Quietest amplifier you have ever owned.

Drubin: My comments to Pbb are not based on his input to this thread alone, but to his continual attack against those that seek a higher level of reproduction to that of what he personally feels to be necessary. He constantly tries to remind us just how stupid we are for going to the extremes that some of us do. After subtly attacking someone, he typically tries to "soften" his belittlement of their comments / efforts by saying something like "responding from the mid-fi trenches".

Here's a question to the rest of the participants on this thread:

How do you judge whether or not your system or a component has a high noise floor ?

Personally, i select an unused input on the preamp and crank the gain wide open. If i can hear any form of noise or hiss with my ear next to the speaker, it is noisier than what i want to hear : )

Obviously, someone with very high efficiency speakers and / or those with a very bright frequency response may hear more hiss / noise than someone running very low efficiency speakers or speakers with a rolled off treble response. If checking a source, you obviously would select that source with no signal being sent to the preamp and advance the gain. Obviously, one should NOT do this with a tuner and the muting turned off : ) Sean
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BVaudio is so quiet, you will hear absolutely nothing.

How to determine if your system/component has sufficiently low noise? Simple. Play something at realistic (or desired volume) levels, then stop play and, at approximately half the distance that you normally listen to your system, listen and note if you hear any noise. Depending on your source, you might hear noise or not. If you don't hear any noise, great. If you do hear noise, also great, now you can start tweaking, which is what tweaking is all about, repairing an audible or perceived defect in the system.

inpepinnovations@aol.com - When you say all you have to do is start tweaking to correct a problem this doesn't tell me very much. Could you be more specific?

Bobgates, first of all, I didn't say "all you have to do is start tweaking". I said that all tweaking is attempting to repair a perceived or real problem in your system. Noise in a properly set up system is not usually a problem - just because you hear some noise when you have your ear right up to the speakers doesn't mean that you have a problem. Some do think that this is a problem and they will start "tweaking away", cables, amps isolation platforms ad nauseum. If you hear noise using the method that I have described it is most probably due to a bad front end set-up or matching with the power amp, with the pre-amp not doing it share of the level gain and using the power amp to do the bulk of the gain. This is especially critical with high sensitivity speakers.