My old but great souding Krell KST-100 power amp got a recap.
Before the recap enabling MultiWave on my Stellar P3 power regenerator sounded best.
After the recap disabling MuliWave sounds better.
Enabling sounds as if there’s a little distortion/harshness in the sound I didn’t notice with the old caps.
I wonder if other people have the same experience and if anyone can explain why this is happening?
Thanks,
Ton
Hello Ton,
Perhaps the new caps need break-in time.
Remko
It’s reasonable to assume that new capacitors will have their own sound signature. The important thing is that they sound good. I’m sure that if you revisit the caps in a while, you may have to change your regenerator to adapt to the new sound signature.
Yeah, the amp sounds different now and I’m tweaking to make the best of it.
Interesting to see where it will end.
Also, new HV power supply bus capacitors will have a higher capacitance than your tired old caps. Therefore, the HV bus will be stiffer and allow the output to track the input more closely. This could be heard as “tighter” and maybe “brighter”. The new caps may also have lower series resistance making them closer to an ideal capacitor resulting in similar improvements in high voltage bus stiffness / regulation.
Yes, it sounds brighter indeed.
Today I added my Krell KSL pre-amp between the Mytek Brooklyn Bridge and the power amp and this soften things up and sounds more “analog”.
I hope I can remove the pre-amp after the break in of the power-amp capacitors because now I need to adjust volume by turning the volume knob of the pre so have to walk to the device 
Why don’t you leave the pre at unity gain and control the volume through your Mytek?
I am told that using digital volume cotrol will harm the SQ so I should keep it at 100% and use the control of the pre-amp. But now I am thinking of it, the Mytek has an digital and analog volume control so if I use the analog control of the Mytek maybe the SQ will be ok and I can set the Krell pre-amp at unity gain.
I gonna check this out.
Thanks jvvita!
You should try both. Depending on the implementation, the digital volume control would do less harm to sound quality. I am not knowledgeable enough, but if I got it right, well implemented digital volume control would beat the traditional analog potentiometer. Maybe someone can chime in and give more details
Glad I could be of any help. Enjoy!
How do I set the Krell pre-amp to ‘unity gain’?
Hello, as I understand it, unity gain is the point where the preamp does not attenuate, not amplify the signal. It is the “dead zone” in terms of gain. This point sometimes comes indicated in the volume knob with a 0.
Regarding your unit, I could only find that it provides 10db gain, when in full volume. See if there are any markings in your preamp volume control that indicates when the attenuation stops and the amplification begins. That should be the "unity gain’ point.
If you cannot find this “magic point”, just place the volume knob in a position that the sound gets a bit too loud when the volume in your Mytek is at full position. Then you will get enough range for loud and soft recordings, using onlybthe volume control of your dac
Again, I hope this helps.
Cheers
One would think it would say in the manual, and it can be any number, on my SGCD it’s 76 as an example.
Nothing in the manual of the Krell-KSLonly that’s 7.5 db gain and nothing on the volume knob. I’ll go with the way of working jvvita suggested.
Till now I used the analog volume of the Mytek because it sounded better.
I’ll give the digital volume another go and see what happens.
I just received a new ethernet cable, maybe this will have a positive effect on the digital volume (snake oil alarm off)
Thanks again!