Solid State Preamp Reviews

One room at the 1999 CES in Las Vegas that knocked me for a loop was the Avalon/Classé installation mentioned in my April show report. Classé had just debuted the Omega preamp, the companion piece to the Omega amplifier I reviewed in March. It proved a very suave, musical, and high-performance marriage.

I first saw and heard SimAudio's Moon amp and preamp at WCES two years back, and something about their aesthetics appealed to me: Canadian ruggedness coupled with a decidedly French panache. I remember that those attributes also characterized the demo's sound, although I can't recall the speakers or the sources involved. At succeeding shows, it gradually dawned on me that the Moon components were the fixed elements in a succession of impressive demos.

Tone controls? I ripped them out of my Dyna PAS-3! And that was the last time I had tone controls. As a card-carrying audiophile, I wanted just what the engineer had inscribed on the recording, with as little change as possible (read: high fidelity).

One of the differences between mass-market and high-end audio is in product model longevity. By this I don't mean that high-end products necessarily last longer—although I think they generally do—but that models remain in a manufacturer's product line longer, perhaps being refined in an evolutionary manner. This helps products retain their value, and, when new models are introduced, these involve more than a cosmetic upgrade and some additional bells'n'whistles.

The Glimmer Twins were right: If you can't always get what you want, sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. Take Ayre's K-1 preamplifier, for instance. I'd been trying to get Ayre to send me their $3750 V-3 power amplifier since the moment I started writing for Stereophile; after approximately a year and a half, I finally got a phone call from then Marketing Director Bruce Van Allen.

The Bryston BP-25MC preamplifier is a full-function control center with one balanced and four single-ended inputs, including one input for a moving-coil cartridge. The BP-25 is shielded in a black steel cabinet said to reduce electromagnetic interference effects. The power transformer is housed in a small external chassis, the BP-PS. The BP-25's remote control allows volume up/down, along with buttons for mute and absolute polarity. Signal switching and audio connections, including balanced and unbalanced input and output connectors, are heavily gold-plated to provide good long-term connections. A 12V AC/DC screw terminal connector on the rear of the power supply provides convenient use when used in conjunction with the remote start feature optionally available on Bryston power amplifiers.

Even as Robert Harley was writing his Stereophile review of the $3995 Mark Levinson No.38 remote-controlled line preamplifier (it appeared in August '94, Vol.17 No.8, p.98), Madrigal Audio Laboratories announced an upgraded, cost-no-object version, the No.38S (footnote 1). At $6495, the 'S is significantly more expensive than the junior version; although it uses the same chassis, power supply, and circuit topology, it's in all other ways a different preamplifier.