Preamp Deal of the Century

In case anyone is interested, Mick walked me thru trouble-shooting it w/a multimeter. Found out that there was no voltage to the pre, but voltage out at the PS (360 vdc, careful there, boys and girls. Traced it to a broken center (hot) wire on the umbilical (I hope). If anyone has an extra, I'd love to borrow it until a new one arrives from down under. If you can help me out, shoot me an email. Of course, I'll pay shipping both ways.

Correction- Now he's got me taking the darn umbilical apart and re-soldering it. Stay tuned boys and girls, reading voltages is one thing, soldering may be a whole different story.

Hi Swampwalker, Actually I may have an umbilical that might work for you. Its from a Chardonnay and its 10 feet long. Its worked on a friends Syrah and it may work on yours.

Some of the umbilicals are slightly different than others depending on how the motorized remote control & board gets its power. This cord should work in your preamp but you may not be able to use the remote (if you have one).

I would be happy to send you the cord but it might be faster to just have yours fixed locally by a technician.

Let me know.

Tubegroover, It turns out that I may be in Florida this weekend with my wife for some R&R. Is there any chance that I could come for a listen to the zh-270 and the Syrah? I guess it depends where in Florida you are!! I would love to hear the combo before ordering them!! Talk about a great long weekend!!

Tube Rolling Update: The replacement set of NOS tubes arrived last friday. After about 20 minutes of listening with the stock tubes (at a set volume level) I decided to go ahead and replace all the tubes all at once just to be sure all the tubes are working and that they light up properly - and they did.

The replacement tubes I receive:

1. 5Z4 Type - 5AR4/GZ34 Mullard standard-base.
2. 6L6 Type - Tung Sol KT66/7581 (matched pair).
3. 6SN7 Type - KenRad VT231 black-glass (matched pair, rectangular plate - not round plates).

First impressions: not much of a difference I'm afraid. I was expecting a more immediate and easily discernable change to the sonic characteristics of my system; but that was not the case at all, not like the time when I replaced a set of unknown Chinese KT88s tubes with Valve Art KT88s on my Air-Tight ATM-2 power amp. The KT88 experience was immediate; it felt as if the power had doubled on my amp. So in comparison, my first real tube rolling experience was a bit of a let down. Also, this was my first experience with “microphonics”. With the Kenrads plugged in, even a mild tap on the preamp knobs will generate loud humms through the speakers.

But now that I’ve had these tubes for a few days in my system, I feel the sound has warmed up appreciably, the music has more “air” and the bass is definitely more defined. I think some of the characteristics discussed throughout this thread are slowly beginning to appear in the system.

Late last night my wife and I returned home from a birthday party and instead of going right off to bed, I decided to play with the system a bit more. So I took out the Kenrads VT231s and put the stock 6SN7s back to see what changes are, if any. I could be wrong as I was quite tired and slightly intoxicated - I thought the stock 6SN7s sounded better with the rest of the NOS tubes in place than the kenrads vt231s. As I said, I’m not a 100% sure however I will check this out tonight as soon as I get home and report back soon.