Phono Preamps with "balls" ?

Dear @atmasphere : Tubes can’t honor MUSIC with the accuracy need it for. I know that you are very good designer of tube electronics and this is not under question because it’s not the subject. Tubes can’t do it.

Your speakers goes to 20hz? wel mines goes to 16hz by design and even that the subwoofers is a must to have. Period.

Of course that I know " what you have " in your listening room and in your last post confirmed it.

Please before you come back here to post about my " falsehoods/outrigth errors " do it your self a favor and try to find out a true audiophile with a home audio system using bipolars electronics ( with no single tube down there. ) and integrated pair of subwoofers and listen to at least two of those CD/LP recordings I posted.

Again, with out those subs you can’t know nothing at all. No single passive speakers can do it the rigth way.

Please read this:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/do-you-think-you-need-a-subwoofer/post?postid=310058#310058


Regrads and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

@atmasphere : do you still think that R2R is the best analog reproduction medium? because it's not due to all those problems I posted and you as any one can check directly D2D recordings made it  by Shefield Labs whom in the same recording sessions they made the great D2D LPs and recorded on R2R too.

Well the D2D sample outperforms easily the one original master cut LPs.

The latest digital technology/mediums outperforms any single R2R recordings no matters what and outperforms all over the frequency range not only in the bass range.

@atmasphere: do you know or are aware that we all are living in April 2018?

Today it's analog no contest and never will be again ! ! !   Got it?

R.

Sheesh.

do you still think that R2R is the best analog reproduction medium?

No, I've never said that. LP is superior since it is lower distortion, lower noise and wider bandwidth. This is why LPs are used to release albums recorded on tape and not the other way 'round.

Raul, you are embarrassing yourself. The problem seems to be that you know nothing about how the industry makes recordings, and even less about the technologies involved. You should try running a recording/mastering operation sometime. When I first started cutting LPs, a good number of things I thought I 'knew' about the medium were dashed. One was how quiet lathe cuts are- they easily rival digital. The surface noise comes in during the pressing process (Acoustic Sounds with their pressing plant QRP has done a lot to solve that problem and now make the quietest pressings in the world). Another is how much dynamic range the medium has, and how low its distortion actually is (the cutter amps usually have about 10 times the power needed to completely toast the cutter head; the LP mastering system has the highest overhead of any audio process; it can't be overloaded like other processes can be). Additional noise and distortion can be caused by the pickup and equalizer (the latter can add ticks and pops that you might think are on the LP surface). But those problems are correctable. I suspect that you are making a common mistake of construing them with the media itself.

Here is my major objection to digital audio: I've gone to many concerts and also played in orchestra and bands. In those situations, if there is background noise like air conditioning, glasses clinking or people coughing, you can listen past them because they are not the music. Similarly, the artifacts of analog (hiss, ticks and pops) can be easily ignored by the brain as well, because those things sit in the speaker while the music is in 3 dimensions.

Digital OTOH imposes audible distortion (caused by aliasing and other problems, interpreted as brightness by the brain, which is why CDs still sound bright even if you have tone controls and turn the treble down all the way) that cannot be distinguished from the music.

Again, if digital is so much better, why are Best Buy and Target continuing to sell LPs while they are dumping CDs? Why are LP sales eclipsing digital downloads? One reason is digital streaming, but the other is that people that don't know anything about the technical bits still want LPs because they 'sound better'. Until you can solve that dilemma, the analog/digital floggings will continue.

@jollytinker 

If you're considering an SUT in conjunction with a MM phono stage, then you might also consider the Zyx Cryo Pre-preamp. It is definitely ballsy. The latest update (v.2) increased the gain over the previous version.  It's a marvelous step up device in my opinion and doesn't have some of the drawbacks of transformers (less fussy about cables for instance). Not cheap again, but compared to a good SUT I think it's actually fairly reasonable.  

Even the first version, which i am using now, the ZYX CPP-1 Cryo (input impedance 125 Ohm, Step up ration 26db) is very interesting device to have. Arthur Salvatore swear it's better that any top quality SUTs out there. 

If you want oomph and dynamics:

Whest 0.2 (and all the others)
Tom Evans Groove et al
Renaissance (forgotten which model)