Running DCS Vivladi DIRECT?

I run my Vivaldi into an ARC Ref 40 and this is a great combination, the RF then drives 10M of balanced cable to my amps - something the Vivaldi would not be comfortable with at all

I agree with Folkfreak the line stage in the Vivaldi is not as good as it should be - especially for the money.

This has to be a subjective colouration/distortion preference statement, or something was horribly wrong, one needs to look at from an electronic engineering viewpoint.
The output stage of the Vivaldi (2.3ohms at 6v) will be far better at driving anything than what the AR Ref40 can possibly hope to. As this graph of the Vivaldi shows driving into an horrendously evil load of 600ohms!!!
The AR Ref 40 has no chance in the world of doing these figures.

https://www.stereophile.com/images/114dcsDvivFig16.jpg

Fig.16 shows the output spectrum as the DAC drives a full-scale 50Hz tone at 6V into 600 ohms. The only distortion harmonics visible are the third, at –130dB (0.00003%) in both channels, and the second, at –126dB (0.00005%) in the left channel (blue trace). Intermodulation distortion was also vanishingly low.

Cheers George

Here we go again, turning this into another preamp or no preamp thread...
george, we have heard your arguments ad nauseam. Let's not go through them one more time...., please.

Kalali, 
 I suspect that quite a few feel as you to no avail.
The continued beating of the proverbial dead horse.
Charles 

These Vivaldi tested figures don’t lie, can’t see the forest through the trees?

It's not possible that a tube/capacitor output coupled preamp can drive 10mts of cables with an amp at the end, better than that tested output stage of the Vivaldi.

" I run my Vivaldi into an ARC Ref 40 and this is a great combination, the RF then drives 10M of balanced cable to my amps - something the Vivaldi would not be comfortable with at all"

and then this confusing statement for the same poster?

" VTL MB450III, but not sure why that’s relevant as I’ve never tried driving them direct from the DCS ... "

Cheers George

BTW this is from the Stereophile review and bench tests of the Vivaldi, from the reviewer Michael Fremer who owns the darTZeel NHB-18ns preamplifier. and darTZeel NHB 458 monoblocks. Looks like he had no issues going direct to the monoblock amps, instead of the $23k NHB-18ns pre.

I ran the Vivaldi’s directly into my darTZeel amplifiers for the last week of the review auditioning, and though couldn’t play any vinyl that week, I didn’t miss it.
Depending on your needs, you might be able to get away with just the DAC or the DAC-and-clock combo, which, directly driving my amplifiers, produced high-resolution digital sound that I found easy to warm up to.

Cheers George