Solid State Preamp Reviews

I suppose that is a desirable attribute in a preamplifier.

Hi

More electronics in the signal path, worse will be the music coming out of it at the expense of paying more. In this case, hopefully it won't be a $63,000 distortion generator that bad.

Listening with own ears is beleiving

Jack L

Review exotic autos and somehow readers react more pleasantly.

Because I review some expensive gear you think you know what's in my bank account? Seriously? I also reviewed a $700 phono preamp. So? I also reviewed the Rotel Michi amplifiers. Not super costly. You realize you are reading a high performance audio magazine, right?

Hasn’t departed. He was involved in the industrial design.

For many years, Stereophile editors (and indeed many readers) have pushed back on people who've criticized the focus on uber-expensive audio juju. Those critics are slammed as "jealous" -- oh, the sting, someone called me "jealous," how will I ever continue onward? (This is often couple with intimations that said critics are socialists or some such.)

Now, we seem to have reached a tipping point: Readers are no longer criticizing. They are now MAKING FUN OF THIS STUFF.

P.S. I am NOT criticizing Mikey. He's a great writer and I will miss his stuff, most especially his writings about John Lennon and other classic rockers. To the commenter above, Mikey is not a member of the 1%. Trust me; I'm in an adjacent business. You would not believe how sh***y the pay is for doing this stuff.

Hi

A Line-pramp selling for 63,000 greenbacks got to be something special about it: 151 lbs dead weight. This I call 'Marketing'. Such hefty price & "heavyweight" warrant excellent musical sound? That will be another story.

Technically & musically, any line preamps with gain are redundant, IMO.
So why nearly every audio guy got one at home ? Thanks to the makers/vendors marketing/sales efforts. This is money making business, not charity. Besides, not many music lovers got skeptical ears like yours truly.

My design/built all-triode phonostage+linestage got a direct-by-pass switch to make the linestage PASSIVE. I NEVER switch back to active mode
for any high level program sources, like CD/DVD players, DAC, tuner & tape deck. On A/B switching to compare active vs passive, the passive mode music sounds sooo much more OPEN, livelike, see-thru transparent, detailed & PUNCHY playing at the same volume.

By "punchy" I mean I can feel the latent energy inside the music fully released without sounding too loud !!!!

Active linestages surely give you a lot of loudness on boosting the gain volume control, but the music lacks the "punchy" transient power feeling in it.

I recall too well Gordon Holt was very well known in his A/B Bypass TEST in comparing amplifiers. I agree to his idea & have done it PASSIVE for many many years now.

Listening with own ears is believing

Jack L

The chassis is nice
It adds no spice
Not worth the price
Which should be said twice

Hi

Money talks.

Not many rich & affordable got good ears like yours. They can only rely on the price tags - higher SHOULD provide better sound.

Too often those expensive audios are acquired as show pieces to enhance the owner's premises - vanity fair !!

To those rich & willing, spending $$$$$$$$$ is believing

Jack L

compared to the Gryphon would be laughably colored and veiled and clouded and bandwidth limited, etc. etc etc.

Compare the two, then talk your trash. Otherwise, it's just rigidity speaking.

I thought it was a well-written and interesting review!
And I tend to believe Mr Fremer's opinion that he did in fact hear slightly superior transparency versus his reference dartZeel pre. Of course absent a blind ABX the reader is left unable to have the utmost confidence. And echoing George's point, a quality passive pre (autoformers or LDR) should be more transparent than any active, so that would have been an interesting comparison.

That said, at this exceptional price point (far higher the top of the line for Audio Research or Conrad Johnson or Shindo), I look not so much for mere transparency as for some extra vitality, what some tube preamps can do. (call it musicality or tone boosting or whatever) Think Shindo or certain niche preamps with NOS tubes that add something delightful. Not exactly hi-fidelity, but I don't mind euphonic distortion. Aural catnip.

That additional musical enjoyment is absent from Mr Fremer's review of the Gryphon Commander.

I will do my best to write logicly. No sarcasm or offense intended.

The ever rising prices for Audio products is somewhat staggering.
Few Luxus audio Brands are pushing retail prices threw the roof, knowing that they have to play the game for to stay in the game. Bigger, more expensive more exclusive is better right?
I cannot blame them, it´s a tough world... Mucnich Highend is a perfect example of it. The more exclusive you are the more attention you get.
So, is it the Consumer to blame? or the provider? maybe the guy (press) who is running in between to deliver us with information?
Thank you Michael for all that you do!

Many many of us can see clearly through this ever expending bubble. Can you blame us for wanting to pop it?

You see, most of the Audiophile folks I personally know are high up on the food chain. Engineers, Elektro-engineers, Product Designers and so on... smart people in short.
So we called the king naked
We threw some tommatoes on him
and now we wright Poems...
Every person and his own way to deal with inflation.

Oooh, johnnythunder (the first unhinged comment above, not the second, more reasonable one) called us jealous. Ooooh, how will I ever go on with such an onerous insult hanging over my head? Am I a communist, too? BTW, I do have to give you credit for even posting this comment, because I thought you OD'd 30 years ago. (Others say it was leukemia and some even speculate you met with foul play. Presumably because of comments like this.)

Anyway, I WILL EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY WE ARE FED UP WITH $$$$ REVIEWS. It's NOT because we are jealous. It's because these reviews HAVE NO UTILITY for us. We will not be buying $63,000 switch boxes. Reviews like this take up staff mindshare that could be used to help guide us to stuff we will actually buy.

Why do you think people are going to the objectivist forum that shall not be named? It's not even because we are objectivists. (Indeed, nearly all SP readers have some subjectivist component.) It's because we want to read about affordable gear like that from Topping and Schiit. (Yes, I know they've reviewed a few Toppings and some affordable Elacs and Klipschs. But these are relatively few and far between; paradoxically they're like finding a nugget of gold amid the Hot Rock-priced audio blingware.)

Now excuse we while I go call Fidel and my other commie compadres to tell them that you've found me out and told the world about my jeeeeealllousy.

......of others" qtd johnnythunder 1.

Hi

First all, here is an open venue open to yeasayers & naysayers.

Your above comment only shows that "Your jealousy & pettiness is just so transparent" as being a yeasayer who can't stand naysayers upfront & frank opinion.

I do not see any naysayers in this forum topic ever quoted they "know it all". Only you accused them being so, apparently due to your own inferior complex or the like.

Even though I know how to design/build a linestage with "straight-line bypass" feature (quoting Gordon Holt) with zip harmonic/phase distortion etc etc, I never ever quote myself being "know-all". So please do not put your words in those naysayers' mouths, Mr. Thunder ! Much appreciated.

Listening with own ears is believing

Jack L

NT

It's the other way around. It's you high-enders who need to get a life.
Nobody with any brains thinks a 63K preamp makes any sense. Read that sentence over and over and over again. Do you get it now?

Yes, please continue to review the Good Stuff. I have an older high-end SACD player that bought used. I never could have afforded it new, but I love it.

Agreed!!!! I love reading about true benchmark, High End equipment!

Sound and Vision used to be under the same umbrella if they aren't still. They review PLENTY of inexpensive stuff.

It feels like half the commenters here are subscribed to the wrong periodical.

...but I strongly suspect you do not, that not one person in this unfortunate thread of comments has so much as hinted at that, George, meaning that your insulting drive-by remark, like a number of similar comments from the usual suspects, have inverted the argument. In order to smear people you don't know on the subject of a product you have no experience with following the work of the experienced, qualified reviewer you just slandered, you, like so many fellow so-called objectivists resorted to that same transparently-false canard.

The objectivist canard begins with the unfounded, unbacked, and flatly ignorant conclusion that a suite of measurements of just X, Y, and Z perfectly and completely speak for the real sound of a device. You leave that assumption unchallenged and so that you can gate-keep and take scalps and generally behave poorly in public while you demonstrate that ignorance and gross incivility.

It is the objectivist's purported argument, and not the reviewer and not the civil commenter's argument, that relies on magic and voodoo, whatever you mean by that, in a priori erecting the notion that you know how a device sounds. It's your assertion that lacks a proper foundation. And it's your assumption that you know what clearly you do not that manifests as the problem, not the listeners and not the thoughtful reader who simply understands that yes, we don't know what it sounds or smells or tastes or looks like until we personally take it in.

In fact, it's this argument you make - addressing the broader topic now - that becomes a logical conundrum, a non sequitur, and a facade, when it tacitly expects to demand the proof of a negative; the existence of a phenomenon - that of sound, which is why we do audio after all - when you, as the corollary of your obvious error that we can measure sound, demand of others that they endure all the many objectivist abuses and for them, produce evidence of a phenomenon that by your own tacit admission, does not exist.

That is a profoundly unscientific and un-objective position to take, but it is the root of the objectivist cant and dogma. It is the core of the deeply ignorant assumption, an assumption that ends in wild and wildly uncivil assertions like yours and these, that others can't experience, mayn't try, are frauds, and here in the anonymous comments section of a free online publication, must perform for you.

Your kind expect the world to perform for you to fulfill your biases, and when they naturally don't, you abuse them while in effect you demean the pursuit of recreating the sound of music for the elevated purpose and state of mind that pursuit brings.

That's a terrible argument and it's a terrible thing that unexamined behavior does to the audio high end. It's comments threads like this that have me biting my tongue until I can't stay quiet any longer. It's displays like these that have any rational, civil reader hoping the editors just close the comments entirely. And displays of this hostile ignorance and rush to abuse that has me fearing for the pastime.

The statement that "the Topping Pre90 as a much better choice, every single measurement confirms this" [sic] is in fact a direct and bald-faced admission of that ignorance. It is untrue but it and others like it is motivated by an active pursuit of that ignorance aimed at just this problem we have in these exchanges. I didn't want to point that out before but I will now, way down in the basement of this stupid thread.

This preamplifier is, as the Editor himself documented and reported, one of the finest he's measured in his very long and quite capable career with this journal. The notion that it's bested, in any conceivable, meaningful way, by a cheap speedline import aimed solely at cheap numbers marketed toward easily-led consumers of such peripheral things, transparently preposterous.

Fine audio is worth protecting. Man up, grow up, and do better. Self-satisfied objectivists haven't found the slightest fraction of the magic elixir of technical truth you give all indications you think you have, one hundreds of years of journalistic excellence somehow missed in their promotion of "voodoo and magic". All you've outed is the obvious fantastic weakness of that miserable, ignorant, and uncivil assertion.

Go buy something else, listen to something else, read and critique something your own speed, and at least act like a reasonable consumer you seem to want to be seen to be. It's not working among your betters.

Well, that just destroyed my opinion of McIntosh.

However, let's not tar the whole industry with the same brush. A lot of companies are run by folks who are first and foremost passionate about music and who aren't in it to squeeze as much money out of consumers as they possibly can.

It's up to us, the consumers, to do our homework and exercise our judgement.

You wouldn't buy it, clearly.

For someone that has spent thousands on a full Mac rig, $200 is nothing. An LED system with Mac branding and the level of Mac casework required is certainly reasonable- for a McIntosh customer.

Hi

Cool it! Why you've gone so peronal as if Mike were your kissing cousin

This is a public forum open to comments, positive or negative.
FYI, this is the job of the reviewers to review & report subject to response of their readers. The review-response system works this way since day one. Nothing personal about who reviewed what !!

Now you claim the naysayers here got "ZERO knowledge & understanding blah blah blah.. How do YOU know ???? Substantiate yr such accussation, please.

FYI in case you missed it: As one of the naysayers for this linestage topic, I design/built truly straight-line-bypass passive linestages many years back for pure music lovers. I am using one myself.

My question to YOU: do you know anything about design/building a line-preamp ?? If you don't, you got SUB-ZERO knowledgw & understanding about it. Better keep it to yourself instead telling the whole world how sooo "smart" you are !!!

Listening music is believing

Jack L

Hi

Sorry, your very substantial resume does not save your day, pal.
Instead it only shows us the background of your sheer arrogance in accusing the naysayers in this forum topic as "ZERO knowledge & understanding".

I never yet commented your 2 tenets as I put my "focus" first at your insulting our fellow readers. Showing your ego of being "50 years in "this industry", right ?

With yr claim of decades experience in reviewing, how come you still have not learned the principle of reviewing & reporting - impartial & impersonal. Mike obviously understands his role of being an impartial & impersonal reviewer as so far in this topic, he has not shown any burst of temper like you clearly showed us all !!!

Soung like you got up out the wrong side of the bed, you need a coffee to cool it down !

Jack L

PS: I am going to get on your two tenets later, particulary the 2nd one. Don't worry !

I could not agree more. This is a forum for certain people to pretend they are the only ones that matter to audio reproduction.

Moreover, they do it in a cowardly fashion by adding insults and assumptions about everyone and everything, while never questioning their own flimsy positions. 'Cooling it' really applies to him only.

Thanks Greg, been reading your work with TAS for years.

Hi

How are you so sure ALL naysayers NEVER heard the $63,000 switch box? Have you done such a survey or just blined guessing ?

My question to YOU: have you ever audition it ??????

If YES, you should have put forth your aural impression of this expensive switch box to compare with Mike F's review instead of whining !!!! Do something positve to us readers here rather venting your spreen here !

If NO, "you have really dropped your pants to show" us all yr shady
hypocrisy. Shame !!!

One might be knowledgeable like the Almighty, but still one has no right to condemn whoever else "ZERO knowledge & understanding".

This is PEROSNAL attack, IMO, being unCIVIL & should be deleted from this civil venue.

Jack L

Hi

BINGO ! Well said calm & cool !

Yet many here don't have a clue. They just WHINE about whoever don't
pay same flattery compliment to their favourite reviewers by accusing them having "ZERO knowledge & understanding".

SHAME !!!!

Jack L

Hi

I wish Gordon Holt is still around here !

Jack L

Hi

Indeed! Your personal attack to us readers here have made this forum topic "ridiculous" !

Quiting won't save your pants here, pal.

Before you quit, I hereby request you again to answer my very up-to-the-topic question which you try to ignore:-

You have ever auditioned this $63,000 line-amp ??

I am all ears!

Jack L

I had genuin intrest in your response. I was not planning with "waste of time" and "ridiculouse". A shame really.