral? Neutral enough that the state of the art has to evolve to hear the colorations. Even then we find that changing things elsewhere (power supply, wiring, coupling caps etc.) will often deal with it (in effect we still are not hitting the limits!).

I agree that all things make a difference, and I know that creating a system around a coloration will not work in the face of creating a system around no coloration. Synergies in effect do not work.

I know that creating a system around a coloration will not work in the face of creating a system around no coloration. Synergies in effect do not work.

I agree that it is a worthwhile goal to build a component that is completly neutral (straight wire with gain) but since we are all using different speakers that in relative terms are all highly colored, couldn't you end up feeding a speaker with a completely uncolored signal and still have sound that is crap.

As long as we have highly colored speakers further complicated by room interactions, it seems we will always be tweaking the system to color it in a way that compensates for speaker and room colorations.

Yes. It took us years to get around this problem. A big key was working with master tapes! This allowed us to know exactly what the recording really did sound like.

Well,it is official, I love the Placette RVC - in my system it works. I'm finding it hard to justify keeping the CAT for my system and my needs, I've put it up for sale - don't get me wrong the CAT is one of the great preamplifiers,and can obvioulsy do soemtings the RVC cannot (phono, source switching, drive any cables into any loads, etc) and deserves its following, but for single source CD with the right impedance/sensitivity/blah,blah - the RVC is awfully good, especially at its price point (I'm not saying it is good for the price, it is good period - at any price). Of course, I'll be thinking about the active Placette, well, maybe after the CAT is sold.