2. amps-preamps
  3. 136421-89400

Pre amps cost vs. value ... what I discovered last month.

Greetings all.

I’m a mastering engineer. www.magicgardenmastering.com . We use Acoustic Zen balanced cabling, highly modified Cary 211 FE tube amps, Bricasti M1 SE DAs and Joachim Gerhard’s Allegra speakers. TORUS balanced power comes 220 from the street. The room is excellent, and you would love to hear it.

For 15 years the pre amp/router was a Crane Song Avocet. I paid around $1800 for it.

Recently decided to try a couple of audiophile products in the pre amp stage and was shocked and saddened how bad they were. Yes, the studio designed Avocet has a relay click for each 1db step, and yes it has a rack mounted 2U body with a corded remote, but it’s clear folks are really getting taken to the cleaners on pre amps. The older and highly regarded Boulder 1010 (used price $5500), was just terrible, truly terrible. The new and fully broken in BAT vk-43SE (demo price $7500) was much better, but still had a cloudy tone as compared to the class A Avocet. Not sure if that’s the cap or the transformer, but it made everything less clear and more generic, more distant from the music.

That’s all. Happy listening.
128x128brianlucey

Showing 1 response by audiorusty

audiorusty
12 posts
 
Nothing is perfect or repeatable in music playback across rooms, time, temperature, pressure, etc. Translation means that something has it’s integrity in ALL playback forums. There is no one perfect playback situation.

 As far as "flat" this and "flat" that I am 100% opposed to such nonsense on 2 basic levels. 1. nothing is truly flat or truly neutral, there are many flavors of vanilla, there is no straight wire with gain, not even in a cable or a capacitor. 2. the goal of music is CONNECTION and ELEVATION of humans, not PERFECTION. We are not doing a science project here.

Thanks Brian.

I know this is not what you came here to talk about and I apologize for helping to keep this thread off topic but I have not seen any other statements that have been more true or important on these boards than what you have stated and I needed to acknowledge that.
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