"An' then ya bring alla ground wahrs to uh, uh single po-wint..." He looked just like I always pictured: jet-blueblack hair Royal Crown'd into that famous pompadour, the heavily lidded eyes, the .357 Magnum in case Robert Goulet appeared on any nearby TV screen...and the Weller temperature-controlled soldering iron.
"...Ah think ya need to bypass them big ol' electrolytics, too..."
I knew I was dreaming, but it didn't matter; I'd been wrestling with the problems of purely passive preamps for months, and was nowhere close to any real solutions. I'd built my own passive…
Active or Passive
In a conventional system based on an active preamplifier, the signal source (phono stage, CD player, tape deck) is treated as a voltage source only; the high input impedance of the preamp enables the source component to drive its interconnect easily. In effect, the active preamp buffers the source component from the job of driving the interconnect feeding the power amplifier, tackling that job itself with its beefier output stage. But a passive preamp has no such circuit; while the source component "sees" a moderately high input impedance (in most cases, 10k ohms),…
I have only one itchin' desire: let me stand next to your wire
More than any other part of the preamp, here's where I say, "Knock yo' bad se'f out," because nobody agrees on wire! Whether 'tis nobler to use solid-core or multi-strand, copper or silver, twisted pair or coax, it's ALL UP TO YOU. I wired up my preamp with the twisted-pair inner conductors of Straight Wire LSI-Encore; with the white leg used for signal and the red leg tied to ground at the RCA jacks but left floating at the circuit board, isolation between conductors is higher than if I'd simply used single legs for all the…
Construction details
A design like this is pretty simple for the experienced constructor, so there aren't too many guidelines to lay out. Definitely make sure you use RCA jacks which come with isolation washers, like the Tiffanies or the Vampires, in order to keep the jacks from touching the chassis; the only ground point in the entire circuit should be that single point ground mentioned earlier. Mount the 470µF supply bypass caps (with their 1µF bypasses) as close to the BUF-03s as you can to ensure a solid path to ground for any noise. And even though they may look more "professional,"…
According to Kawakami, SACD software is beginning to sell and chart the way regular CDs used to—a good thing, he says, because "the music industry is in desperate need of a packaged media it can sell." Regular CD sales continue to decline, yet Universal has shipped 700,000 CD/SACD hybrid Police albums, Sony shipped 700,000 hybrid Dylan albums between September and November alone, and ABKCO has sold more than 2 million hybrid Rolling Stones discs in the past year. (Keep in mind that ABKCO's Stones discs are not a supplement to a back catalog of regular CDs: They have replaced single-layer…
David Chesky, whose company has been making superior recordings for nearly 20 years now, isn't from the engineering side of the business. He's talent—a pianist who sometimes performs on his label, a composer of classical and jazz selections integral to its catalog, and an arranger as well.
Chesky was born in October 1956, grew up in Miami, and began studying piano at age five because his mother, an eighth-grade teacher, decreed that "everybody in the house is going to take piano lessons, so when you become a doctor you can play as an avocation." She also felt that the pursuit would help…
Lander: You've long used exotic equipment to make your recordings.
Chesky: We have so many things in our studio: a large selection of vintage tube mikes, our own custom tube mike preamps and custom tube mike mixers. We use a lot of audiophile mike cable, and we have a SoundField mike that we had customized as well. We use Genex multichannel optical disc recorders, and we have a selection of A/D and D/A converters.
Lander: As a longtime champion of high-resolution digital and the first to release a recording with 128x oversampling, do you want to comment on the format wars?
… A few nights ago, John Atkinson and I played host to a speaker designer and a turntable manufacturer. We were all chewing over the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show, talking about different systems we'd heard there and speculating as to which designs would be around for the long haul. The speaker designer said he'd heard no truly bad sound at the Show. Nods all around the table—none of us had. The turntable manufacturer asked if any of us could recall hearing any spectacularly bad products recently. We all shook our heads. "Actually," I said, thinking about the Audio Research CD2 CD player…
Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect.—Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696)
Impatient sort that I am, I didn't let the CD2 gather much dust between plugging it in and playing it. According to my well-thumbed copy of Earn Big Bucks as a Hi-Fi Critic, this is where I'm supposed to impress everybody with my description of how horrid it sounded cold out of the box. But it didn't. From the start, the CD2 sounded warm, big-boned, and inviting. Oh, the sound bloomed and steadily grew more refined and relaxed over the next several hours, but it…
It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.—Karl Popper (1902-1994)
Conditioned as I have become to the proposition that when you audition two components side by side you will be able to identify differences between them, I was initially startled by how few significant differences I heard when comparing the Audio Research CD2 with the Mark Levinson No.39. That's not to say that there were none, just that most of them were either musically unimportant or so small as to seem piddling. Ruth Laredo's superb-sounding CD of Beethoven piano sonatas (…
