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"We realized that Conrad-Johnson is coming up on its 20th anniversary," he said. "So we thought we might produce something special to celebrate. This is a version of the preamplifier we use in our listening room at the factory---we never even thought about producing it because it…

Of course, very few people buy any product simply because it's well built. The only true justification for a $15,000 preamplifier is that it sounds great. Which the ART does. Kind of.

I don't mean that the ART sounds kind of good. My system has never sounded better than it has since I've had the Anniversary Reference Triode. Even though I've changed just about every other component in the system at one time or another, one thing has remained constant: The sound has been involving, rich in timbre and nuance, and staggeringly clear. What I'm…

But just because the ART offered such precise delineation of small details, don't assume that it slighted the big picture. It most certainly did not. Among the many jewels freshly rediscovered in my vinyl collection, Classic's reissue of Bart—k's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (RCA/Classic LSC-2374) stands out as most revelatory. Neither suite nor symphony, the work is more like a large-scale baroque set of variations on the same theme. It's scored for two separate string sections: the first consists of the first and second…

Wes Phillips talks with Lew Johnson about ART and engineering

Lew Johnson: The ART was not originally conceived as a product---it was a research tool we built for ourselves. We realized that much of what we had learned in building power amplifiers had implications for preamplifier design as well---we came to see that loop feedback is not innocuous, and that local feedback has its own drawbacks as well. We wanted to design a preamplifier that came as close to being a zero-feedback amplifier as possible.…

Johnson: We wanted to keep the front panel clean, but we also feel that if you're going to set balance, you want to do it from your listening position anyway. And, of course, the balance function is not an additional control---because the volume control sets each channel's volume separately. There's only one set of switches; what changes are the control instructions. What's interesting is that the microprocessor built into the ART is the same one that used to be in the computers we used to run the business---it's…