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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The ultimate buffer #2...?
Post Subject: invisible preampsPosted by morricab on: 12/5/2006
Hi Romy,
I too have for quite some time been on a quest for a truly transparent preamp.  To this end I have tried some that were indeed very good such as the Silvaweld SWC 1000 that I now own and especially the Vacuumstate RTP-3d from Allen Wright, which is the closest to invisible I have yet heard.  My own Sivaweld, while being very good indeed, is not completely neutral tonally.  Dynamically it seems to be just about right but I can hear some coloration in the lower mids.

None of the so called "passive" solutions I have heard did the job; be they transformers or resistor based...until very recently.  All of the ones I heard before lost information in tone and especially dynamics.  However; I have now heard one that appears not to lose anything nor does it add anything (the transformer based "passives" all add something as well as losing something).  It is from a company in Germany called Purist, which is a pretentious sounding name, but it appears to lose nothing in dynamics and nothing in tone.  It is resistor based using very expensive Vishay resistors but apparently it has been impedance optimized for audio signals (the designer is a high frequency engineer by training) so it appears not to have the losses normally heard with "passive" solutions.  I will be trying this out in more detail in the future but my initial impressions were very positive and revealed to me quite clearly the coloration from my current preamp.  So far it is the closest to truly invisible I have yet found from a preamp.

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