BAT Equipment vs Audio Research

I own the VK50se and the VK 60 amp. I've owned ARC tube stuff before, but not the products on the market currently. This biggest diffence I hear is the BAT is more involving, has more emotion, draws you in better. The ARC is very good, but doesn't get your blood flowing. Both are good, the choice should be made on match to your speakers, taste, and what dealer you like better. That's my 2 cents.

Hello Pipes, Wow this thread is right up my alley. Over the years I have compared ARC to BAT and in all honesty to my ears it wasn't even close! Before owning BAT gear I had countless ARC tube pre-amps and amps and I don't want to over state my enthusiasm but IMHO the Bat gear won by a WIDE margin. I now own a VK-50se, VK-60 mono blocks ( hope to upgrade to the VK-150se mono's ) driving Eidolons. My front end is a ML-37 transport and a ML-360s DAC. I don't have a lot of time now to get into the details but if you care to e-mail me direct I would be happy to respond to you sometime over the weekend. Best of luck, Tom

I haven't heard the ref 1 or 2 yet, but I did hear the vk30SE's (jtinn's in fact!) put into my system with my ARC vt100m2. It replaced my solid state preamp. I never heard such a dramatic improvement. Lost a tiny, tiny bit of detail, but the instruments just came alive and the sonic image instantly, unquestionably, became fully three dimensional. You felt like you could get up and walk around single instruments. Amazing. Might just get me one o them.

Has anybody compared the VK30SE's optional phono preamp (card) to an ARC ph-3 phono preamp ? I run the ph-3 right now, and I love it's sound.

Has anyone done a direct comparison of the BAT verses an AR ref 1 or 2 using a vt100 ? If I recall, the ref 1 was actually a little more detailed sounding than the more euphonically voiced ref 2.

Skip the BAT phono cards, they're little transistor circuit boards--and sound like it. Yes it's only $500 more to get the phono, but IMO that money plus a tiny bit more coin would be much better spent on a nice reasonably priced external phono stage like the EAR 834 or Lehmann Black Cube as two examples. Usually, one or the other of these will float your boat, and for the $$, they're hard to beat. If you're prepared to pay more for phono, then that changes things of course, but for under $750, I think you'd be hard-pressed to beat EAR or the Cube.

Whoops, saw that you already have the ARC external phono stage. I don't think it would be a stretch to claim that what you already have will be significantly better than the BAT phono card, no matter which BAT preamp you buy. And BTW, as a former VK-30 owner, don't necessarily assume the VK-30SE is better. To my ears, I preferred the sound of the 30 with premium (high-$$) NOS 6922s to the sound of the 30SE. YMMV