Fidelity Research FR-64 vs. FR-54

Dear @lewm : Curious that you named the MAT02 and totally " weird " that you think I’m used in the Essential.

That matched bipolar pairs along the MAT03 were used in the late 80’s by ML and even that are good devices are not what we were looking in our near " perfect " Essential design and that’s why we took a very hard very hard task to choose individual discrete bipolars and not only that but we choosed/tested diferent manufacturers where even that almost all were made it the same did not sounds exactly the same. After the choice the hardest task was to have matched pairs that we can’t do it by our self, this task was responsability of a México University. No, not all similar bipolars sounds the same. Yes, it's more easy to handkle and to design a circuit with MAT kind of devices than single discrete bipolars, remember that single discrete bipolars has not the very high gain in the MATs and that was an additional issue to solve in the Essential design.

The ML circuit/stage where goes the MAT02 and 03 are a perfect circuit where those MATs are surrounded by a clever proved complementary devices.

Come back to the Essential I remember that in the external power supply we found out that simple circuit resistors ( not power resistors. ) changes makes that the Essential performs a little different. Extremely dificult to be aware about and we found out this by " accident " and after that we tested resistors everywhere in the power supply.

In those old times and before B&B was bougth by TI before any commercial source for naked resistors by Vishay we already were using it as many other today top parts.

No, my Essential can’t mate with the poor electronic designs you own. How can do it? is just impossible.

Even that’s out of production that design is years a head any other in today audio world. Maybe you don’t understand my past posts in this thread but our Essential was the very first Phonolinepreamp with the Neumann pole designed in the rigth way, the firstb one in the audio world: got this? understand this? and that is only one of " the first.. " and more important: performs just fantastic!

If I remember I offered to you and refuse to buy it. Big mistake.

Regards and enjoy the music,
R.

@lewm : """  tell me about some of the revolutionary new transistors that are so radically different from what came before... """

whwn we started the Essential design we did it starting from below CERO. We had to learn every single subject from parts different sources to facilities to build boards and where machine the Essential boxes and everything. No one gave us any advises or any supoprt about and as a fact we did not ask for. Below CERO because we are not in USA, my country is way different.

So if you want to know more about bipolar transistors that's your personal job and if not for other thing but because you have to learn and that's the way to learn. In the other side if I tell you it will be useless for you because you can't handle/work with those kind of devices. Have to learn before you even think to buy it.

R.

Raul,
It is possible your preamp is quite good. ’State of the art’ unlikely from what I’ve seen. For a start the casework and circuit board physical attributes utilised in the Essential in of themselves induce significant hysteresis distortion. Your circuit boards are nothing special. What is "state of the art". "state of the art" implies state of the current art, but what you don’t understand is that there are many design engineers out there in non audio industries that are operating at design levels way ahead of current audio "state of the art".

I have access to 2 engineers who work outside the audio spectrum - one can reproduce any solid state phono stage currently in existence with improvements - you want a vendetta why ? I can build you a Blowtorch with enhancements. Halcro in this forum had a fault in his Halcro preamp, my tech can read the circuit and chips used from the topology even without removing the masking paint from the board and components. You want the noise floor of the latest Burmester preamp lowered - no problem. You want to improve Lewms tube preamp - no problem - we can go in there and do onboard regulation using new state of the art stacked op amps that no tube manufacturer would even be aware of unless they were designing in the digital domain as well. Why doesn’t he produce audio equipment - because commercial audio product cannot bear the cost of a design engineer who is operating at a level above current state of the art in our hobby.

You want a phono stage unlike any other produced - easy - the other engineer built his own phono stage designed specifically for MC’s with output down to 0.1mv and below including compensation for known cutterhead/amplifier deviations from RIAA using proprietary Burr brown chips. Can it be produced commercially - no because the chips are 1 off advanced research chips not even available to any current audio designer including the likes of Bob Stuart at Meridian - we are talking 3 generations ahead of current technology when it was produced.

So my friend take it from me - anything available commercially is out of date even before it is released to market, and significantly off true "state of the art" for which my definition is "in advance of what is currently commercially available by a significant margin".
Your Essential preamp is irrelevant to this forum - it is not available for audition anywhere commercially and if you think it is more advanced than anything else, then you are deluding yourself, there is always something out there better.

Cheers

Raul -
2 further thoughts on your system. You will be pleased to know that like you I use outdated bipolar devices for optimum LOMC amplification, mine designed and hand built by Reto Andreoli. It is vastly more transparent and than anything else I have heard including my old Klyne 3.5 and some pretty exotic SUT's.
As far as the Levinson mono blocks, the mods you describe make good sense, but at the end of the day those amps are slow. I would only use them for boat anchors. You might want to look at replacing those in my view,

Cheers. 

One full mistake from my part:

" poor design ", I'm not refereing to it self design on those tube electronics but to the poor technology.

R.