vmps, art d/io, & boldercables.com

Sedond, no offense taken whatsoever as we built the preamp to see how far we could take it and never expected to do much more than build a few units and have something for reference use the rest of the CTC partner's lives.....Just finishing up the big JC-1 amps for Parasound and they mentioned that they want a matching preamp, but it is going to be tough to make an easy to build and cost effective preamp for them....It will happen this next year I imagine.....Back to Art it is possible to spend a lot of money on digital parts as I specified in the 1.5 rev to the Entec Number Cruncher as teflon caps don't some cheap nor do Muse caps, Schottky diodes, shunt regulators or Vishay resistors....You can run the bill up pretty high if you aren't careful and obtain better performance and finally come to a stopping point years down the way, but the point is the digital circuit is exactly the same electrically and most DAC chips just don't cost much these days.....

Bob Crump,
Thank you for having a sense of humor.
I hope you sell more preamps than you expect and maybe even can license your technology to a larger producer so it will eventually "trickle down" to more of us. The hi end industry needs people like you as well as those few who can afford to buy your products at list price in order for the rest of us to enjoy the level of sound reproduction we do.

I wasn't kidding as we really don't want to build many of the preamps as they are a real pain to build.....Parasound wants to hire CTC to do a preamp and we'll do the best we can, but it will need to be easy to build and probably need to be remote operated.....It will likely be ready in a year or so.....Oh, for those that wonder where I have squandered the profits from CTC we finally broke even at ten units and are now building Nos 14 & 15 for a couple of lucky individuals....We sure aren't doing this for the money even at the pricing we have required........

To rcrump: Did you hear any new music (CD's) at CES that stand out? (IE; Great sounding new discs?)

My tastes in music are a bit unusual as I like live recordings made in small venues in front of an audience and most of what I hear at shows bears no relationship to the club experience whatsoever......Other than just the bass in the VMPS room I didn't hear anything I thought was even acceptable sound, my room included....It is really tough to make a system from several manufacturers gel as all it takes is one green component and the sound will go to merely acceptable on the fifth day after set-up from truly nasty the first day......We had green amps and speakers and the sound the last day was merely OK, but I still could not play the "A" list of my live folk, blues and jazz recordings........Heard lots of cannons from other rooms and we had to play things like the "X" Files soundtrack the third day as anything produced by real instruments or voices would peel the wall paper off the walls.......I don't think the average audiophile has gone through this sort of nightmare unless they have moved and bought some new components at the same time....The CES normally has just awful sound unless someone takes the time to set up an entire system, break it in and then move the whole thing to the CES as Brian did.....I've done this once and had wonderful sound from the get go, but it takes a herculean effort and glad that Brian did so well at the CES as he and Shirley's efforts were rewarded this year......