Solid State Preamp Reviews

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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Threshold T2 preamplifier
Steven Stone  |  Apr 03, 2009  |  First Published: Jul 03, 1995  |  0 comments
Threshold is one of the longest-surviving high-end audio companies. Founded in the 1970s by Nelson Pass and René Besne, it was acquired by a large, publicly traded corporation in 1988. This had both positive and negative results in that Threshold was then able to expand its activities, adding the cost-effective Forté line of products, but energies were drained away from cutting-edge design. Besne left the company in 1991, while Pass resigned in 1992 to pursue other interests. (These blossomed into the Pass Aleph 0 amplifier reviewed by DO in March '95, Vol.18 No.3.)
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Simaudio Moon Evolution P-7 line preamplifier
John Atkinson  |  Mar 20, 2009  |  0 comments
Over the years, I have become increasingly impressed by the quality of the audio engineering emanating from Simaudio, which next year celebrates its 30th anniversary. In a world where the US facilities of some well-known audio brands have been reduced to a design office coupled to a warehouse for storing product manufactured overseas, this Montreal-based manufacturer, in order to keep full control over quality and hence reliability, does as much manufacturing as possible in-house, including metalwork, some printed circuit-board stuffing, and assembly. (See my photo essay starting here.)
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
The Mod Squad Line Drive passive preamplifier
John Atkinson, Anthony H. Cordesman  |  Feb 06, 2009  |  First Published: Apr 06, 1987  |  1 comments
The Mod Squad Line Drive System Control Center is a purely passive stereo switching unit with a volume and balance control, five line inputs, and additional facilities for two tape decks. It allows the audiophile to replace a preamp, with its active gain stages—and resulting coloration—with a device that introduces no distortion or coloration other than that in the wiring, switches, and controls.
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Solid State Preamp ReviewsHi-Rez Disc Player/Transport ReviewsMusic in the Round
Music in the Round #34
Kalman Rubinson  |  Feb 01, 2009  |  First Published: Jan 01, 2009  |  0 comments
Sometimes, I think life would be easier if I were an audio customer. If I didn't have to wait on the priorities of the electronics companies, I might have gone out and bought a Blu-ray player months ago. Had I done so, I would have been shocked to find that almost all BD players are released with fewer than the advertised number of features, and sometimes require firmware updates—sometimes even a return to the manufacturer—to have them installed.
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Solid State Preamp ReviewsBudget Component ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsHeadphone ReviewsComputer Audio Reviews
Benchmark DAC1 Pre USB D/A headphone amplifier
Sam Tellig  |  Dec 28, 2008  |  First Published: Oct 09, 2008  |  0 comments
Most of this column is dedicated to two hi-fi products for the masses—not from Lvov, via Vladimir Lamm, of Lamm Industries; or from Leningrad, via Victor Khomenko, of Balanced Audio Technologies; nor from any other Soviet-born audio hero. (Neither Vladimir nor Victor is on the list of "Name of Russia" contenders for greatest Russian of all time.) Nor from any consumer audio company, but from the world of professional audio. An Iron Curtain almost separates the two.
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Lexicon MC-1 preamplifier/surround processor
Larry Greenhill  |  Dec 03, 2008  |  First Published: Mar 03, 2001  |  0 comments
The roadster's throbbing rumble became a roar as the tachometer soared above 4 grand. Like a giant hand, its thrust jammed me back into the seat. Racing along low to the ground, feeling every curve and bump, I began to understand: the automotive virtues of smoothness and insulation had been swapped for firm road grip and the ability to transmit to the driver each jolt and curve in the surface below. Long before I'd climbed into the driver's seat of Porsche's Boxster S, I had known about its low-end snort and speed—the main reasons I was considering a lease—but I had not known about its ability to join sensation and purpose in such an intense bond.
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Myryad MDP 500 preamplifier-processor
Kalman Rubinson  |  Nov 24, 2008  |  First Published: Jun 01, 2001  |  0 comments
In my February 2000 review of Meridian's multi-talented, multichannel, multi-kilobuck Digital Theatre system, I fumed about the lack of a medium for discrete multichannel music. Even more loudly, I railed against the irresponsible mastering of many Dolby Digital and DTS discs, which place the listener in the middle of an ensemble and swirl the voices around his or her head with little concern for musical or artistic coherence.
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
DNM 3D Six preamplifier
Art Dudley  |  Nov 12, 2008  |  0 comments
It isn't enough to say that engineer Denis N. Morecroft is one of contemporary audio's few visionaries: He's one of a very few mature designers whose passion for doing things a certain way hasn't abandoned him in the least, and whose well-argued convictions seem stronger than ever. Thus, as others cave in to commerce—the tube-amp designer who offers a solid-state product just to help his dealers fill a price niche, the source-component manufacturer who rails against digital audio one day and starts cranking out CD players the next—DNM Design remains the likeliest of all modern companies to stay its course.
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Solid State Preamp ReviewsAudacious Audio
Ayre KX-R line preamplifier
Wes Phillips  |  Nov 04, 2008  |  1 comments
I can't think of a product that was as eagerly anticipated as was Ayre's KX-R preamplifier ($18,500). Following in the footsteps of Ayre's MX-R monoblock amplifier, a Stereophile 2007 Product of the Year, and milled, like the MX-R, from a 75-lb billet of aluminum, the KX-R also shares with its monoblock stablemate the Ayre ethos of zero feedback and fully balanced operation. But what really caused the buzz was the declaration by Ayre founder and chief designer Charles Hansen that the KX-R, with its use of a technology he calls Variable Gain Transconductance (VGT) to control the volume, would set new standards for signal/noise ratio.
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Solid State Preamp ReviewsAudacious Audio
MBL 6010 D preamplifier
Michael Fremer  |  Oct 17, 2008  |  0 comments
Don't be confused by the MBL 6010 D's oddly baroque, even retro looks. Behind all the glitz—the oversize, perfectly finished, black-lacquered faáade; the two big, solid brass knobs plated with 24-karat gold; the ornate lettering; and the incongruous digital volume display—resides a thoroughly modern, remote-controlled, unusually versatile, and well-thought-out solid-state preamplifier. Not that the 6010 is a new design. It's been around for a long time, and the current "D" iteration is at least five years old.
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Hafler Iris preamplifier
John Atkinson  |  Jun 05, 2008  |  First Published: Jun 05, 1989  |  0 comments
When David Hafler sold his Hafler and Acoustat companies to in-car audio manufacturer Rockford-Fosgate a year or so back, things went quiet for a while as the new owners made arrangements to transfer production of both brands to their Arizona facility and took stock of where their new acquisitions stood in the marketplace. Then, at the 1989 CES in Las Vegas, the company made a reasonably sized splash with the first in a new range of Hafler products intended to lift the brand out of the hobbyist-oriented identity it had, perhaps inadvertently, adopted in the last few years.
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Solid State Power Amp ReviewsSolid State Preamp Reviews
Linn LK1 preamplifier & LK280 power amplifier
John Atkinson  |  May 17, 2008  |  First Published: Jul 17, 1989  |  0 comments
This review should have appeared more than a few months ago. When I reviewed Linn's Troika cartridge back in the Fall of 1987, in Vol.10 No.6, Audiophile Systems also supplied me with a sample of the Linn LK1 preamplifier and the LK2 power amplifier, which I had intended to review in the due course of things. As it transpired, however, I was less than impressed with the LK2, finding, as did Alvin Gold back in Vol.9 No.2, that while it had a somewhat laid-back balance, it also suffered a pervasive "gray" coloration, which dried out recorded ambience and obscured fine detail.
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Solid State Preamp ReviewsArt Dudley ListeningCable Reviews
Listening #63
Art Dudley  |  Mar 25, 2008  |  0 comments
I'm old enough to remember my family's first table radio that was made out of plastic. It was cream-colored, and it sat on the rearmost edge of our kitchen table: a less-than-timeless design in its own right, destined to be discarded at the end of one era and treasured again at the dawn of another, for more or less the same reason. But in 1958, a cream-colored plastic radio looked fresh, clean, and right, and its cheap wooden predecessor seemed dowdy and sad by comparison. That would all change in later years, of course. Then it would all change again.
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Solid State Preamp Reviews
Parasound Halo JC 2 line preamplifier
John Atkinson  |  Mar 14, 2008  |  0 comments
My very first review of a preamplifier, for British magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review in May 1984, was of the Audio Research SP-10. In my opening to that review, I wrote that, "more than any other component," a preamplifier "should approximate to the late Peter Walker's 'Straight Wire with Gain.'" By this I meant that a preamplifier should not be in the business of effecting dramatic changes, and in any case, dramatic changes are not the kind that prove to be of lasting value. However, I also wrote back then that what I became increasingly aware of while using the SP-10 "was the fact that 'neutrality' is a positive virtue rather than just an absence of aberration."
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Solid State Power Amp ReviewsSolid State Preamp Reviews
Boulder 810 line preamplifier & 860 power amplifier
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 23, 2007  |  0 comments
Boulder Amplifiers, named after the Colorado town where the company has resided since its founding 23 years ago, makes some of the most elegant-looking solid-state amps around. Chassis are anodized, aircraft-grade aluminum with rounded edges, machined and finished in-house. The two models reviewed here, the 810 line preamplifier and the 860 power amplifier, each have a sleek, compact build—stacked atop each other, the two stand just over a foot high—owing to extremely efficient packing of the circuitry inside. These are the company's "entry-level" electronics, but there's nothing cheap about them—the preamp retails for $6900, the amp for $8500—and for all their economical size, they look like luxury goods as well.
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