I visited Raul this week to listen to the latest version of the Essential preamp.
When we got there he was playing the Dynavector XV1 cartridge through a SAEC arm.
The first impression was of clarity, everything seemed very transparent airy highs well defined bass all was there but I little bit more cohesive than I remember from my prior visits, the sound was better integrated.
Raul was, as always, a very good host, and very knowledgeable. He is the most driven Audio fanatic I have met and it is good to talk about audio with someone so passionate about it. We also discussed about the local Concert season and the best Directors.
After some listening I noticed that the system was a bit more mellow than it used to be, while still vibrant there is no listeners fatigue, we played a lot of Jazz (Duke Ellington and crowd) and the music was just alive, but still warm. We asked him to switch to the Van den Hull Colibri (his secret favorite) cartridge and he explained he got it set up in a Sumiko arm he had stored for some years and when he tried it he loved the combination it does with the Colibri. What impressed me the most about the preamp is we never talked about it after the first conversation of his recent trip. I remembered the preamp when the first notes from the Colibri started to flow, it was like switching from CD to Vinyl, Lou Armstrong´s voice had amazing detail I could see his mouth move, we could feel his chest resonate and all the instruments came into the room. This being said it did sound a little thin with Holst´s Planets.
This is how you notice if the preamp is doing its job, it lets the signal go through whatever you feed into it, he did inform us when we arrived that he was still setting up the VTA on the Dynavector cartridge, but the brilliance and liveliness of the Colibri are its trademarks. We then started talking about the preamp and he told us of the endless listening test he has run comparing the preamp to a resistor load until sound wise you could not tell one from the other, he also run a lot of comparison tests with most reference phono preamps and I can vouch for his access to them, (yes FM acoustics was on the list). Another friend who is a tube preamp designer had a technical conversation with him that ended with talk about subwoofer integration; he later told me how impressed he was with the current design. I asked him if he would make a bigger version with double power supplies but it is not on the drawing board.
Congratulations Raul!
PS: I am not connected to the company in any way.
