Some of you guys seem to want to change the minds of others. Why? We like what we like.
For example, yesterday we hosted a small brunch and one of my gf’s friends brought her own special syrup for our “famously wonderful” waffles. It was Log Cabin; all chemicals, zero maple anything.
She finds pure maple syrup inedible.
We were all happy in our own reality.
Pre, no Pre…how 'bout those Bengals?!
It seems to have some of the same design objectives as the Townshend Allegri Reference. Max was a widely regarded genius engineer, I use some of his products, and it is rather fitting that this was his final product before he died (I think). It uses his fractal cable (about $1,500 p/m), 120 Reed relays and has a Seismic isolation base for good measure. It costs about double your unit.
Jason Kennedy reviewed it for The Ear and summed up the pre-amp thing quite well:
You wouldn’t think that attenuating or reducing a signal would be all that difficult, yet this is essentially what preamplifiers do most of the time. Active ones complicate matters by adding gain, which in essence is increasing the signal, but with modern sources there is rarely any need to actually increase it by much unless circumstances further down the audio chain are unusual: combined low gain amplifiers with low sensitivity speakers being the main one. But all preamplifiers struggle to control a signal without both adding distortion and losing some of the smallest/quietest elements of that signal. Passive preamps have an advantage inasmuch as they don’t use electrical power and thus don’t have to go to great lengths to eliminate the noise that comes with it, but their job is not easy nonetheless.
Like your pre-amp, and my post above, he emphasises the benefit of an extremely low noise floor.
In his comparison he also notes some of the sound characteristics of various active pre-amps.
I’m thinking of changing my tube phono pre-amp for a pair of silver wired Stevens & Billington step up transformers. The intention is to have the benefit of a vanishingly low noise floor. Active v passive. As elk says, sometimes you don’t know until you try.
The W4S is a passive/active…passive up to a certain
point perhaps about 14 on volume control and active
from there on up…transition is so smooth sq wise you
don’t really notice…
Thanks for posting that. I for one agree with everything Paul says. He says it’s all about the tubes in the BHK, they add warmth and produce a more pleasureable sound, he doesn’t call it distortion, but it is.
As per my last post, I’ve done exactly what Paul says with my phono, I have a perfectly good digital MC phono, but I added an external tube MC phono pre-amp and run it into line level input.
As he says, it’s really a mystery, but it’s the tubes that do it.
The irony is you can emulate the tube sound pretty well using DSP, I did it once and it sort of works. I copied a Prima Luna curve.
The basic STP-SE will give the OP all the flexibility he needs in his setup for a lot less money and without the “quirks” of the BHK preamp. He also then gets the flexibility to upgrade the unit at a later date if he choses. I have owned both and the STP-SE is the only one still around.
Only way to resolve this issue for you is by auditioning one or two preamps in your setting. I have a BHK pre for a 60 days trial (yes 60 days ) to compare with my STP-SE Stage2. STP with or wo Stage 2 upgrade is a great preamp, but so far I like BHK a lot. As I get older, I find myself fatigued listening to music more easily and the BHK appears to mitigate the problem for me. I have to say that I have M1200s which probably synergies better with the BHK than with STP. I strongly recommend that you try a BHK or STP with Stage 2 in your system.
I consider digital volume control taboo in my system
If you start with that premise then you’ll hunt down and use the best analog volume control you can find / budget allows. And, yes, I truly believe that leaving digital volume control out of your system improves sound quality. The maths say so!
Hmm, the math says it depends on the digital volume control. Some might argue that if already have a digital source, you don’t throw away any precision with a digital volume control and you don’t have any analog noise from an analog volume control you might be better off.
Conversely, experience tells me that an active preamp is the way to go in spite of the math.
Yes, I certainly simplified my statements on something that isn’t that simple. Precision vs. bit-perfect. Ultimately, and thank you for continuing to be an advocate for precision over bit-perfect as too many wave the bit-perfect flag without understanding why that is / is not important at various stages of the playback chain, we want precision.
Understanding the new MkII I’d be interested in hearing it’s volume control. It appears to be the most advanced and well-thought-out (or at least explained) digital control I’ve come across. The MkII could very well get rid of my taboo. Hope I have a chance to try it in my system one of these days.
This is one hypothesis, and an appealing one. But all modern preamps, be they tube or solid state, measure vanishingly low in distortion of any kind. And people report improvements using both tube and solid state preamps over running the DSD directly into an amp. Euphonic distortion does not appear to be the source of the improvement.
An alternate hypothesis, which also explains why whether adding a preamp improves the sound in a given system, is improved gain staging. I have found good gain staging makes an audible improvident in the studio. I expect this to be the same in home audio.
The Leedh volume control is (at least to me) the obvious way of doing volume if you can’t implement the volume control directly in the DAC proper (e.g. inside a DAC chip). The idea is to only pick volume settings that don’t push (too many) bits off of the bottom of the 24 bits available between you and the DAC., roughly, if the volume asked for is 1/3, use 1/2 or 1/4 instead.
If you can do the volume processing in the DAC then you can get around the possible accuracy loss of the 24 bit bottleneck. In the case of the FPGA in the DS dacs, there’s no need to round, dither, etc. Sigma Delta allows keeping all bits of the volume multiply so no approximations like Leedh needs are necessary. (Note that the Leedh don’t approximate the output of the volume multiply, it approximates the volume setting itself which is definitely a better approach.)
So, just to recap, here’s what Paul said about 3 minutes in:
“Here’s my guess … it sounds so much more open and alive because the vacuum tube is somehow adding something very pleasurable to the music - it’s all I can think of. Nothing else makes any sense whatsoever to me - and I hate it when things don’t make sense. Look, I admit it, I don’t know. But it does sound better. I wish I had a really good answer why, but I don’t”.
The good part was when he was about to slam his fists on the desk and realised his glasses were sitting there, so good sense saved him a trip to the opticians.
So there is no sensible explanation from Paul, or Ted, or anyone really, but subjectively people like it, and it must be distortion of the signal of some form or other as it sure isn’t straight wire with gain. And whilst BHK insisted it had to be done with tubes, there are solid state advocates etc. No clarity at all.
Returning to the original post:
Seems the answer is it will change it.
The good news is that the DSD DAC, and no doubt other DACs with digital volume control like the 40-bit one I use, are non-destructive to sound quality.
Use the wong model, get the wrong result. Who says that straight wire with gain is the ideal? Impedance matching is (at times) more important, especially if one uses higher capacitance cables or has a lower than normal input impedance or frequency varying impedance on their amp. Also, active preamps (or transformer based preamps) can deal with common mode noise better… “Straight wire with gain” isn’t always the right model.
May be a subtle difference but as stated earlier in this thread the BHK Preamp has a potentially larger voltage swing and probably lower analog output impedance.
)
) to compare with my STP-SE Stage2. STP with or wo Stage 2 upgrade is a great preamp, but so far I like BHK a lot. As I get older, I find myself fatigued listening to music more easily and the BHK appears to mitigate the problem for me. I have to say that I have M1200s which probably synergies better with the BHK than with STP. I strongly recommend that you try a BHK or STP with Stage 2 in your system.
