Preamp Deal of the Century

Greetings Fellow Humans - 

I just popped by to see what's new in this "most popular all-time" thread in the amps & preamps forum. Nice to see that the thread is still drawing visitors and folks are as enthusiastic as ever.

I'll post a "four+ year follow-up" review:

My Supratek Cortese continues to sound wonderful. Several amplifiers have cycled through my system since I got the Cortese - I'm now using custom SET 45 monoblocks to drive my Altec A7 Magnificents very satisfactorily. The Supratek is always delightful, always reliable.

Oh, one system upgrade that was an eye-opener for me was to switch over to Cardas Neutral Reference interconnects and speaker wires. They are very nice, though relatively modest and not up to Cardas current state-of-the-art standards. But they sound wonderful.

Hope everyone has a wonderul holiday season.

Best regards...

Markus (no longer the) Naimnut

Hey Fellow Supratek owners - 

Just a quick question - what E180F tubes are you preferring?

Markus

Markus, 

 I have used the Phillips PQ, Phillips SQ, and Mullards. I also have Valvo and CEI, but I haven't run any of these two brands yet. I can't tell any difference in sound between the Phillips and the Mullards. Mick told me a while back that he thinks that Phillips may have made all of them, which could explain why they sound the same. 

Just bought a used Supratek Chardonnay. Wow! I don't have anything super high end to compare it to -- prior preamps include Adcom GFP-750, Schiit Freya+ with some nice NOS 6SN7 tubes -- but am very happy with the purchase.  One question for Supratek owners -- can you use the balanced output AND the single-ended outputs at the same time?   I'm running balanced right now (with the toggle switch set to XLR) and it's very clean and sounds great.  I'd like to use one of the RCA outputs at the same time to a pair of subs but trying that introduced a good bit of hum to the speaker outputs.  If I switch toggle to RCA, hum goes away but now nothing is going to XLR.  So I'm assuming I can't do it but wanted to check with others.  Thanks.

Hey nymarty

I’m pretty sure you can only use one or the other. Why don’t you use your amp outputs to your sub. I think it blends better and you get some of your amps character. Just by some copper speaker wire from Amazon not expensive.

That’s how I connect my sub works very well. Just make sure on some amps like Pass labs you have to connect the negative to ground not the negative speaker output. If you don’t know ask your amp manufacturer if that’s ok.