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
As far as DR, please do not blame the ME, we are service providers. We are not running the show on DR. My comments are based on the reality today, not my view on it per se. My chain adds punch at the DA and the tube EQ and can sound great at low DR thanks to the elements in it. So again, I have some loud records that are punchy and not obnoxious. 80s CDs were lame, 90s were overcompressed. I don’t compress as a rule, unless it’s needed. I limit and EQ all day long.
As far as DA (yes I love the M7 verb for mixers) I have 2 x M1 SE DAs. As said above, I helped them to tune the filtering 4 years into it’s market life, hearing some issues with it the immediately fixed and that are not sold as standard, with free upgrades to all past owners. Bricasti is a great company. I was happy to help them to master their DA if you will.
As far as how do things sound here vs there, no idea what you have there. Yet who cares No two systems are ever alike as was said, and there is no perfect anything, including the perfect system.

Further point since we are way off topic ... I have no issue with 16 bit audio and no issues with 44.1 when the converter and engineering are great. I print 44.1 with the Pacific Micorosonics AD for 15 years. The whole HD market is like the remastering market, mostly BS to make money and evoke fear in audiophiles that they are missing out. Remastering is a huge topic on it’s own. Most of it is not great IMO. Sample rates also a huge topic. Higher rates alter the presentation of frequencies and the details up top are greater, but details are not music and higher SR do NOT ALTER THE QUALITY of a converter. The box is the box, Clock, Chip, Analog path, Filters. Those 4 don’t improve at higher sample rates. A cheap AD can sound better at higher SR but a great AD at 44.1 or 96 is still great, just a different layout of energy. I prefer 44.1 for the low end density, actually. Mastering is about the gear and the engineer not the SR ... this is a massive marketing myth that is taking up too much time in too many lives, IMO. When you have very dynamic and very spacious music then the details up top matter more, but for 99% of the music out there, pop types, it’s not a real thing. And even for highly spacious and dynamic musics the converter and the engineering are WAY WAY WAY more important than the SR. Men like to measure, and are plagued by fear of not measuring up. Yes, I mean that in every way. SR is a red herring. Higher quality is not found in more samples per second.  What you want to buy and hear is the SR and bit depth of the mastering session, not higher, not lower, not more, not less, just the file that was done in the room. That is the ONLY THING that is true to the source, and even then, it’s always new in your room.  P.S. there is no "improving" that approved master file.  MQA is beyond BS, it's a near criminal enterprise, looking to take over the audio market for streaming income.  People who are dead in the water on the video market, here in 2018.
Ah...on 06.09.18 at 5:11pm OP hammers the nail directly on its head.  IMO this is a great post on SR and its relationship to what we hear.
"Men like to measure, and are plagued by fear of not measuring up"
A keen observation. .
Charles 
Brian,

Thanks for sharing your obersations. It’s such a wealth of info from an insider. I would love to know your observations when you’ve heard your music on a truly “high end” home system. How has it differed from your studio sound? Has it sounded “better” (understanding that is such an objective observation). Really, what I’m asking is when you’ve heard it on a system that is “attempting to be the absolute state of the art” (and typically with a huge price tag to go with) what were your thoughts during the experience (compared to what you heard in the studio)?
Kudos playmore

OP, Recently I went on an in depth search to replace my Parasound P 5  preamp(MSRP $1095). Aside from fitting my budget, the 2 main reasons were; it has separate XLR E/O circuitry, and a separate bass control circuit, which I was hoping to control the ridiculously sensitive VCs on my 2 SVS powered subs. Alas, it turned out to be of no help.. I also discovered that piggybacking off my main amps with speaker wire to the subs sounded much cleaner, but does not help with VC.

It seems upgrading from the P5 means jumping up to the $4K range, and if I could find a used Parasound JC 2 it's in the $3K range. The lack of funds headed me back to passive preamps. Decades ago I owned several, including an autoformer, but that was long before I replaced all my rca kit with XLR. You think your thread brought out the uglies, try discussing rca v XLR

Moving on, I found 2 PPs that caught my eye; the Hattor and the Tortuga, who uses LDR instead of resistors. Their XLR version looks to be very high quality with lots of I/Os, and is reasonably priced at $2495 with a 30 day return, but it was out of my budget. Still, worth consideration. The Hattor is also extremely well made: their LR version MSRP is $995. Bingo. It fit my budget, and after 9 days I still love it, though it ruthlessly exposes inferior recordings.

I know nothing about your ICs, but David Salz of WireWorld has been making inroads int the mastering/recording studio market. They too offer a money back