2. amps-preamps
  3. 165274-130

Are these exceptionally well recorded, or what?

I don’t know what just happened. My system suddenly started to sound much, much better. Particularly on the last three Qobuz hi-Rez downloads. What happened? The last change in my system was two months ago—added the new Bel Canto PRE5 preamp. It sounded great right from the start, and I probably have 120-150 hours on it. Can it have “snapped in” all of a sudden?  Is my power suddenly cleaner? Or did I stumble on three exceptionally well-recorded albums.  I’ll listen to my old standard references, but in the meantime, I’d like you opinion of these three:

Marie Stockman Becker: JS Bach Sonatas for Viola (on this album I can distinguish between filters on my Cambridge 851N, for the first time).

Veronica Swift: This Better Earth (opening song—she’s right there in the room)

Rattle and the LSO: Rachmaninoff 2nd (best sound staging I’ve heard on this system).

whattya think?
tomaswv
rushfan71
291 posts
 
It's the source material
danvignau's avatar
danvignau
935 posts
 
The longer we listen to our system, the more we ignore the bad sounds and appreciate the good!
rvpiano's avatar
rvpiano
2,466 posts
 
Tomaswv,

You have excellent taste in music!
Never heard of Veronica Swift before.
She’s great.
Bach and Rachmaninoff ain’t bad either.
audioguy85's avatar
audioguy85
2,017 posts
 
Things always sound better when you can fry an egg on top of my sugden a21 class A. 😆
acefactory
60 posts
 
My betting money is on the preamp hitting its break-in point. My first experience with equipment break-in was when I recapped my tube preamp. For quite some time after the recap job I wrote it off as another lesson learned to not tamper with working equipment, as it sounded worse after the recap job than before (weak sound stage, etc.). Several weeks later, however, the sounds stage and dynamics opened up in a way that was (to me) remarkable. So my guess is your new preamp has gotten through its break-in period...
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