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Welcome to Audiophilia. We publish honest and accurate reviews of high end audio equipment and music.
Welcome to Audiophilia. We publish honest and accurate reviews of high end audio equipment and music.
All in Preamplifiers
The HiFi reviewing challenges continue to arrive from the pearly shores of South Korea. The Allnic Audio L-8500 OTL/OCL Preamplifier ($13,500) is the third Allnic preamp we’ve had in for review. All three are beautifully designed and manufactured. The varied designs/topology made serious impressions on the rest of my components. All in different but musically fabulous ways.
Other than these gems eventually leaving my system, the primary challenge comes from trying to describe the subtle but very important differences and directing the audiophile to the best purchase choice for their components and listening habits. In this review, there will not be an indeterminate ending. One, after many happy hours of listing and comparison (two in house and one from very pleasant aural memories), did work best for my situation and needs. Ever so slightly. Continue on and read about the L-8500, a very special component, and which of the three preamps may work best for you.
This spectacular, $22,900 audiophile work of art came to me as a stop gap between distributor and dealer. Victoria is not exactly midpoint between Kelowna BC and Portland OR, but I was very grateful to distributor David Beetles of Hammertone Audio and US dealer John Ketchum of Kevalin Audio for their kind consideration. As such, the L-8000 DHT Preamplifier was here for a good time, not a long time.
Beetles has been slowly tormenting me with better and better Allnic Audio products to review, which I’m happy to accept on behalf of myself and our readers; a couple of which have been generously given on long term loans (H-7000 and L-7000) to use as references in my system. So, with full disclosure, I offer you my unencumbered story of what is probably the finest and certainly most expensive component to have graced my listening room.
David Beetles of Hammertone Audio, the North American distributor for Allnic Audio electronics, gave me a nod that an L-7000 Preamplifier was available for review. The new linestage is the $16,500 replacement of the L-3000 ($13,900). After my continuing musical experiences of the most passionate and intense kind with Allnic’s similarly priced H-7000 Phono Stage, how could I pass up the opportunity to hear Allnic’s linestage equivalent?
The L-7000 is not your grandpappy’s 300B tube linestage preamp. It is a single gain stage unit and is transformer coupled. But, to shake things up completely, designer Kang Su Park uses the much-loved DHT 300B tube, not in the audio chain, but in the power supply chain as a voltage regulator.
Before reading this post, please check back to the full review of the Vinnie Rossi L2 Signature Preamplifier. It’ll give you a better understanding of this DAC module review. It may be fun to read the Phono Stage module review, too. It’s the other plugin available for this fully functional and brilliant preamplifier.
The Phono and DAC modules’ MSRP is $3495 each. They are both plug and play. Unscrew the four screws, remove the plate, install the module. Click, rescrew, done.
It would be instructive before reading my thoughts about the L2 phono stage module to read the full line stage review of the Vinnie Rossi L2 Signature Preamplifier.
Skinny audio seems to be all the rage these days. Fewer boxes, smaller boxes, fewer cables and a much lighter lifestyle footprint. While this trend can look the part and put a few more dollars in your pocket, the sound trade offs can be quite powerful. It’s why flying cars never took off, pardon the pun. Jacks of all trades and masters of none. I’m much more of a do-one-thing-well kind of guy.
Vinnie Rossi, designer and manufacturer of the tremendous L2 Signature Preamplifier ($16,995) has given the high end community a sub 20K benchmark line stage to propel reference components to the next level. It pushed my Jeff Rowland amplifier, Mytek Manhattan DAC II, Antipodes CORE Music Server and Sutherland Engineering DUO Phono Preamplifier into rarefied air. As such, it was a crying shame when I took it out of my system.
Oh my, what do we have here? A full featured preamplifier from Holden, Massachusetts’ Vinnie Rossi, replete with live easy modules for digital and vinyl. And it’s not only a standard tube preamp, but one of the few starring the grail of sonic tubes, the 300B. Gold plated and a matched pair, no less.
As a good friend in the industry continues to say to me, ’there’s always room for a full featured preamp’. Full featured, yes, but the L2 Signature is far more than that. It is full figured. And that’s not the half of it with this tank-like, but sexy behemoth from the pen of designer Vinnie Rossi.
Some forty or more years ago, the average person who set out to buy a stereo system, typically ended up with a stereo receiver. Things were much simpler then; all you needed was a receiver, a turntable and a pair of speakers. As for ‘audio furniture’, milk crates were the order of the day. A pair of included patch cord interconnects and if you were somewhat sophisticated, a run of heavy gauge lamp cord and you were in business. You didn’t have to give any thought to power cords, because components had captive power cords.
Of course, there were serious hobbyists who bought separates and had furniture grade cabinets made to house their components and speakers. These folks constituted a very small minority of stereo buyers. Once the transistor era took hold, watts per channel was the order of the day; the bigger the box with more knobs and lights, the better.
When Pass Labs comes out with a new piece of gear the audio industry takes notice. Well known for the quality of its products, the longevity of its designs and the seriousness to which it addresses the ever evolving science and art of sound reproduction, the XP-12 Preamplifier arrives. The XP-12 is the replacement for the XP-10, which had been their entry level, reference, one-box line level preamp for nearly a decade. What have they done to improve performance?
The new XP-12 starts with a new power supply. It uses an efficient toroidal design with both an electrostatic and Mu metal shield along vacuum impregnating and epoxy fill. This makes a very quiet transformer both electrically and mechanically. The power supply circuitry is also quieter and has additional filtering. The XP-12 uses a single stage volume control borrowed from the XS line preamp. This gives one hundred 1 dB steps with lower noise and distortion while removing some signal path parts. This redesigned volume control results in greater precision with a more luxurious feel.
There are times when the sound quality of one’s audio system exhibits significant improvement due to an upgrade of a component and no one would question why. Main examples are the upgrade of speakers, amps, or digital-to-analogue converters (DACs)—all of which I have gone through over the years.
Bel Canto, Minnesota’s manufacturer of quality hifi equipment has kicked its already wonderful digital line up a notch with ‘Black’. Black is a deceptively simple digital/amplification solution for your high end needs — described by Bel Canto as: ‘elegant simplicity. Three boxes. Two connections. One coveted musical result.’
The Italians get a rough ride when it comes to high end audio. Flaky kit, manuals that have been edited by Basil Fawlty, iffy distribution, etc. Sure, it looks good, and often sounds divine, but will the company be here for the long haul? I just reviewed pair of Italian loudspeakers from Chario. They were superb, exquisitely designed and manufactured. That speaker went a long way to eliminating my prejudices (real or imagined) about Italian gear. Another manufacturer that added to the elimination of misconceptions is Audia Flight (AF).
